TechnoFear

Or Millennial Angst!!

"Tony, I've fallen off my learning curve!" I frantically wrote to my Web Tutor recently. I'm sure I've fallen off more of the buggers than most folk have ever been on.

Laser, Laser, burning bright
Etch your photostatic shite.
So much dross and so much piss
From AUTOEXEC and CONFIG.SYS

Would Will have penned his awesome plays,
If half his nights and all his days
Were spent among the software texts,
Instead of doing what he did best?

Would Mozart too have stood the pace
Of learning MIDI interface?
Would Microsoft have made him better?
Or given us the first Lloyd Webber?

It's simple really. The reason most websites - no matter how whirly-birly - don't contain two interesting thoughts to rub together, is that their creators have burned out. Their pages soar like a skylark, but have a vocabulary to match.

Whatever spark the writers might once have had has long since gone...in the frantic rush to keep abreast of the latest application, program ...call it what you will.

Wherever the United States hestitate to drop bombs, they drop instead Coca Cola, Disney, and now Microsoft, the absolute jewel in the Imperial Crown.

"I see brother holding hand with brother, networking with MSN. I have a dream."
W Gates (With apologies to M L King.)

Last night, in a forlorn attempt to get Leo (for it is he) to give me some sound on Quake, I experimented with the Yamaha (for it is they) settings. Patiently I sat for over two hours while zipped-up drivers downloaded, only to find that Win98 has no unzipping feature. (Heh!)

Still quaking silently I stretched my legs then hit the sack, only to find this equinoctal morning that Leo had lost his voice completely - on everything.

OMyGod (OMG) - I thought. It's the MIDI/MAXI/ AUDIO/CODEC/.DRV/ MINI/PC/PCI/ TC/IP/TCP. I've fucked it.

But it wasn't. And I hadn't. Stretching my legs last night had pulled the speaker lead out of the computer. Simple.

End of technofear for one day? Not on your nellie, as we say in the UK. I did a quick inventory round the house and found that every single plate, cutlery and pan was dirty. Not mouldy, you understand - we do have some standards - just coated with the remains of some earlier creation.

Except the grill pan, which - because I only ever cook fish fingers in it, was only lightly dusted with yellow crumbs. And the fish fingers don't touch the bottom, anyway, but instead poise sizzingly on a grid, as they rush from frozen to charred.

And because it was Sunday, and the Equinox, I decided to serve them with Rogan Josh sauce, by Co-Op. Brown, cheap and delicious.

Words can hardly convey my cliches when I turned on the cooker and no gas came out. "Holy Gas Bill - I've been cut off!" I thought, instantly fearing jail, or worse. But no...my money had indeed run out, but there is a Ł2 credit feature built in to the meter, to protect babies and suchlike from pneumonia and starvation.

Never were Fish Fingers Rogan Josh so gratefully consumed!

But even that's not all. There's an ongoing learning situation with FrontPage98 - still not ready for you - interrupted all last week by Lernout and Hauspie VoiceXpress (Standard) an application I have no hesitation in recommending you not to buy.

Great for breaking the ice at parties, fabulous for hilarious emails to understanding friends, but for transcribing speech into type? Forget it. The advertised 95 percent accuracy is simply a lie, and someone should take them up for it. Here's possibly the best-known poem in the English language, by courtesy of VoiceXpress...

Mary had a little and,
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure which ago.

It followed her to school one day,
This was against the rule.
It made the children laugh and playing,
To see a lamb at school.

Now let's try the last sentence I typed before the poem...

The advertise 95% accuracy is simply alike, and someone should take our for it. He is possibly the best known problem the English language, by courtesy of Voice Xpress...

OK, I hear you saying...that's not three bad. But let me stress, that is after possibly thirty hours training the damn thing, patiently and laboriously correcting its every failure. Also, to achieve even this accuracy, I've got it set to minimum speed, which reduces the transcription to about half my typing rate.

Not recommended. Maybe with 256MB RAM things would be better, but the only stated requirement is 40MB.

But let Scott and I share possibly the best Voice Xpress blooper, when I was writing to him about a young man of my former acquaintance - a former student of mathematics, actually - who now wears the Queen's uniform.

"His a lamb stump adhere."

Can YOU decipher that? Answers in an email please. Best ones shown here soon.

And for some lovely writing and pictures, click here to visit Scott's site. "Quack" is especially recommended.