Whatever Turns You On

I've just spent five minutes staring at a blank screen.

Not something I do as a matter of choice but rather something that I am required to do by someone with a skewed idea of what is 'acceptable'. Five minutes on the face of it doesn't sound like a very long time but when you have work to do and it is stopping you do it, five minutes can feel like an eternity. This particular pause for reflection came courtesy of, who else but Microsoft, a company so firmly rooted in the past it ought to wear a stovepipe hat.

I made the rookie mistake of turning on my second computer - the one that shares my main workstation monitor via a KVM switch that needs to be switched to whichever computer is booted up or else the screen resolution goes haywire. Once the 'on' button is pressed you are committed, and on this occasion I was ambushed by one of those Windows updates that waits till the computer is turned back on to finish installing. The 'installing upgrades' screen, otherwise known as the 'Blue Screen of Tedium', appeared and I just had to wait.

And wait.

Then it rebooted again and I was left staring at the aforementioned blank screen for the aforementioned five minutes. What fun. Eventually it got as bored as I was with this game and fired up but not before I had plenty of time to muse about an oft-considered question: Why?

Specifically, Why does it need to be this way?

Back in the day when Windows was but a small child it would be demanding of time spending an extended period getting itself ready when the on button was pressed. We came to accept that this must be necessary, I mean, why would they take all that time out of your day if it wasn't for some good reason?

I am from a generation when many things were mechanical. Cameras for instance. They didn't need a battery or a USB charge cable, they relied upon the energy put into the system by the simple action of pressing a button to do all they needed to take picture. Brilliant, and instantaneous. They moved on to a point when they needed batteries to do stuff but were still quick. It is a good idea to be quick when taking a picture but modern digital cameras have ignored this managing to do a lot of tedious messing about after the button is pressed and I have lost count of the number of things I have taken a picture of that are no longer there. This is not progress in my book.

Since my first computer in 1994 they have got faster. My first one would process 188,000,000 instructions per second. My current one can process 91,100,000,000 instructions per second - nearly 500 times faster and, if you take into account all the other improvements it should have left that first machine in its dust but it hasn't. The problem is that the growth in software bloat has nearly outpaced Moore's Law. The most obvious result is that programs sprawl all over hard drives that should by now have hardly noticed them. Possibly the most irritating result is that the time between pressing the on button and everything being ready for action is barely any quicker. 

Knowing nothing of the internal processes of a computer I couldn't see why it took over a minute to turn a machine on when a Google search returning millions of hits could be done in a fraction of a second. I mean, what was Windows doing for all that time? It must be a massive task to use up that much time and resource. I put this down to naivety but in recent time Microsoft has found itself with competitors and they seem to have managed the near instant start-up. My Nexus 7 runs on Android and the instant I open the flap on its protective case it fires up. Not quite as quickly as a fridge light but getting there. It is ready for action without having to wait. This is what we want.

Granted, it isn't a serious workstation and I would have trouble running my computer modelling software on it but the principle is established. Even digital cameras are getting with it by constantly 'taking pictures' until you press the button and select one. A bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach but it does reduce the number of oddly empty photos.

I am of the opinion that Microsoft's days are numbered. They have been repeatedly late to the party as new developments have come along. They were too complacent. They had too big a market share to fail - or so they thought. Like the dreaded Autodesk they had foisted an inferior product on the

market that had become the de facto standard and everyone was too afraid to not be there with the crowd. Once they had reached that position they felt free to do everything on their terms using their outdated notions of what their customer base could be expected to put up with. But times are changing and the people who have had to put up with their foibles are now in a position to put up serious opposition.

Can anyone port my modelling software to Android?

Ode To A Wasted Morning.

So. I am sat at my computer trying to kick start my working day when a 'nag window' pops up. 

This is yet another one from Nvidia who, after sitting in the background letting their graphics card offspring quietly get on with its job, have suddenly started to get needy and attention grabbing of late. Updates promising a better gaming experience have been dangled in front of me repeatedly.

