WLTM knight in shining armour, must have GSOH

It's taken thirty-odd* years to reach this point, but after decades of pootling along nicely, fixing dodgy wardrobe doors, taking fax machines apart "because it's interesting, no, look, it is working now, well, all I did was read the manual" and colliding with male colleagues in attempts to out-polite each other through doorways, this evening I realised I want a knight in shining armour to gallop along and save me from dragons. Not that I've anything against dragons, in fact some of my best friends are dragons. I'm speaking metaphorically, since there are no legends about knights, armoured or otherwise, galloping up to relag a condenser pipe on a broken boiler. I don't know if there's a term for accumulated aggravation, but I seem to have spent the last decade using up my inner resources and now I would quite like someone to take the pressure off. So is this it? Is this what it's all about when the romantic balderdash is stripped away? When it all comes down to it, do people lash themselves to other people less out of a sense of communing souls and more from a fierce desire not to be the one outside trying to unfreeze the pipes with a hairdryer while the hood of your parka fills with snow? In the past, when women had no status outside marriage, it's hardly surprising that they'd hitch themselves to the best available protector. But now, when fully functioning spinsterdom is a very real option, are we willing to cling to our independence while knowing it's always going to be down to us when the boiler breaks down or the roof leaks? I'm not saying these are the province of men, simply that when life throws grey slush at us, sometimes it would be very nice to let someone else deal with it. I don't think I'm about to settle down and pop out a few sprogs. I prefer animals to children on almost every count and I've done my share of communal living. (Why do men have so many toiletries? Why do they leave the empty bottles in the bathroom cupboard? And X should be aware that I haven't forgotten the state she used to leave the kitchen in.) And I don't really think I'm even looking for someone on a white charger, or even on a donkey or a pushbike. Just right nownI would like a fairy godmother to give me a break for a while. But I'm curious if this sense of semi-permanent mid-thirties exhaustion is just my bad luck or if there's some weird genetic thing going on, trying to make me mix my chromosomes with the first available knight in the vain hope that this will make everything All Right. Because happy ever after is all very well but ever after is a long time to be stuck with someone. Now if you'll excuse me I've got to go and fiddle with the thermostat and prod the boiler. * Some would say very odd.

You don't have this trouble with a slate

I write this in a condition of low-level seethe. My laptop is about eight months old, and, as with all youngsters, there are teething troubles. Having bought a well-known photo editing package, I am continuing to pick up the pieces after it crashed my PC comprehensively. The latest error message is that the webcam isn't working. Tentative investigation suggests this is because the computer can't detect the webcam. Now normally I barely give the webcam a moment's thought. I don't do video conferencing or online chat or flash my mammaries at strange men in Minnesota. But I am peeved that the software is asking me to install a webcam when there is one built in to this machine.

I tried a system restore but that didn't fix it. I restored the system restore back to where I started and it almost decided not to let me open this document.

Now I'm not totally dim. I've got letters after my name and everything, and in a former life I was a scientist and an (inept) engineer. I understand the concept of built-in obsolescence and can see how it drives market forces. But I refuse to accept this as an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Why can't computers work reliably? Why must we view crashing PCs as something to put up with, like late trains or all this damned snow? And please don't sit there smugly and tell me I should have bought a Mac. Some of us are on a budget.

All I want is for PCs to be robust, so that if the user does something inadvertently unhelpful it can shrug it off and brush itself down before going smilingly on its way.

Is that so much to ask?

PS And while I'm having a technical gripe, why is Blogger reformatting my text and dropping all the carriage returns between paragraphs? No wonder I feel like giving up blogging altogether.

Future imperfect

2010 has proved a little disappointing so far. When I woke up on Friday I assumed, perhaps naively, that we'd all be wearing tinfoil jumpsuits and feasting on food pills. Yet here I am digesting a very traditional Sunday roast while wearing a top I think I might have had since the last millennium and jeans that won't stay up since the belt loops are too narrow for the snazzy tartan belt Father Christmas brought me. But this is the Future. Arthur C Clarke wrote a book about it and everything. Shouldn't everything be shiny and fabulous?

Human beings are very keen on progress. They don't like change very much, but progress must be a good thing. In the last decade progress has brought us a technological revolution in the way we communicate. It's now possible to cram hundreds if not thousands of songs into a piece of plastic and metal smaller than a matchbox. One need never go without music ever again. Imagine the joy of never having to be alone with your thoughts, never having to think about anything beyond a superficial level before being distracted by the next track.

It's now possible to spew out every passing notion to a waiting world, no matter how private, hurtful or inane. It's now possible to pretend to have a thriving social life by hunching over a screen and tapping out more inanities to people you never meet, people you have never met. It's now possible to pretend to yourself that you're still friends with people you knew years ago because they clicked yes to your request but have had no contact since. It's now possible to snipe about modern life without going to the trouble of leaving your room to find someone to snipe to.

This is no Star Trek utopia with all races, colours and creeds getting along in perfect harmony (and wearing jumpsuits). This is a fractured world with death, destruction, cruelty, pestilence and harm on every side. This is the future is the present is the past. Human nature does not change. We're still the same selfish apes we ever were.

I don't want to live this way. All right, the sniping in splendid isolation bit is what I'm best at, but not the rest of it. I don't want to cut myself off from birdsong. I don't want to tell the world what I had for breakfast or what goes on behind closed doors. I don't want pretend friendships. If this is progress I'm glad to be a luddite.

So this year I'm striving for change over progress, ears open, looking up. If this is the future, I'm going to meet it on my terms for once.