I never needed a nanobot to fix it when my stereo was a sideboard

I bought 2 cds last night and since then I've spent about 3 hours trying to copy them to my phone, more specifically the micro sd card inside it which is the same size as a grain of dust and which I need to pick up with tweezers because my giant monkey hands can not grasp it. 

Why am I even trying to work with stuff that's so small it only functions on a subatomic level? It's beyond physics. I'm just going to do what I used to do in the old days and play the bloody cds, in a bloody cd player! 

I've got other stuff going on in my house, like the cups I need to wash which are all individually 100 times bigger than this sodding sd card....if aliens are watching me from space, they will be laughing their heads off.

maybe I'll nip down to Currys and see if they'll lend me a fecking nanobot to take a subatomic trip down to the bloody thing's molecular level and see if it can convince the atoms in there to start pulling together as a team?

When I was a kid in the 70s my mum bought a stereo that was as big as a sideboard...the reason being it was a sideboard, it just had a stereo inside it.  If that broke, which it never did because it was made of cast iron, you could still use it to stand your nine types of Christmas veg on which wouldn't all fit on the dining table at Christmas.

These days even the adaptor that the bloody micro sd card fits into is so small it could be stolen by a motivated ant while I'm in the kitchen making a cup of tea, which I am going to do right now, and I'm going to settle for playing the cd on an actual cd player, because I haven't evolved the teeny tiny action man hands yet that are required to deal with microscopic music players.

Bye for now...

If technology gets any smaller I won't be able to find it

I went to see my mum yesterday.  As usual she gave me lots of food and then we watched some gameshows.

We usually watch contemporary gameshows like the Cube or Deal or No Deal but yesterday we had a go at that Challenge TV, where the shows are from about 20 years ago.  The main attraction was back to back episodes of Brucie's Price is Right.  I never even realised that Brucie had done 'The Price is Right'.  I've only ever seen the ones with Leslie Crowther.

It shows how far technology has advanced in the last 20 years that almost all the amazing prizes on the Price is Right, gadgets like Home Computers, Camcorders, Stereos etc, all priced at £1000 or more, you can now pick up from a charity shop for about a fiver.  Stuff that obsolete you can't even take to Cash Converters, they'll just laugh in your face.  A PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a camcorder the size of a suitcase, a stereo with a tapedeck, a VHS video recorder?  You'd have trouble these days trying to give that crap to the rag and bone man.  And the 4 separate devices that between them cost about 5 grand on the Price is Right and which would fill a whole room, could now all be replaced by an I-Phone.

Technology has come on so far since I was growing up in the 70s and 80s I can hardly believe it.

To think that when I came home from playing rugby against Benton Park when I was 15 I was astounded by our new VHS video recorder that we'd just got.  I was so amazed I watched Top of the Pops over and over again.  I didn't even like Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, but I thought it was incredible that I was in control of when it was on.  We even had a remote control on a wire that trailed along the floor.  It was state of the art.

I think that VHS recorder cost about £700.  It was as big as a house, and if you pressed the eject button it set off so much vibration all my mum's ornaments fell over.

In the Second World War they had to crack the Enigma Code with a computer the size of a stately home that had about a million valves each about as big as a small child.  Then in the sixties they managed to land on the moon with the aid of a room full of computers that had less processing power than a modern Pay as you Go sim card.  Now we're all watching Youtube in our breaks at work on phones the size of postage stamps.  If technology gets any smaller we'll need electron microscopes to even find the stuff.

When I was a child I was a human remote control.  If my mum wanted the channel changing I had to get up and bash one of the big 3 buttons on the big wooden telly to switch between the 3 available channels of crap.  It was the News on two sides and Harold Lloyd on the other (no, young people, you've never heard of him, look him up he was ace) The cathode ray tube on that telly probably weighed the same as an anvil, and it was encased in a giant wooden case.  It was never likely to get stolen, and even it somebody did steal it, it would probably have been worth more as firewood than as a telly.  But nobody ever would steal it, because you'd have needed a team of navvies just to lift the thing.  These days you could get your i-Phone 5 stolen off you by a motivated fly.  Recently Ruth lost her i-Pod in the car for about a month because it had fallen down a crack about a millimetre wide into where the spare tyre is kept.

Say what you want about old and obsolete technology.  It may have been total crap and it may have had to be delivered to your house by forklift truck after having the front window taken out, but at least you could find the stuff.  Stuff that bulky you could see from space.