I don't really 'do' games, certainly not on my work computers. But I do need a reasonably serious graphics card to handle the computer modelling and rendering tasks I throw at it, so I hit the 'install' button - what could possibly go wrong? A few minutes twiddling my thumbs should see me experiencing a new level of graphics handling capability, whole new worlds of visual pleasure will be opened up. Not that any of the previous updates have made any discernible difference in performance.

The 148Mb file starts to download. 148MB! What is that all about? My first serious computer had a hard drive smaller than that and this is just yet another update to what was then called a video card. Alarm bells start to ring as the progress bar fails to do much of that. Progress, I mean. What could be slowing things down? It is a fast computer with a fast broadband connection: I can only put it down to their servers creaking under the load.

I click to install, and wait.

I go and make a coffee.

I unload the dishwasher.

I wind up the clock in the study.

I prove that branching ratios of the Higgs Boson are consistent with the standard model.

I lied about the last one.

The installation bar continues to creep slowly across the screen so I try to buy a couple of things on eBay. Twenty five minutes have now passed. Then the screen goes black.

No problem. I expected something like this to happen. It has presumably got to the stage when it needs to disable the graphics card to update the software. A bit rude of it to not ask first, but so be it. The screen lights up again but with a resolution that has dropped to something I haven't had to work with for the best part of twenty years and the installer progress bar moves slowly on.

Then it stops.

A dialogue box appears. It says that the installation has failed, thank you and good night - though possibly not quite that politely. I am left staring at a screen with hugely magnified icons dripping off the edges. Good grief. Thanks Nvidia.

I manage to navigate my way to the unfeasibly large control panel and click on the Nvidia icon hoping that I can at least find a more user-friendly screen resolution before I attempt to fix it. A dialogue box appears telling me that I haven't got an Nvidia graphics card. Something of a surprise as I had been using it earlier.

There is only one way forward. Turn it off and on again. So I hit the shutdown button only to be informed that it will 'install updates and shutdown'. Updates. What updates? It must mean the Nvidia update but why are there six of them? What is going on? Is this some sort of cruel joke?

It takes over thirty long, grinding, minutes to install the updates and for the screen to go black. I press the on button with my fingers crossed that all will be well. And it is. Well, nearly. It comes back at low resolution and spends another six minutes to search the 'preconfigured driver folder' and asks for a reboot before all is back to normal.

So. Pressing that innocent looking 'install update' button has cut a swath through my morning with no discernible benefit - another PR triumph for the software companies. I could, of course have resorted to using my other work computer but that was sitting tantalisingly behind a KVM switch and past experience told me that a rebooting computer needs to have control of the monitor or else all manner of horrors will result. I just have to be patient.

The moral of this story is: 'When your graphics card asks to upgrade consider taking it to the nearest computer shop and having it levered out with a screwdriver - It may be quicker'. 

Have You Got Something To Prise This Key Out With?

I have just hit the damned 'insert' button again.

The problem is that, being located right next to the 'delete' button it is a key that can be pressed without you knowing. But you certainly know that something just happened because all of a sudden everytime you type a character it deletes the one in front of it. Not being a touch typist, I tend to look at the keyboard rather than the screen which means that this little monster can cut vast swathes through my carefully crafted prose before I realise what is going on. I don't do it very often so, every time that it rears its ugly head I forget which button I am supposed to press to cure it and I am reduced to trying to Google it. Which is when the word 'overwrite' would be useful if it came to mind - but it never does.

So what is the 'insert' button for, and why is it in such a stupid place? Heaven alone knows. The answer is presumably the same for the question; what is a 'caps lock' for in this day and age and why did some idiot put it next to the 'a'?

Accepting that there are a lot of keyboards out there, and there may be someone who finds these things useful, it is doubtful that we will ever be rid of them, but is it really beyond the wit of man to come up with a bit of 'keyboard management' software that allows people like me to turn these irritating keys off?

There is, actually, a method being peddled that involves 'adding some keyboard scancode mapping information to your Windows registry' Unfortunately even the description lost me at the word 'adding' so the chances of me succesfully disabling these keys without disabling the whole computer are slim to nill. The other technique often ventured is 'prising the offending keys out' - nice.

