TECHNOLOGY:
A STEAMING PILE OF COCK
Please don’t assume that because we’re Tech Fogey we’re intrinsically codger-ish or Luddite in our approach to digital bollocks. We sort-of quite like shiny new stuff. It’s the boy-toy dynamic that no male person ever really grows out of. Having said that, while some tech is very fine, some is utter shite. More often these days we find ourselves thinking, ‘What’s the f***ing point of that?’ rather than, ‘Isn’t that wonderful.’
For example, if you’re Stephen Fry and have over 5 million Twitter followers, it’s easy to assume a certain responsibility to all those advocates and keep them sweet with a daily tweeting torrent. Fry also has stuff to sell – DVDs, books, audiobooks – so Twitter represents a significant marketing opportunity for him. On the other hand, if you only have 43 followers (only a handful of whom are people you actually know), you’d have to think those peoples’ day will not be overly enriched by someone babbling on in 140 characters or fewer about the weather, what we had for lunch or how many times the Fogey mutt has crapped today. Of course, we could concoct tweets that were big fat fibs that grabbed attention but what’s the f***ing point of that? Soon it won’t be ‘famous for 15 minutes’ but notorious for nine. So while we tweet occasionally, we’re not in same league as, say, actor Simon Pegg, who just can’t help himself. We watched Pegg’s video of his chunky chum Nick Frost flushing cake down the loo and thought, ‘Hmm, that cake looked really tasty. What a waste.’ Perhaps it was funny if you’re on a low-carb diet, or diabetic or don’t like cake. TF isn’t and isn’t and does. Poor cake.
So, social media. What a steaming pile of cock.
ONLINE TICKET SALES COCK
What we think of Eventim
The other day there was an ad in The Times announcing some concerts later in the year by Billy Joel. TF loves Billy. When Music Fogey takes its bow, Billy will be one of its icons because, like all great bands and performers, he did most of his good stuff before 1979. And he has a vintage motorcycle shop on Long Island and he was married to a super-model. Anyway, we digress… The ad in The Times said that Billy would be playing the Hammersmith Odeon/Apollo on 5th November and that tickets would go on sale from 9.30am on Friday 31st May. The website under the ad was www.hammersmithapollo.com, so we went there and discovered that tickets would only be sold online and that it was only two person. We set our alarm.
9.30am swings around and we’re on the above website clicking on a link to Eventim who are the ticket-flogging intermediary. ‘Buy tickets now’ it says. We click that button. Nothing happens. We refresh the page. Still nothing. Maybe there’s a technical glitch, we think, lots of Fogies will be after these tickets. Be patient. We keep refreshing and hitting the button but still nothing happens. Five precious minutes have now ticked by. Eventually we go direct to the Eventim website and suddenly there are the buying options. But in the stalls there are only single tickets and in the circle all that’s left is in row X which is so far from the stage it’s in a different time zone. This cannot be happening!!! But it is and before you can say, tough titties f***face all seats are gone. In less than seven minutes.
So why would the various parties involved take out an ad in The Times featuring a web address with a ticket-buying link that didn’t work? Who cares? Certainly not the organisers because all tickets went in a heartbeat. No it’s only Mr and Mrs Fogey who are inconvenienced and disappointed and all because we were naive enough to expect technology and the people who manipulate or manage it to actually work.
PRINTER COCK
Lips and arseholes – what sausages are made of
We have an all-in-one printer/copier/scanner. It’s a Hewlett Packard Photosmart C5280. By tech standards it’s old but our demands of it have been modest. Suddenly, and for no discernible reason, it stopped working. There was a carriage jam, it said. The carriage is the gubbins that holds the ink cartridges and whizzes back and forth splatting ink on the paper. On the HP website there is a video suggesting means by which this issue can be resolved. It is tediously repetitive in a chew-your-arm off kind of way. We gnawed both down to bloody stumps and still the problem persisted.
Printers are now cheap because nobody prints because ink is so lethally expensive. The printer is a loss leader to lure you into an ink commitment because, as you will know, there are myriad ink cartridges of many, many dimensions and each is specific to a small number of printers.
Who mends printers? No one. You throw them away and buy new. Except we have a catering pack of ink cartridges for our now defunct printer and we’ll be throwing these away as well unless we can summon up the mental fortitude to sell them on ebay which will involve more gnawed limbs, wrinkles and white hair.
What to do?
