Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Canary in a Coalmine

I’ve learned a new word today: Allegory.

I’ll present an example of this, pertaining to my own existence:

In school I was taught that one of the earliest systems for warning coal miners of the presence of methane gas was the canary.

These little yellow prisoners were used as a low-tech equivalent of a carbon monoxide detector, helping to save countless lives for a little seed and water each day, unaware that at any moment, their little lives could be snuffed out.

Chirp, Chirp, Chirp, Thunk!

Monday, November 27, 2006

Switching to a new Blogger

Well, that’s all I need, seems like every five minutes this almost-fifty year old is having to learn a new piece of software. In the last two days a new version of Internet Explorer has landed on my desktop, my work PC has been swapped and I’m now a full time XP user and here, at the blogging universe, Google has given me the opportunity to learn even more new software.

It’s a sense of constant confusion, just as I am comfortable with a piece of trusted binary magic, a new improved version thrusts its way into the world, bawling and demanding my ever decreasing supply of attention for all its new and so called improved features.

And luckily, my short term memory has started to wander off.

Well, moving from Paperclip III to Microsoft Word V1.0 way back when was certainly an improvement, but it still was just a word procesor (without a spell checker).

The original Word was never a magnificent piece of software and that so called WYSIWYG feature, even with a feature packed 24 pin dot-matrix printer and a crystal clear 14 inch VGA color monitor, was never really a case of getting what you were really seeing.

However, it was better. Then later, the differences between V1.0 and V7.0 or 2000 or XP, well, you tell me if your word processing experience has moved in time and space in the same logarithmic fashion?

Do you write more now or less?

I think it’s a plot by the young ones to keep old Chester constantly confused, dazed and bewildered. It’s so they can catch up and show that they are the new wizards. After all, take a guy with thirty years experience in the aerospace industry and present him with the new and improved Engtools 2010 and it will be at least a few months before he’s worked out how to do a thread undercut all over again.

The equivalent youngster will have designed, stressed and tested an entire atomic wonko-copter in that time.

Welcome to my new blog, just like my old blog

Warcraft Anonymous

Here we are on the 27th November and I'm still on World of Warcraft.

I said I hated the game and I'd never subscribe, well, all thats partially true, I do really hate the game and I could stop the subscription at any time I want to, any time at all.

Any time I want to.