All this modern stuff, it might do all kinds of stuff that we could only dream of in the 70s, but at least in the 70s we didn't need tweezers to retrieve our technology from between the cracks in the floorboards if we accidentally dropped it.  We didn't have to go through the bins in case we'd chucked our phones away then. No, that bloody massive beige phone we had in the 70s, it was quicker to run down the street and call for your mates than it was to try and dial a number on it.  And the first proper record player we had was actually built into a sideboard!

I could go on, but if you're old you'll remember it, and if you're young, you'll never believe it, so I think I'll stop there.

Throwing Action Men out of the windows, and other cures for boredom n the 70s

Practically the first thing Ruth did this morning, while she was still in bed, and shortly before I'd arrived back in the bedroom with her first cup of tea, was to check her emails on her new Samsung All Singing All Dancing Galaxy mobile phone plus.

I'm a notoriously slow adopter of technology myself and I'm still at the 'Go to the computer stage' with this particular endeavour.  The Galaxy has got one of those screens that you move stuff around on just by touching it.  I'm not too comfortable with this idea.  If it hasn't got buttons, I don't really trust it.

Anyway, I handed over the tea, and then, as as aside, I said to her 'Back in the 70s, when we were messing about throwing Action Men out of the windows, we never would have imagined we'd have been able to do stuff like this in the future.  We were lucky in those days if we were even allowed a go on the big beige phone with the dial that could have your fingers off.  Mostly, if you even asked to use that, your mum told you not to be ridiculous, and just go call for someone'.

We didn't even get any clues from Tomorrow's World that this kind of thing was in the offing, they mostly seem to have pointless stuff on there, that no-one would ever want, like kettles that could park your car, and lamps made out of string.

'Oh, did you do that as well, she said, I thought it was just me?'  She meant throwing Action Men out of windows.

'Yeah, I even had the Action Man Parachute', I said, although they should probably have been prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act for calling it that, it was basically just a plastic bag and some string.  He usually died when it failed to open, although I think in practice your bedroom window is not usually high enough for a parachute to work properly in any case.

It turns out, Ruth used to play with Action Men a lot in the 70s.  They had much better kit than Barbie, she said, but she never had any of her own, she had to borrow her brother's when he wasn't looking.  He used to hide them.

I think, if mine and Ruth's experiences of Action Men are anything to go by, they had a pretty hard life back then.  I mean, which other toys would have been dunked head first in a tin of blue paint, drowned in the bath till their fuzzy hair fell out, had their legs bent back until they popped out of the sockets?  I don't remember My Little Pony being melted in front of the fire, thrown out of windows and painted with nail polish and Airfix model paints to looks like a transvestite.  If you could scale Action Men up to be real-life soldiers, they'd be invincible, because they took all this, without saying a word, and the only way you knew they were suffering was when their little eagle eyes would move from side to side.  Other than that, they never flinched.

I used to have a Steve Austin toy as well.  Not that wrestler guy, the original Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man.  He was great, and the toy had extra modifications, that the real Steve didn't.  As well as two robot legs and a robot arm, he had a big plastic button at the back to raise his arm, and they'd cut a hole right through his skull so you could use his head as a telescope.  I bet that kind of surgery absolutely knacks.

I think it's probably a normal stage of development, wanting to try and break stuff, when you're a child.  That's probably why they designed Stretch Armstrong, a man whose sole purpose was to be stretched out of shape.  They made it seem on the adverts, as if he was infinitely stretchy, but he totally wasn't.  Some friends and I managed to stretch him so far, that the rubber all split open and you could see the wires inside.  What a wimp.

I used to collect Matchbox cars for a while too.  These are quite collectible, although they cease to be quite so valuable if you take all the ones you own, and smash them up to make a junkyard.  I may have been suffering a bit from short termism when I did this, because it's a bit like smashing an egg and frying it.  You can only really do it once.  It's quite a good way of annoying your mum though, I found.

I used to annoy my mum a lot in those days, not just with legging Action Men out the window and hitting Matchbox cars with a hammer.  I used to play a lot with Toy soldiers too.  For some reason I always wanted to be the Germans.  I think the uniforms were better.  My mum always insisted on self-building stone fireplaces in the 70s and covering them with pointless ornaments.  Saucers and ash trays and other shite (we had horse brasses on the wall too, what was that all about?).

I've found through experience that ceramics provide pretty flimsy cover for German soldiers, and if you catch them a direct hit with an oversize rubber band, or a pair of socks rolled into a ball, they just smash.  The Germans were always having to pick ashtray shrapnel out of their heads.  That's the thing about playing soldiers by yourself, you have to play for both sides, but I always tried harder when I was the Germans, sometimes I'd cheat a bit and throw bigger stuff when it was their turn.  Things could get really messy then.

