A Tale of Two Technologies...

OK, finally, I can write this post, despite the extraordinarily piss-poor performance of the technology that enables(!) me to write this daily scribble. I have spent the last thirty minutes on the verge of apoplexy - trying not to scream out loud and physically assault this aged but otherwise innocent laptop - because I simply couldn't get a simple photo to down/upload from my phone to the computer. I know I've had this problem before: Apple's iCloud sometimes chucks a curve-ball at me and refuses to synchronise my Photos from the iPhone to the MacBook via you-know-what.

In the past I've managed to sort it, but I never bother to note down how I achieve the fix and promptly forget all about it as things normalise for the next few weeks/months. Whenever this happens and I can't be arsed to rediscover the fix, I simply email the picture I want to myself; as I attempted to do some fifteen minutes ago. Or so I thought. The first attempt resulted in the email itself getting through but the attachment download hanging in limbo. So I bit the bullet, closed a load of browser tabs and shut everything down. A brief pause to scream under my breath about the parlous state of the twenty-first-century online experience - remember, I was a very early online adopter pre-web [blog posts passim] - and to check my local internet connection throughput on my phone, which was as expected and far more than perfectly adequate for the modest purpose we actually require the service to provide.

On reboot, at least some things started to actually happen, and although the second attempted email send took its time, it did arrive eventually, and so I made a start on this very post. After I'd written the first paragraph I checked Photos, and lo and behold, six days worth of missing pictures had finally crawled their way out of the morass that the Cloud seems to have become, to my laptop. Progress? Hardly. We have been steadily outstripping our technical capability to keep up with the consumer demand for online content supply we have been selling for some time now, and the cracks are starting to show: bandwidth is slowly being swamped, and the networks are just playing catch-up all the time: and for what? YouTube shorts? Pointless hits of the digital equivalent of crack cocaine? What a total waste of a resource as important as the World Wide Web started out to be. Pathetic, lowest-common-denominator non-culture sucking the very life out of what should be a universal benefit in the service of all in the service of mammon, at the expense of sensibility and utility.

By complete contrast, at least in terms of technological reliability and utility of stuff, we went over to James and Leo's for Jame's birthday lunch this afternoon - a very pleasant bill of fare catered by Leo - and we took with us the present pictured above. Now, to the unaware and disinterested, this might seem a pretty odd piece of kit to offer one's son as a birthday gift. But I chanced upon this rather fine piece of machinery at the end of last week in a local junk/curio shop that I frequently visit. Liking stuff like this anyway, I was giving the thing some close scrutiny and was asked by one of the people at the place whether I knew what it was. I thought it possible it might be of GPO origin, but I couldn't recall ever seeing anything exactly like it in my sixteen years with BT.

Anyhow it turned out to be the master clock from James' small secondary school, which closed in 2017, and had recently been cleared for sale, as the owners/headteachers had moved out. Two things: I just had to buy it as a memento for him of his happy times there [I had the brass plaque made and attached it myself to celebrate the place's brief(ish) history] and secondly, the device itself represents to me the very best of human ingenuity and craft. At a guess, I would say that the clock is the thick end of seventy years old, a bit like me. It was probably, if at all, only ever turned off at holiday time, but over the course of its septuagenarian life still never misses a beat or fails to keep perfect time, and would, given the need and the opportunity, continue to do so well past its centenary year. Oh, that the fragile web we've woven out of data spaghetti to run our lives today could ever be so reliable and faithful. There you go, though...