Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Thursday 22 May 2008

I wonder what's behind this door?

Does this label mean anything to you: “Track changes”? Or this one: “Online collaboration. (Meet Now. Web discussions)” ?*

If so you’ve delved more deeply than I have into Microsoft Word’s “functionality” (I love the IT business. Never use one syllable when you can use five). But which of us belongs to the majority?

I think there’s an unwritten rule about software development. As version follows version more features are added and they’re used by fewer and fewer people. The aim must surely be to add a feature which no one uses. But it mustn’t be useless. The rule is it must be (a) unexpected, and (b) almost impossible to define under Help. The equivalent of the programmer shouting down a well and hearing echoes of applause from other programmers in recognition of the purity of his achievement.

Not that I’m complaining about Word. I wouldn’t be without it. In fact I have a sneaking suspicion I couldn’t be without it. What I don’t need is its next – and here’s another one of those written blurs – iteration.

* If you’re curious, they’re under Tools.

Blazing inferno a source of joy

The electric stove in our rented house in Pittsburgh was quite old. One day ceramic insulation broke away from a hob coil, exposing the bare wire. A multi-amp arc leaped from the wire and punched a hole in the base of the frying pan. Oil in the pan ignited and set alight the wooden kitchen cabinets.

My wife told our two daughters to leave the house, closed the door on the inferno, retrieved the cat who - awkward as ever – was basking somewhere unexpected and left the house to await eventualities.

I was elsewhere at the time and had chance to reflect. Yes, I’d have attended to our daughters, yes I’d have closed the kitchen door… but the cat? Upstairs I had a half-written novel in MS. Happily we’ll never know.

The fire was confined to the kitchen and the landlord had us cooking again within twenty-four hours. When he installed new cabinets he paid for us to eat out. US landlords were like that.

The wrecked pyromaniacal stove was put at the end of the driveway and my older daughter had the inexpressible delight of seeing it slung into the back of the garbage truck and crushed as flat as a pizza by the truck’s powerful jaws. She told me this with shining eyes that evening. I was glad. The tiny publishing company I was working for was “going down the toobs” and we were short of money for things like family entertainment. Ah the benefits of technology!