While Microsoft spend all their time messing up user interfaces why don't they divert some of that creative energy into something really useful like an idiot proof way of customising the keyboard? Something with a nice friendly graphic interface maybe? They're probably still trying to figure out why the letters keep disappearing while they type.

Java Java it likes me

Periodically I get bugged by a Java update. I have no idea what Java does anymore so whenever I receive an update the knee-jerk reaction is to go along with it and go through the update process.

I mean, what could happen if I don't? Presumably this is just another of those bits of legacy software on my computer that has security issues and if I don't update it when they demand that I do then my machine is going to catch a very nasty bug or topple over because a vital bit is no longer up to date. Right?

Well. Not necessarily. 

Every time Java wants to update it uses that nasty little trick of making you opt out of installing an Ask toolbar. I don't want an Ask toolbar. It is a bit of meaningless clutter that gets in the way of me using Google. But every time Java forces you to update it the Ask toolbar is there ready to be installed unless you actively opt out. The problem is you probably have a life and, as a result, are doing other things. More important things. While you are going through another uninvited and tedious update of a bit of software that you don't understand the purpose of you can easily overlook the task of un-clicking a radio button and you have another bit of trash installed on your machine.

I can do without this!

The latest 'update' to Java has appeared, and do you know what I did?

I uninstalled it. 

Hopefully this will bring the irritating updates to an end and nothing untoward will happen to my machine.

If it does this is probably my last blog for a while.

If it doesn't it will be business as usual and I have just saved myself from another computer-related irritation.

Watch this space...

So Much For Not Being Evil

I think that the title just about says it all.

Reductio ad absurdum

The reason why many older people do not follow fashion isn't because they don't understand it, but because they have seen it all before. This is also the reason why there is a tendency to get grumpier with age. The first time round fashions can have a certain novelty and, occasionally, something new does come along. People who now stick to a particular style have probably followed fashion at some time in their past. But a lot of fashion is just change for change's (or commercial gain's) sake, and that can get  wearing, very wearing. Resisting fashion can become a heroic fight as retailers are completely in its thrall and you can find that things simply become unavailable. A couple of years ago there was a fashion for purple clothing. It became quite amusing looking at shop window displays in Italy and seeing nothing but a sea of purple in all its shades. Anyone who didn't like purple would, presumably, have to wait till the next fashion bus came along.

Fashion, of course, makes itself felt in all areas of life. Clothing is the first thing that comes to mind when the word is mentioned but it also shapes the environment in which we live, infecting everything from the way food is presented to the shape of waste bins. Architecture is at the whim of fashion but, unfortunately for architects, any mistakes tend to linger and mean that buildings can become dated very quickly. Consequently architects will reign in some of their more extreme reactions to fashion in fear of leaving an embarrassing edifice to haunt them.

Not so software designers.

Microsoft have turned their back on anything that suggests three dimensions in their Windows 8 operating system and 'flattened' everything out into simple areas of colour. They call them 'tiles' and the whole idea of reducing everything in a GUI to its most simple and impenetrable form has met with some resistance. So you would think that other software companies would take note and steer another course. Actually, no you wouldn't, because if you are old enough to have seen it all before you know that the headlong rush into a particular design dead-end is unstoppable. Google are currently following the path to minimalism. I have mentioned this before but Google keep reminding me so I can't resist protesting again. Their latest roll-out of their search page has banished the menu bar. This now means that operations that used to be carried out with one button click now require two. This could, of course, be because Amazon have patented 'one-click' but it is more likely that useful things clutter up their nice minimal work space and need to be banished. Preferably somewhere difficult to find.

My wife has an Android phone and it has just updated itself. Mine has yet to receive the command from above but it will, doubtless, appear any day now. Without asking anyone if they want the interface with their most commonly accessed piece of technology messed around with they have now flattened everything. No choice is given, you are supposed now to be eager for a 'new look' and thankful that they have decided for you what it is going to be. Resistance is futile. They have also chosen to move some of the furniture around and their end users will just have to put up with banging into things for a while, for the sake of fashion.

