The Natural Order of things

This quote from my favourite author seems to typify most people’s interactions with technology.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

– Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

More thoughts on Google ChromeOS

After reflection, I think we geeks should get fully behind Google OS. Not for us, of course, but for everyone else.  All those people that need our help just to keep a Windows-based computer running could benefit from a much simpler computing experience.  More to the point, our time would be dramatically saved if all the non-geeks used a cloud-based, automatically backup up, never-lose data, no viruses, no complexity, always connected device.

So it’s down to us.  If we can pour the passion that we usually reserve for OS arguments into comvincing non-geeks why everything *they* need can be done online, and that old-fashioned computers were always rubbish at games anyway, maybe, just maybe, we can see our way forward to a windows-free world, where we save so much time NOT fixing our friends and relations computers, that we actually have time to work on cool technologies at home.

After all, we geeks can still use our computers when they are not online.  Can you?

Graham’s law

A special hello to my friend Graham Page who is the one responsible for first writing down “Graham’s Law”. Graham’s law simply states that

“Life gets more complicated”

A subtext added later makes the point that

“this is always true, regardless of how complicated your life already is”

Having moved to Paris, and had to fill out tax returns in French, I can definately vouch for the truth of these sayings. Especially as our next step was the French-Swiss border, where we now live in two currencies, and two tax systems.