Witness the past! | Glimpse the future!
I've just spent the best part of three hours, on two different computers, trying to get an online auction going on eBay. Specifically, I've tried to set a reserve price on a lot. Forgive my old-fashioned thinking, but I don't think an auction is an auction without a reserve price. If you don't care how much you get, you're begging.
Anyway, this most popular of ecommerce sites, a system that children use daily, that cranially damaged spud-a-likes hooked to lung pumps sail through, transforms into a labyrinth of frustation and despair at my fingertips. This happens to me a lot. I have access to a top of the line machine, the broadest of bandwidths and a decent brain. Yet much of the worlwide web is a closed box. I can't post a video to YouTube without it stretching and squashing to the wrong aspect ratio. I can't get my head round Photoshop, Flash or Firefox. I recently found that out neither BitTorrent not iChat actually work at all, except as space fillers on my hardrive. I don't subscribe to any RSS feeds and, as previously outlined, find Facebook unrelentingly naff.
The gap is widening. Within the next decade I'll be the digital equivalent of Adam Adamant, hopelessly unmoored from comtemporary life, hamfistedly trying to ram my usb dongle (and what cretin coined that particular gem, pray?)into the most intimate neural wet ports of a 700 tetrabyte, wah-fuhr theen zMac Ghost or whatever the hell.
Oh, double balls and bollocks.
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Firefox I used to hate, but I used Camino for a while rather than Safari, and that kind of eases you into it. And once you discover the joys of a Google toolbar, you never want to go back...
No idea why BitTorrent won't work for you, but how did Transporter work out for you?
Next time I'm up, I'm going to have to have a look at your Mac and see if there's something up with it.
This is of course NOT simply an excuse to play with a shiny new Apple Mac. No, not at all...
I don't get Flash, or Photoshop, and as for web design? Yeah, hit, miss and pray is how I get by!
But man, I wants me that wah-fuhr theen Mac....
One the one hand:
- I've never made, edited or uploaded a video in my life (I'm slightly bummed that so little video footage of MLG exists, but there's nowt I can about that now).
- I've been using the same image editing software for nearly a decade.
- I tried to teach myself Flash, and gave up after 10 minutes. If it was so great, Flash-heavy sites wouldn't need a "skip intro" option, would they?
- I don't use Dreamweaver or owt like that - I'm one of these real ale web users that writes raw HTML in Notepad.
- The 'breakbeat concrete' noodlings I'm currently working on are done with pretty much the same gadgets and gizmos I had in Glasgow (with the exception of human gadget Wee Joe, who mixed the last MLG album)
- I've also found Bittorrent utterly useless.
On the other hand:
- Ebay I love. I've spent the past few weeks snapping up paperbacks of JG Ballard's back catalogue for a few quid a go. Why don't you just set a starting price on the thnig you're flogging? It's essentially the same thing a reserve, it doesn't cost you extra, and you get more bidders ("reserve not met" puts people off). Ask Lisa - her feedback rating is pushing 800.
- I've got about 40 RSS feeds on the go. I use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) - the RSS equivalent of webmail, meaning I can check blogs from any PC. It's a lot easier than visiting sites to see if they've been updated.
- I also store my bookmarks online (http://del.icio.us/mcgazz).
- I get music from Soulseek - an obscure p2p program that only a small number of music buffs seem to use.
- I've got a Facebook page, but I don't let it rule my life. I'm currently using it to play Bryan Wark at Scrabble. Really. I'm having to tone the page down a bit anyway, cos people from work are 'friending' me. I need to erase all references to my past life as Glasgow's Tesco Value Mark E Smith.
"Glasgow's Tesco Value Mark E Smith"? Come, now. Tesco Finest, surely? How many others shared a bill with him?
You're not selling a kidney, or owt like that, are you? ;-)
Not to belittle my own achievements, but I'd have to reply: an awful lot of people, most of whom were never heard from again. Google can't furnish me with much on the first two Fall support acts I witnessed: 'Chalk' and 'Groop'.