If fashion went in a straight line introducing us to new and exciting things along the path to some sort of design Nirvana it wouldn't be so bad. But the reality is that the next wave of 'bright young things' will be along in a while and everything will rush headlong in another direction, probably backwards. The current BYT's will presumably recognize this as a 'retrograde' step and join the ranks of the grumpy.

In days gone by we had to put up with all of this because the infrastructure wasn't there to allow people to find and adopt their own style. Things are different now. Software can be designed to allow everyone complete control over the look and feel of things. By allowing 'user preferences' they can allow their customer base to locate their own comfort zone and opt to stay there. The computer modelling software that I have used for the last nearly twenty years allowed this. Each time they released a new version you could opt to stick with the old interface and not have to go through a new learning curve. Microsoft bought that company and then pulled the plug on it a few months later so it is permanently in stasis now. It won't develop as new technology comes along but then again I won't be bothered by BYTs gaining control either. On balance that is probably a good thing, and you never know it may become a design classic.

An Attack of Sticky Cursor.

Something I have been noticing lately is that when I use Google Street View the cursor gets 'sticky'. By which I mean that if you try and click to rotate the viewpoint it sticks to the little grey zone used to zoom in or move and won't let go so when you release the mouse button you move position. This has been getting increasingly annoying but I had thought the problem was at my end. Google wouldn't have updated one of their flagship pieces of software so that it no longer works would they? 

Wrong. Apparently they have. When I eventually found out what the forums were calling this phenomenon i.e. 'sticky cursor', I found that plenty of other people have been having the same problem - and it apparently goes back a long way. To at least 2011 in fact depending on which combination of hardware and browser you use.

However. On this occasion there is a fix, and it is simple. Just click on 'Full Screen' and the problem goes away. Now if the chaps at Google can just figure out why that is maybe they can break that too.

And That Reminds Me...

I am sure that there is little chance that I will run out of material for this Blog. I have a backlog as long as your arm of software-related nonsense to go at and only yesterday was treated to a whole day of installation hell by a bunch of amateurs who think they are running a software company. I shall be tackling that one soon. But I need a little space to calm down before I do so consider this a small interlude.

The software companies that form the bulk of my big backlog have little danger of being forgotten because I am reminded almost daily of their existence by irritating pop-up dialogue boxes. I have just been treated to the latest from our friends at Adobe.

One of the many problems that anyone who uses a computer has to wrestle with is how to handle updates. I have had many helpful people tell me that I am doing it the wrong way and that if I adopted their tactic I wouldn't get quite so irritated. THEY ARE WRONG. Updates are irritating no matter how you handle them.

It comes down to three basic choices:

1. Let the computer get on with updating without reference to you.

I tried this. To a degree it works. I am even currently adopting this strategy on my Smartphone until it goes horribly wrong - and it will. It is just biding its time until it can go wrong with the most effect. I used to let Windows update itself but Windows is an idiot. Whoever was Head of Wrong Decisions at Microsoft at the time structured it so that an update could restart the computer. Just wait a moment and think about that. Restart the computer. What could possibly go wrong? 

I build computer models. It is my job. I spend hours, if not days, building complicated meshes that then need to be 'rendered' to create the final image. The rendering process can take hours depending on the complexity of the model with its shadows and reflection and reflections of reflections. So I leave my machines running, often overnight, so that I can hit my presentation deadlines. I think by now you have probably guessed what happens if you do that? 

I wake up in the morning not to find all the renders complete but instead a dialogue box saying something along the lines of 'Your machine was updated and it required a restart'. If I had the temerity to render a model that I hadn't completely saved this piled on a whole new layer of pain and why? Because some idiot software engineer had decided that time was of the essence in updating the machine and it didn't matter if there was collateral damage. Thank you Microsoft.

