When the Powers of Tech Fail

This slightly grainy photo is the full moon on Puget Sound. The lights just below center are dock lights. In the spirit of our topic for this week: When the powers of tech fail us - the dot of light off to the right of the moon? Yeah. No clue. It did not exist as an actual thing in the night sky.

The logical portion of my brain says 'lens reflection'. But it's All Hallows and that suggests something -- other.

Long way of saying that I lurvs me my technology. Use the 'compare documents' feature when your dev edits come in and you'll find out just how labor (and angst) saving all the bells and whistles can be. Until. Something unexpected (like my phantom light above) happens. Hard drives crash. Graphics cards melt. Gremlins enter into the spirit of the machine and wreck havoc by corrupting files. To guard against encroaching chaos what do we do? Pile on more tech! Personally, I rejoice when I find  another cool way to work on stuff I want to work on no matter where I am.

But my biggest technofail at the moment? Weeeell, I may have had a hand in naming this week's topic when I *may* have used a bit of NSFW language about Facebook not working properly. It is FB that is my current nemesis. It's supposed to be an easy thing to autopost a blog to FB. So I set it up. And not a damned thing happened. No posts. Nothing. Troubleshooting done. Nada. I'm beginning to take it personally.

To soothe myself, I naturally do what any internet addict does. I look at cat photos. Speaking of which, happy National Cat Day. Which is different from every other day, how?

Technology is Grand...When It Works

When it comes to smart phones, phablets, and smartwatches I choose to be a Luddite. I've a faux crackberry circa 2009. I keep it mainly for emergencies and the occasional text. While innovations in newer technology are awesome--by the truest definition--I have issues with the culture surrounding them. I despise being omni-connected. I abhor the external expectations of being always available, always reachable. I loathe the new normal of six people sitting at a table and no one is having a verbal conversation with the people right in front of them. I cringe when face-to-face meetings are interrupted by someone taking a call or answering a text; thereby relegating the person present in their company to lesser value. Their time less respected. Their companionship less desired.

Manners have gone so far out the window as to be orbiting the International Space Station. 

 #GetOffMyLawn

That said, I adore the convenience of modern tech--wireless connections, long-life laptops/tablets, online shopping, and even select social media sites. I am a Mistress of Google-Fu. Twitter is my favorite distraction, and I'm waiting for Facebook to implode. 

Then Tech Fails... 

There is no more weighted a Frisbee than a personal computer that does not work as designed. I am, for the most part, a patient person...until tech fails. I go from Zen to keening banshee toot-sweet. Adware software bobs in my wake. Hardware fragments litter my trail of destruction. I have zero tolerance for lag time, auto-reboots, buggy updates, and security ware that fails to do its damn job. 

To prevent my writer's life turning to shambles during such times, I back-up my files to cloud storage and thumb drives. Cloud-storage daily. Thumb-drives...ought to be weekly, but end up being quarterly (that'll eventually bite me in the ass, I'm sure). The redundancy may seem excessive, but when you're weeping over a lost WiP an extra two minutes a week of dragging & dropping doesn't seem like such an high investment.

Now, while I loves me my PC, I don't know squat about Macs. I've tried to learn. They all ended up as Frisbees. Oh, and anything gaming related? Utterly clueless...unless it's Mahjong. I totally space out while playing Mahjong.

Techie Big Brother

Before we begin this post, I'd just like to shout out to my brothers and sisters at the NSA. You guys are doing a helluva job. At getting the US Government sued (with and for my tax dollars). Way to go.

 

Okay. Okay. The government brought the lawsuits upon themselves, deservedly so in my opinion. It is still your money and mine going to argue whether the whole mess violates the constitution.

 

The whole 'your government is spying on you' thing is, at its core, a technology issue. Until very, very recently, governments couldn't data mine their citizens except during census years. Then, cellphones. With more computing power in them than NASA had for the first few Apollo missions. And GPS. Glorious, potentially life-saving tech. Until some nitwit perks up and says, "Hey! This may be totally illegal AND immoral, but you know what we could do?"

 

All of which makes me sound anti-tech. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love the tech - so much promise. So many possibilities. Cool (outdated) techie stuff got us to the moon and back. It lets us look at video and photos of Mars. We peer into the center of our universe looking for clues to how we all got here to talk about technology in the first place.

 

Spain is using a solar tower to power thousands of homes with sunlight. No pollution. No CO2.

 

 

Watch the documentary Connections, available for free viewing online. It traces technology through history in a really compelling way. And like James Burke says near the end of the series, "We can't put the genie back in the bottle." Nor do I want to. Not even cell phones - or the chips I expect will end up imbedded directly in use at some point - chips that will carry our IDs, driver's license, bank account info, and a locator designed ostensibly for use by emergency responders.

 

See, I'm pretty convinced that technology isn't our problem. We're our problem. Power grabs, especially those veiled by 'just trying to help' excuses, seem to be human nature. Tech only aids and abets. It is also, then, human nature to resist that power grab. Usually with technology. And maybe a few well placed class action lawsuits.