Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Talking to computers

June 12, 2005 at 11:28 pm | In yulelogStories | 4 Comments

On Thursday I installed Skype on my iBook and by Friday morning I was talking to my friend Betsy Burke in Florence, Italy, all via computer, all for free. The technology works well. Sort of. The problem lies in the interfaces: I simply shouted at my iBook, in the general direction of where I think the microphone is located, and cranked the built-in speakers up high enough so that I could hear. Ideally, I should of course have a headset with mike & earpiece, right? Except that Apple requires USB connectors, and to get a headset with those, I’d have to pay about CDN $80, according to the folks at CompuSmart. London Drugs doesn’t even bother getting them in, because they’re too pricey to sell.

This is something that drives me buggy about technology. It doesn’t work unproblematically across platforms, and it comes with built-in tariffs and barriers and drawbridges and moats. It’s full of crocodiles.

It’s all about what happens at the edges, the fringes, the places where two or three different sectors (or applications) meet — to agree or disagree.

It made me think of urban planning, …

…which in turn made me think of Shelley’s recent entry on Neighbourhood, which had these great photos of a racoon working hard to get its daily meal, which made me think of Betsy’s book, Hardly Working (which tackles environmental issues — yup, chick-lit crusaders for the environment, right on!), …

…which also made me think of a really brilliant cartoon Shelley’s entry included. It was drawn by Pippa, blogger AKMA’s very talented daughter, and it’s just terrific. (Hope Pippa doesn’t object to my reproducing it here….):

But now I’ll turn my reading briefly (for I’m tired and need to sleep, too) to Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (in German: Der Untergeher). Interesting to see, on the Amazon “look inside” feature, that the English translation has paragraphs — sort of like neighbourhoods, platforms, points where you can rest your brain before jumping on to the next idea. The German original has no page breaks, no paragraph breaks, no short sentences. It’s a bit like being shouted at, quietly. From the inside out.