2. Turn off updates altogether.

Not a good idea. You see, software companies write lazy and clumsy software. You only have to remember that Voyager 2 has managed to get into interstellar space after a journey lasting over 40 years with 68KB of memory whilst your average 'modern' program runs to Gigabytes to see something has gone wrong. When we had our first computer you would load programs on using floppy discs. Until the wheelbarrow wasn't big enough to carry all of them and then they moved to CDs and then DVDs and then direct downloads from the internet in the arms race between the hard disc manufacturers and the programmers. Every now and then it looks as if the programmers are going to win and completely fill your hard drive before you get a chance to use it but Moore's Law has kept them at bay and we now have hard drives routinely installed in computers measured in terabytes. Now there's a challenge. The only danger of course is that we will run out of words to name the ever-bigger drives and then all will be lost. But I digress.

The point is that in the middle of all that massive bloated programming there are mistakes. Big ones. And they will come out to bite you if the guys who produce it don't get to grips with quite what it is they have written before the bad guys. So, as they find the errors they fix them usually under the guise of patching a hole in security because that casts them as the good guys. Despite the fact that it was they that sold you the pup in the first place. If you don't keep applying these updates then bigger and bigger holes become available to the less scrupulous and that can be bad. Scrapping-hard-discs bad. If you delay applying the updates they just build up. You don't get to the stage where you save time by not updating. You are just putting off the inevitable.

3. Ask to be informed when updates are available.

This is where we came in.This is my weapon of choice because the innevitable outcomes of the others are too horrible to contemplate  Bearing in mind everything I have just said it makes sense that if I am keen to stay safe and up-to-date I will apply updates whenever I am notified. All well and good, but those notifications have come at progressively closer centres and they are now daily reminders that intrude into my life. I cannot turn on a computer now without a string of updates to one bit of software or another demanding my attention. And not just once, these things repeatedly nag until I give in. I turned on this machine this morning to get some work done only to have A

dobe nag me to update their Reader software. Why, for heavens sake do they have to keep updating reader software? They should have been able to fit the whole program inside 68KBs. To put the icing on the cake this 'update' required a reboot. A reboot! Why?

And another thing. Why do they keep putting radio buttons in that default to the option I never opt for? This may form the subject of a future Blog.

So, after having fired up all my working software I now had to shut everything down again and wait while these idiots mess remotely with my machine. It is pointless to delay the reboot because it will also keep nagging with the added danger that it could get bored and restart the machine anyway out of spite. The job I am supposed to be doing is pushed to one side and I am reminded, once more, about the subject of a Blog.

Such is life...

Oh, and by the way. Any solutions that require me to remember anything are doomed to failure. So don't even go there.

Who is Steering This Thing?

I have a great admiration for Google and what they do but there comes a time in the development of any company when an idiot takes the wheel.

It happened with Renault a few years back. We had a string of fine cars from them that did the job we wanted and even managed to get progressively better. Until they changed their Head of Design. He broke a perfectly good range of cars with his meddling. 

The result of his 'design' input was the 'Avantime' and the 'Vel Satis' both of which had negligible sales. But he wasn't satisfied just introducing cars which were so radically wide of the mark in design terms that no-one wanted them he also gave the rest of the product line a makeover. The Clio and Espace turned their back on the market and started to look like something out of Judge Dredd. The poor Megane gained a rear end that looked like a filled nappy. Needless to say we stopped buying Renaults and, despite their recognition that this had all been a big mistake, have never been back.

Google seem to have gained their equivalent to Renault's Head of Design and he is currently engaged in undoing as much good work as he can. Another example of this is the Play Store on Android. As with all the other Google products it has received a 'makeover'. The colours have been simplified and the layout is striving to achieve some sort of Zen state.

The problem is, this simplification once again makes the product less functional.

To start with the colours are now more uniform. There is the heavy use of areas of a single brightish colour rather like the tiles in Windows 8 to announce what the product is but after that all is subtlety. Unfortunately this means that silly little things like buttons now merge into their background. A white button on a pale grey background with a darker grey text isn't very readable when you are trying to see it on a smartphone screen in variable lighting conditions. Genius.

