One Thousand Years of Rice

I was in the sixth-form when we got our first computer. Prior to that I’d had an NES, which I brilliantly got for christmas a few months before the SNES came out, making it almost instantly obsolete. Nothing’s changed, I still have a lousy sense of timing when it comes to technology. My old laptop died and I had to replace it just a couple of months before Windows 7 came out. The new one had a free upgrade, but the amount of form-filling and verification required was insane. They required everything up to and including a mouth swab for a DNA sample.

So I’m still running Vista. I know that makes me a shameful, pitiable Luddite. I’m not allowed out of the house on my own, and have to employ an orphan boy to walk ten paces in front of me ringing a bell so more respectable Apple fan-boys and Linux users have time to cross to the other side of the street, thus avoiding a potentially embarrassing and infectious encounter with the unclean. Women and children, encumbered as they are by mammaries and/or shortened legs, rarely have time to get far, and I’ve seen many a frantic mother pull their child to the nearest doorway to huddle, terrified, as I pass. The braver ones point at me as I go by, clearly hoping to use me as some kind of cautionary tale, lest their offspring follow my wretched example and find themselves also adrift in this slough of misery, despond, and unintuitive drop-down menus.

I’m in no special hurry to upgrade though; what’s the point? My computer does everything I need it to, even if it is starting to show its age a little. A little over three years now. I reckon I can eke it out for another year or so then get another, better one. One more capable of running whatever system is current at that point.

I clearly know fuck all about programming, but friends who do assure me that it’s not what it once was. Back in the day the limitations on processing power meant you had to produce more efficient, more elegant code to improve performance. These days you just chuck more RAM at it. This means that software upgrades are not always a good thing.

See what I did there?

A couple of years back I taught at a JHS once a week and, slightly unusually, they actually provided me with my own laptop. However, this laptop still had an internal floppy disk drive. After a few months they did a big upgrade on all the software and upgraded this machine’s OS to XP. It promptly all but stopped working. Seriously, if I needed to print something from a USB key I’d better be damned sure that I didn’t have a class first period, as it took far more than the 25 minutes of the teachers’ meeting and homeroom to start up, open Word, and print something out. And if there were pictures involved I could forget it. I’m really not exaggerating this for effect. My phone had more processing power than that computer.

And that was the problem. Even an OS as outdated as XP required too much from a system that old. So there seems little point in upgrading for the sake of it. I know, the bogey man of ‘security’ is all pervasive, but I’m not exactly dealing with state secrets here. If any ‘hackers’ really want a few years’ worth of lesson plans and half a dozen unfinished blog posts, then I’d question their ambition. Aren’t they meant to be bringing down The Pentagon/Google/China this week?

One's a rising force which is making western governments
increasingly concerned about personal freedoms
and information security, and the other...

The last time I was the first to own the new model of anything, it was the third generation ipod nano, the one with the first colour screen. The battery on my first generation one died, and with the flexibility and customer service for which Apple is rightly famed, the only way to fix it was to replace the whole thing. I could get a new model for only a few quid more than a new ‘battery’, so why not?

I got the new one the week it came out; it was so new that there were no third-party peripherals for it yet. I took it to the gym the next day, and, lacking a clip or case for it, stuck it in my pocket. It fell out when I was doing floor presses and I dropped a 40kg dumbbell on it.

Fortunately it was rubberized (the dumbbell, not the ipod or floor. Actually, the floor was too, now I think of it), so I got away with just a massive dent in the casing. It’s still working just fine five years on, though my music library has long since outgrown the 8GB memory, which seemed cavernous at the time. I can buy a flash drive with that much now for the cost of a couple of CDs. Though that’s more a reflection on the ridiculous cost of physical media in Japan than anything else.

I got an iphone when I came back to Japan, about 4 years ago now. A 3GS, all mod cons. Not now of course; now there are any number of cool apps I don’t look closely at before downloading only to be disappointed that they won’t work because the phone is too old. Might be time for an upgrade there as well, what with everything. My eldest can already unlock it and shuffle the icons round by himself, I might just have to write off the old model as nothing better than a child's toy and move on.

This isn’t meant to be a grumpy old man rant about the pace of technological change. Technology doubles every 18 months. I get that and think it’s a fantastic thing. The alternative is to say, ‘No, stop it. Slow down, don’t push the boundaries. Try not to do the best you can.’ That’s clearly a moronic attitude. I’m not even going to include the ‘but’ you’re probably expecting at this point. This is just the way the world works now and you’re going to get nowhere raging impotently against the dying of the light (battery life issues again).

We will not go quietly into the night, just stumble
blindly because we can't use the screen as a torch.

My wife is even worse than I am. She is a complete technophobe, to the point where she’ll get actively angry if we discuss the subject. I think it’s because, what with much of the jargon being originally English, when I’m discussing it with salesmen or technicians I understand more than she does. My Japanese is functional at best, whereas her English is genuinely fluent, and it’s a bit of a blow to her ego to be the one left out of a conversation for a change. I try to tell her it’s not a language thing, my Mum would be the same, but sometimes it’s better just to drop the subject completely.

On the odd occasion I do brave it though, it works like this: Soon enough our both our sons will be into this, and it behooves us to be at least aware of it and its benefits and dangers. I have limited time for scaremongers who point to videogames every time some teenage nut-job decides to shoot up his school in Michigan. New technology plays an important secondary role as a scapegoat for older people who can’t face up to their own responsibilities. As does pop-culture. In fact, just about anything new. They said the same about video nasties, Ozzy Osbourne, even Elvis. Elvis! Won’t somebody think of the children?

Fuck off.

Not that these things don’t play a part, of course. It all adds up, but in general they’re symptoms, not causes. And if you’re incapable of even recognizing the symptoms, you’re going to have a much harder time treating the actual condition.

Which is why I feel that, for all my shitty timing, I – we – do need to at least be aware of what’s going on. My sons will eventually, and probably very quickly, surpass me for understanding of all this, but I don’t want to be phoning them in 20 years time (or whatever the equivalent of phoning is then) and asking  how to programme the video recorder (or whatever the equivalent is then, or even now). Kids should surpass their parents, that’s the whole point, but let’s not be in too much of a rush to get there just yet.

Credit where it's due.