The C5280 hasn’t been manufactured for many moons. None of the 26 HP printers that use the 351 and 350 ink cartridges are in production. We know this because we went on Amazon and entered each printer’s code into the search box. However, one second hand machine popped up. Result! With delivery it was a shade over £50. It hasn’t arrived yet. It might be crap. But if it isn’t our ink will live again!
As for the old printer, it looks so disconcertingly new that we’re reluctant to take it to the dump. The reason it stopped working is probably sooo trivial and easy to fix so long as you know how. But we don’t and no amount of web-crawling has made us any the wiser. But doesn’t the searching and striving for printer resurrection represent an appropriate use of our precious time? What better way to spend all those minutes between birth and death?
POLAROID COCK
A proper camera
While the HP printer was down we wanted to print a few photos to send to Old Father Fogey. It’s Fathers’ Day soon and he’s going a bit doolally, so being reminded of who he is and the offspring he has sired might be a good thing, we thought. We have two other photo-capable printers in the loft but they’re buried under so much redundant detritus, getting them down and then working might require oxygen and tunnelling equipment. There’s also the oft-encountered tech issue of compatibility and built-in obsolescence. Present-day hardware exhibits a scornful indifference towards ‘legacy’ items such as outdated software. It’s like expecting a teenager to find Joan Collins alluring.
So, what to do?
We could, of course, have popped the relevant images onto an SD card and gone to a shop that prints your snaps but that would have been too easy or too much like hard work depending on which side of the digital divide you’ve plonked your flag.
Mrs Fogey bought us a Polaroid Z340 Instant Digital Camera for Christmas. It replaced a much-loved trad Polaroid Land Camera that we still have but can’t find film for because Polaroid doesn’t make it any more. Apparently some Dutch people do but they’re being very quiet about it. Perhaps they’re embarrassed.
The new Polaroid still prints its own piccies, though, which is nice. It also has a slot for an SD card, on which snaps taken are stored. Spiffing! we thought, pop the snaps we want printed from our PC onto the SD card, slip it into the Polaroid’s slot and print them. Easy peasy.
What were we thinking?
Of course, it doesn’t work. You can send photos the other way – from Polaroid to PC and thence printer – but the Z340 doesn’t recognise .jpegs. Only the most ubiquitous imaging codec in the world but a complete mystery to Polaroid. But hang on there one darn minute – the Z340 saves its image files as .jpegs, so why won’t it print .jpeg files I’ve uploaded to the SD card from my PC?
How long is your life? How much of it are you prepared to waste getting nowhere?
FIREFOX COCK
Frogs for dinner – about as tasty as Firefox
And on we go. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser – love it or hate it? TF quite likes that it’s open source – which is partly to say it has no affiliations to any of the usual internet service providing suspects – Microsoft, Google, Apple et al. Firefox is like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but unlike IE, Firefox doesn’t try to suck you in to the Moonie-like world of Microsoft. TF also uses the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client so that all our email addresses (for some reason we have three) and correspondence therewith is gathered together in one place on one screen at the same time. So far, so unremarkable.
But it crashes. Every day. Sometimes several times a day. Mostly just Firefox, but occasionally Thunderbird as well. We’ll be working on something or just farting about and, ping! the whole lot disappears. We ‘tell Mozilla about this problem’ every time it happens because a little box pops up saying that the organisation has been notified, which may well be true but nothing changes to make the experience more reliable. Yes, we could use Internet Explorer or Google Chrome but they represent ‘the man’ whereas Firefox is flying the flag for unaffiliated independence and we quite want them to succeed. So we put up with it. Or not, because we’re moaning about it here.
SKY COCK
What a steaming pile of cock might look like after a few days in the sun
Once upon a time your Sky TV menu screen featured a ‘copy’ button whereby you could copy a TV programme you’d recorded onto, say, a DVD and post it to a friend who might not have Sky and so wouldn’t have seen it. Not any more. Sky+ is all well and good and wonderful but it’s not about sharing. TF thinks it might be possible to record a show in real time but we somehow doubt it. The most likely scenario involves much cable wrangling, even more cursing and no end result. We think copying shows to DVD might have been possible back in the days of analogue Sky tuners. The move to digital meant it was easier to restrict what customers did with the programmes on their Sky+ planner. So, no more copying. But it’s not just wanting to send shows to friends; our planner fills up fast when we record series in HD, so much so that we find ourselves deleting entire unwatched series to make room for new stuff.
Which is a steaming pile of cock.