Just to make the task of actually using the product a little more challenging they have also tried to rationalise the layout. This has resulted in buttons now occupying a small area in the top right hand corner. On my phone, an HTC OneX, the screen is large. I like that. It means that someone with eyes my age can see what's going on. But even on my screen the buttons are only 5mm apart with a gap between them of 1mm, way to small for the fingers of most people. If these buttons were unimportant it wouldn't be too much of a disaster but the boy genius in charge of design manages to place the 'Open' and 'Uninstall' buttons together with hilarious consequences.

Renault eventually tracked down the source of their problem but not before a lot of damage was done. Hopefully someone at Google has their wits about them.

Now, Where Were We?

In the beginning there was the map, and it was good. It allowed you to get from point A to point B without wandering aimlessly around in between. For the next few hundred years there was still the map, drawn and then printed on papyrus or vellum or paper and we were happy enough.

Then someone invented satellite navigation, arguably one of the most amazing pieces of technology ever invented. Having machines for writing words or adding numbers or communicating with each other we could and did see coming, but sat nav came out of left field. Who could have guessed that we would have had maps that actually tell you where you are? Amazing, unless you are a teenager in which case you probably have grown up with it and have no idea of what the fuss is about.

It was only made available to people without guns less than twenty years ago and, given the time needed to develop consumer products, only became ubiquitous in the last ten years. One of the many things that I admire Google for is their dedication to recording the planet with aerial and street level photography and resisting the temptation to only release the data on a series of expensive DVDs. That would have been the old anal-retentive way of doing it. Instead it is given away via your computer browser and, once the screens got big enough, your phone. Brilliant. Their adventures in mapping have been useful beyond measure and given everyone with a computer a much clearer view of the world in which we live.

But, and there is always a 'but', Google seem to have caught something from Microsoft. It is a creeping, invidious condition called 'minimalism'. Microsoft have been practicing it for a while now, no doubt because there will be a new generation of designers among their ranks who worship at the altar of 'clean', 'pared down' graphic interfaces and will pour scorn on anyone who disagrees.There is a certain attraction to making things more simple to understand, shortening the period needed to make it navigable. The problem is, you can go too far. Microsoft are slowly learning this lesson with Windows 8. Simple is only good to the point that it becomes counter-productive. Hiding things so that they don't 'clutter' the interface surprisingly makes them more difficult to find - who would have guessed it?

The other manifestation of minimalism is that functionality is also pared down. Why allow the user to use a comprehensive set of tools when we can make their life so much better by taking some of them away? Again Microsoft have been doing this for a while but Google now seem to be following the same route. This is presumably because that same generation of designers who are trying to make their mark by doing something, anything, different to the previous lot which, for the moment is minimalism, work for them as well.

Back to maps. Google have (had) an excellent product in Google Maps. It was clear and clean and easy to use. Apparently not easy and clean enough though so, along with a number of Google products, they have revamped the graphic interface. They have now taken many of the unsightly buttons and hidden them. If the hidden buttons themselves were still too cluttered they culled them. It is now a guessing game trying to figure out how things work and, indeed, if they are still there. Functionality is now, apparently, 'Old School' so the ability to store maps offline has been banished to an arcane series of button presses known only to the cogniscenti. I have the deep suspicion it shouldn't be possible at all but a small group of the older guys have hidden it from the bright young things.

The main gripe I have with it is 'My Maps'. I have been using these for route planning and location marking for a while. I can sit in my office with my nice big computer monitor and plan things easily. I can then call up this information via Google Maps on my mobile phone without having to remember to do anything in advance. It is just there. I can look at my phone and see any of the growing number of maps I have saved on my computer in the office. Genius.

At least it was until the minimalists took over. The latest version of Google maps no longer allows this. You can still do it by opening your phone's browser and going in the back way (thanks again there Old Guys, keep up the good work, your day will come again) but it is nowhere near as convenient as it used to be. Why is this? What possible harm was it doing?

Anyway. I'm waiting for the old guys to form a posse and ambush the bright young things and put them in a room without a doorhandle. At least they will be able to appreciate the minimalism of it while they sit there in the gloom and slowly get the point.