I've talked about Tonka Toys elsewhere, so I won't list their destructive qualities here, but I also used to have another guaranteed skirting board chipper of a toy.  It was called Richochet racers.  Somebody thought it would be a good idea, to take a tiny little car, and fire it out of a massive gun.  Ace not only for chipping paint, but also for knocking the legs out from under sideboards.  What the hell is a sideboard anyway?

I also used to have something similarly destructive to Richochet racers.  It was an aircraft on a catapult.  The makers had sensibly given it a soft rubber tip, so if you accidentally hit anyone with it, it wouldn't shatter their kneecaps.  We had a 4 day trip to Blackpool in about 1980, my mum, my brother and me, and for some reason we took our elderly neighbour Gertie with us.  We called her Auntie but we weren't related.  Her house was bloody freezing, she would never put the fire on, and she was about as much fun as having your eyes poked out with a cappucino spoon.  Anyway, I used to claim it was an accident of course, but when she'd gone to sleep I used to fire the catapulted plane at the wall just above her sleeping head.  It used to give her a bit of a shock as I recall.  I don't think she lived for much longer after that (she was ancient though, it wasn't anything to do with me).

So, on reflection, I'd have to say that these little modern gadgets with their little touchy feely screens, where you have to swoosh things to one side with your fingers, are probably a very sensible distraction for us modern folk. Apart from anything else, we don't have to spend as much time smashing stuff up.

I don't need facial recognition software - I've already got some, in my head

I keep getting disappointed at the cinema.  Not necessarily by the films either, although some of the tosh I've seen at the Arc would come into that category.

I keep seeing adverts containing young, vibrant, happy people, and they're all over the world, and they're obviously having an amazing time, and I catch myself thinking, I wouldn't mind a piece of that, and then it turns out that the advert is for a mobile phone, and so then I think, no thanks, I've already got one.  Or it might be an advert for a car that can recognise your mobile phone, and get all your music off it, and Facebook, and in-built satnav and all that jazz.

And it just leaves me thinking.  I don't really like travelling by car, but mostly when I get in the car, it's because I want to go somewhere.  So can't I just go there?  Do I have to be riding in a mobile disco / social networking site / atlas type thing.  All I want is to go round to the chippy.

One of the mobile phone adverts I saw.  I may not have understood it correctly, but it seemed to be about taking a picture of someone else's head, and then using the phone to remember what their head looked like for next time you saw them.  But I don't need one of those.  I usually just use my own head for that.  There's people I haven't seen for years, but if I saw them, I would probably just say 'Hey, I remember you!'.  I doubt they'd say.  'Wow, how do you do it?', but if they did I might say 'Well, I've got this pile of mush inside my skull called a brain, and one of the things it can do is remember what things look like'.

And all the phones are called Galaxy or some other space agey bollocksy name.  If you want to see a galaxy, try looking at the sky with the eyes in your head, not through the hand held device you're carrying.  Your phone might be able to augment reality, and tell you what you're looking at, but have you ever considered just looking at regular reality, without any augmentation?  I mean, does augmentation really make things look better?  It doesn't seem to work on women's boobs, I'm not sure it works with the stars either.

I was out cycling the other day, and when we stopped for a breather, the Chief was checking his work emails while we waited.  My own view about going for a bike ride is that I'd like to get away from stuff, I don't want it following me round.  It's easy for me to say, since I don't have any work to follow me, but hey ho.

I think the message these mobile ads are trying to send me, is that there's a better life out there for me, if only  I had a smart phone, that could do loads of stuff.  Like if I was walking round a city, and I wanted to eat something, I could Google the nearest eating place, and ring them up, and pay for it all over the phone, and just go and collect it.  Which I'm sure for some people would be very handy, but where's the adventure in that?  Where's the pleasure that comes from just wandering about, looking at stuff?  From getting lost?

I didn't even have a mobile phone till I was 37, and I said I wouldn't get one, and I thought texting was absolutely ridiculous, but now I've got one, and I send texts, and I've got music on my phone, so I have embraced technology to some degree, but I'm quite happy to continue to have separate things for separate things.

Like a phone for ringing people up, a car for driving places, a computer for doing email.  I don't need an emailphonecar that does everything.  And I'm quite happy to keep looking at people's faces, for the purposes of finding out who they are.  Sometimes I can remember them, sometimes I can't.  And if I need facial recognition software on my phone to remember who you are, chances are you're not all that important to me, sorry and all that.  To borrow a phrase from Graeme, I don't want to have to start an electronic 'Who the fuck are you'? register.  Life's complicated enough.