The Mouse is Your Friend

by mrbrown@mrbrown.com

(Feel free to distribute for non-profit and non-commercial purposes but keep my byline, email address and URL intact please. Thanks)

Some people will tell you that Technology is great, that IT will solve all our nation's problems and world hunger, that IT will be our next paradigm shift, that IT was written by Stephen King. Yet, I can't help but feel that this whole Technology thing is seriously over-rated.

Look, I am writing this on a Apple Powermac (shameless plug, I know, but it's _my_ article) that has enough memory, hard disk capacity and processing power to do the nation's budget, manage nuclear weapons and chew gum at the same time. And I can also see two full A4 pages on my screen at once even though my optical receptors and brain can only work on about one line of my work at a time.

Why do I use so much muscle for my humble work then?

Because I don't want to be seen as some dweeb who uses a Mac Classic or a 286-class PC to do my work (for those who are not into the jargon of computers, it's like the TV equivalent of a black-and-white television _without_ the, gasp, remote control). It makes the work seem so... less important.

I mean, it doesn't matter if you are putting together the Constitution of the United States, because if your boss sees you typing it on a Commodore 64 (which is an ancient computer, trust me -- look, the dang thing used _audio cassette tapes_ in place of floppies, ok? "Oh, it has started loading Pacman, let's go for lunch and a movie first."), well then, it must not be very important, and you need more work.

But typing up a meaningless article like _this_ on your company time and your company's Silicon Graphics workstation that is slaved to a Cray computer (a very big, powerful T-Rex of a computer that needs its own office building and central air-conditioning), well then, your work takes on a whole new profound, guru-like meaning.

Of course no one needs to know that you really got this Powermac for the sssssmokin'! way it plays Duke Nukem and Marathon (both fine, noble examples of brain-numbing carnage). It is simply amazing how we use such a tool representative of our advanced civilised society to do such a Neanderthal thing as splattering alien butt across a virtual wall. But there you go.

Then there are those automatic flush thingies in the modern loo. Yes, the kind that flushes when you so much as stare at the sensor cross-eyed while standing at the urinal. The kind that decides that you have finished your business when you merely shifted your butt to a more comfortable position, thereby flushing the throne and getting your royal rear end wet. Yep, that's what we _all_ need, Sensitive New Age Toilets (or SNATs).

While we are on the topic of sensitive high tech stuff, have you heard of the new Singapore Tourist Promotion Board's high tech "intelligent" building? I was told that this building can sense if there is no one in the office and automatically turns off the lights and other life support functions like air. This it does by sensing movement, or the lack of it, in the room. Brilliant. Except the quiet reflective nature of the work in some of these offices do not generate enough movement for the "intelligent" building to sense and, you guessed it, the lights go off even though there are people still working away in there.

I don't know what it says about corporate environments when an "intelligent" building decides that you have become a non-living thing that does not need light and air, but imagine if you will, a couple of executives, diligently working away on their computers or talking discreetly on the phone, who occasionally stand up to wave their arms frantically in the air so that the building knows there are humans in the room and they are alive. To have to verify our existence to a _building_ is so, so sad.

My mother, on the other hand, does not care too much about "intelligent" buildings and technological wonders. She thinks I spend way too much time and money on my "toys and gadgets". She has been known to scold my regular computer vendor for selling me new stuff, when she sees him come round to my home office to deliver some new hardware. I feel sorry for the man.

Then again, my mother belongs to that elite class of Singaporeans who still do not know how to operate the VCR, and by gosh, she's proud of it, dammit! This is the same woman who, because she is a teacher (30 years at it and still going strong) that a rabid infotechnology-smitten Ministry of Education wants to push into the 21st century, told her principal that she had no interest in going on a course on Electrical Wiring. Her exact words were, "Power points?! Why would I want to go on a course on power points?!"

That exchange has since become an Urban Legend in her school.

I guess nobody wants to left behind in this rapidly advancing planet. That may explain why people are willing to invest time and money on technologies that may actually be less efficient than the old ways, especially if you take into account the time and money blown on learning the new ways (that become obsolete even before you open the shrinkwrap on the software box). By the time you have figured out version 1.0 of the word processor, version 6 (with the built-in Internet Web Server tools and the ability to make Toy Story 2) is already out.

Or perhaps you are one of those people who _must_ have the latest model because it runs at _225_mhz instead of the pokey 200mhz model you own.

There are exceptions though, people that Technology has passed by, that The Digital Society has left behind...

I have a friend called Michael (not his real name) who just bought a pager, a numeric one, with just two melody settings, loud and louder. It was a proud moment for him, I can tell you. I hear he plans to buy a handphone in 2005 AD.

I have another friend called Carol (also not her real name) who switches her pager to vibration mode and puts it in her handbag because she doesn't want to disturb her colleagues. She is presently in a therapy support group for People Who Answer Pages Five Days Later, with another friend Christopher (not his real name too).

"Hello? You page, ah?"

"Yes, last week, as a matter of fact. I just wanted to tell you that some thugs are planning to ambush you in some Wong-Fei-Hong style way, but your pager not alphanumeric, leh."

(Wong Fei Hong, for those not familiar with this icon of Chinese martial arts and general goodguyness, was a Kung Fu master who was famous for his No-Shadow Kick and frightfully advanced alphanumeric pager, as seen in the historically accurate Singtel Paging TV ads.)

I have yet another friend, who shall remain unnamed, who still thinks his 16 megabytes of RAM is "a lot" and with RAMdoubler, should be enough for most purposes, like using Netscape Navigator, which as we all know, eats RAM for breakfast.

And who can forget that young lady who, and this is a true incident, faced with the daunting task of using her ATM card for the very first time to pay for an item in a departmental store, promptly took the NETS number keypad that the cashier gave her ("Your PIN number plis"), and brought the device close to her face, whispering, "My PIN number is..."

My wife frequently calls my _handphone_ from her office to ask me how to do profoundly difficult things like how to delete 3 columns and add a row to her table in Word 6. Try explaining these things over a phone _while_ you are driving.

She also calls my handphone to ask me the meaning and spelling of words as well, but that's another story. And you wonder how Singtel and M1 make their money in the highly competitive world of telecommunications. There you have it, wives calling their husbands' handphones to find out the meaning of the word "trifling".

Speaking of cheap thrills, I recently went hunting for new thrills on the Net after being bored by the Web (that means, instead of 19 hours of web surfing a day, I now surf only 17 hours).

And I found my latest distraction. It is a piece of software called Pointcast (available at www.pointcast.com) that allows me to download everyday, the latest news from CNN that I don't have time to read, the latest US stocks and share prices from the Wall Street Journal that I don't own, and the latest weather in Eastern Aruba where I won't be going. On top of that, it displays all this updated information on a screen saver that throws headlines on the screen when your computer is idle.

Most importantly, it has 3D icons and buttons.

Wow. Too cool.

Hey, I may not read _all_ of the stuff Pointcast downloads (except maybe politically earthshaking news like Pamela Anderson's latest tattoo) but it sure is nice to know that I have the latest, most-up-to-date news and inane animated ads on my desktop. Yep, I feel like a truly connected dude after my morning updates, and all those headlines flying across my screen. Whoopee. It doesn't have to be too practical as long as it is _cool_, is the motto I live by.

Now if you will excuse me, I have very important business to attend to. One that will require all of my PowerPC processing power, mental prowess, manual dexterity and AzKickr(TM) Plasma Pulse Rifle to complete.

All fan mail and soft toys may be directed at mrbrown@mrbrown.com

Other writings may be found in the Website "BrownTown" at http://www.mrbrown.com