Technological Progress

A while ago I ditched the whole business of building websites using HTML. I had bought software packages including good old HoTMetaL from way back when, and Expression Web and managed to tame them to the point where I could get a halfway decent website. However, the joys of nesting tables (look it up but include the term 'HTML' unless you want to get something in teak) paled somewhat and I decided that I needed a way of building websites that hid all the messy html stuff and allowed me to simply put things on the screen that looked right. I am more interested in using software than coding so when Moonfruit came along it seemed the answer to my prayers - and was, for a time at least.

Moonfruit uses a Flash based interface which allows sites to be built using their website in the web browser rather than software installed on the computer. I could lay things out on the page and nudge them to suit. I could upload images and they would be resized by the software rather than me having to painstakingly do it myself. This is what I had been waiting for. I could even let other have access to parts of the site to change themselves without forking out for the aforementioned software. Heaven.

There was one small problem. That same 'Flash' that allowed this to work had issues. Not everyone had adopted it so anyone looking at the websites on an Apple device didn't see what I saw. The same went for mobile phones, not a problem when everyone's phone had a screen the size of a postage stamp but these days everyone expects to surf the web on their phone even whilst driving. Even the devices that used Flash had their problems. As new versions of Flash have been brought out first Google Chrome and then Mozilla Firefox started to glitch. I found that Chrome wouldn't display YouTube videos, a little ironic as they own YouTube. Then browsers started missing out anything in bold type which left odd, unexplained gaps and caption-less photos all over my website. Then the layered images that I had used for backgrounds started to display areas of black behind them. I checked all of these things out on other computers just in case it was my video card on the fritz but it was consistently wrong. The only fix for this that I could find was to disable the latest version of the Flash player, and this worked, but other glitches then appeared to replace them. This was a big problem.

Then the Seventh Cavalry appeared in the form of HTML5 and there was the promise of a solution. Moonfruit responded. Realising that Flash was going to be dead in the water soon they started to rebuild their Sitemaker software retaining the friendly Flash interface but then converting everything to HTML5. They promised that they would upgrade everyone and even gave dates.

They have now stopped giving dates, they can't take the grief. After missing deadline after deadline they finally unveiled their new 'v6' software - but only for new websites. We longstanding established website owners were promised that we could migrate at a later date, whenever that was.

Eventually the big day came earlier this year and we were encouraged to convert our sites from v5 to v6. There were just a few issues though. Large chunks of functionality that we had rather got used to in v5 were not yet there and there was no guarantee that there ever would be. These included forms, blogs and membership and a whole lot of other things. So, not small chunks. Rather large chunks. In fact the sort of size chunks that meant that migration couldn't sensibly happen.

This is still ongoing. I can't update my websites because the effort may be completely wasted by me having to go elsewhere to build and host them. I can't have sites without member areas as that would make the whole business of being a member pointless. I just have to sit and wait and hope that something comes along to put me back to where I thought I was 18 months ago.

Technology apparently progresses backwards.

We're Off

Ah. There you go.

I hadn't even posted anything before Google obliged with a perfect example of what this blog will be about. Having put the bones of the blog together I tried to look at the site and got this:

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

• Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
• Provide the following error code.

bX-di21nx

This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologise for the inconvenience.

Thanks Google. Thanks a bunch. I am now going to have to wait until the technology sorts itself out before even the blog will work correctly!

Oh, and by the way I don't live in the same time zone as your servers, but surely you know that already? I get accurately targeted adverts popping up all the time spooking me but you can't seem to figure out my location?

By Way of Introduction

This is my new blog. Born out of the continuing frustration that results from doing anything that involves technology.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with technology. I love it. I embrace it. Unfortunately it seems to have a problem with me. The simplest, most straightforward requests are turned into a world of pain. The things that technology is supposed to offer don't materialise, or at least refuse to until they have run me ragged.

If you are frustrated by things that don't do what they are supposed to do, or no longer do what they used to do quite well, this blog is for you.

You are welcome to it.