We’re going to look ridiculous: no one will ever be away from their mobile, and I’ll find I’m thirty (or at least, older than I am now) and can’t stop talking about how my first mobile was when I was thirteen and not when I was five, and how the world has changed into a sinful darker hellhole of technology. I will sit at bus stops talking to the young.

“There was none of this,” I will bleat in a voice weary before my time. “And none of this ‘adverts on bus stop tops‘ either. The world’s gone mad. I miss newspapers.”

“What’s a newspaper?” the berated children will ask, because it is 2019 and newspapers no longer exist.

And then I shall put a paper bag on my head and sit in a dark room. I don’t really care though. It’s sort of lovely this fantastically mad advancement, and it’s sort of not. It’s always a shock to notice quite how immersed we’re getting in all this but at the same time it’s just incredibly, well, smart. When done right. The type of smart that makes you think “this is the future! where is my dinner in pill form?”

As long as I keep doing traditional things, reading books, making things and doing new stuff, whether online or off, I’ll be pretty happy. So, here’s an irrelevant picture of me painting.

It’s sort of lovely wondering where technology’s going to be in twenty years. For now, I really like that Microsoft advert.

We have a strange culture with crash screens, and i forget how important they are, especially with the right touches. Google Wave has its “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” firefly references which makes fans of tech and sci-fi melt a little inside. This site doesn’t have one because I am arrogant and lazy.

As Rory Sutherland says about the Eurostar, money would be better spent on people’s enjoyment of the journey rather than the speed. He prescribes that the several million pounds spent on increasing the speed on the journey by half an hour should have been spent on scantily clad supermodels serving drinks. Who would be the more satisfied customer?

It’s a TED talk that I’m a massive fan of.

Twitter’s worked on that, making their graphics cuter over time from altered LOLCats to more carefully crafted home-made images, and a gallery’s sprung up under the name of Tweeterr.

On the other hand Windows don’t really have this down – an angry customer has created a Microsoft equivalent of the Fail Whale gallery with twelve pages of examples.

It’s not just operating systems. Mankind seems to have a strange obsession with taking photos of broken systems. For example, this website, full of photoed fails. I’m not exempt. Everyone seems to have a failwhale photo lurking around on their computer. If laptop screens had a fail whale, they should all look like this.

posted at: (untitled)
via: the guardian