My Binary Life

Someone was rant­ing on the radio today. That’s not unusual, of course. But what caught my atten­tion was the sub­ject of the rant. “I blame com­put­ers,” the ranter said. “It’s all this TV and video games and com­put­ers that’s ruin­ing the kids. There’s no creativity.”

And that got me thinking.

First of all, full dis­clo­sure: I’m a geek. Specifically I’m a Mac geek. I love me some com­put­ers. And I firmly believe that my com­puter is a tool that makes me more cre­ative. When it’s not com­pletely wast­ing my time. God knows I’ve spent many an hour tweak­ing my con­fig­u­ra­tion  and search­ing for a bet­ter way to do what­ever I should be doing and devel­op­ing intri­cate sys­tems for man­ag­ing my tasks and gen­er­ally pro­cras­ti­nat­ing with the full aid and com­fort of my com­puter. And that’s the thing: if you want to waste time, your com­puter is the ulti­mate enabler.

But when you want to get things done, the com­puter is your best friend. I have used mine to man­age my writ­ing, make my pho­tos look AMAZING, pro­duce music and make a mul­ti­tude of other cre­ative endeav­ors pos­si­ble. I update my blog, post pic­tures on the web, dis­trib­ute my music and keep up with friends all over the world thanks to my com­puter and a ridicu­lously high speed inter­net connection.

I frankly don’t know what I’d do with­out com­put­ers. Or how I lived with­out them.

I can actu­ally remem­ber life before com­put­ers. My baby sis­ter, who just turned seven, has never lived with­out one. She was a cou­ple years old when she first crawled into the com­puter chair and started bang­ing on the key­board. By the time she was four she would announce that she needed to check her email; and then she would crawl into the com­puter chair and bang away on the keyboard.

This year I set her up with her own email address (linked to my par­ents’ address for safety, of course). It’s a riot to get an occa­sional email from her. They almost always end with “The End” fol­lowed by a P.S.

My first expe­ri­ence with a com­puter was in mid­dle school, on the Tandy TRS80. Or, as it was lov­ingly dubbed by many, the Trash80. There was a game called Hot Dog Stand, a glo­ri­ous text based adven­ture in com­merce. The idea was you ran a vir­tual hot dog busi­ness, and you had to learn Useful Math Skills in order to make your busi­ness suc­ceed. If you didn’t prop­erly imple­ment the Useful Math Skills, your Hot Dog Stand went bank­rupt and you lost. Losing looked some­thing like this:

> You have no more hot dogs.
> _


Don’t even get me started on Oregon Trail. That game was stress­ful. It was a text based adven­ture that pit­ted your knowl­edge of his­tory against the power of the nat­ural ele­ments. At stake: the VERY LIVES of your trav­el­ing com­pan­ions. Talk about putting some pres­sure on a kid. Losing Oregon Trail was a very trau­matic expe­ri­ence; the com­puter cer­tainly didn’t break the news easily:

> Your party froze to death.
> _

We also learned some basic pro­gram­ming. And by basic I mean BASIC. It was amaz­ing to me that I could put together lit­er­ally tens of lines of code to do things like mul­ti­ply 24 by 24. Or have the com­puter type out my name ad infini­tum. I wrote killer apps, let me tell you. Witness the code genius that freaked the screen out on a reg­u­lar basis:

> 1 Print Timothy is awesome.
> 2 GoTo 1
> Timothy is awesome.
> Timothy is awesome.
> Timothy is awesome.

And so on.

It was at our local pub­lic library that I truly fell in love with tech­nol­ogy. It was an Apple IIGS, com­plete with glo­ri­ous 256 color dis­play, 1 MEGAbyte of RAM and the power of 16 bit pro­cess­ing. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know is that I could play a text based adven­ture that also HAD PICTURES AND SOUND! The game was Swiss Family Robinson, which was also one of my favorite books, not to men­tion the 5,000 or so times that my sis­ters and I had watched the old Disney movie.

Oh, that game was truly amaz­ing. Not only did it show you pic­tures AND describe your sur­round­ings, you could move around the game USING THE ARROW KEYS on the key­board. As you moved about, the pic­tures might change to give you clues about what you should do next. Of course some­times it was hard to know what the right move would be.

> Look West.
> You see a bear.
> Look East.
> There is a tree with low hanging limbs.
> A snake is coiled around the lowest branch.
> Run North.
> The ocean is to the North.
> The bear has noticed you. He looks hungry.
> Shoot bear.
> You don’t have a gun.
> Pick up gun.
> There isn’t a gun here.
> Make friends with bear.
> The bear doesn’t want to be friends.
> Freak out.
> I don’t understand “Freak out.”
> Run.
> Run where?
> Run South.
> The bear has eaten you.
> _


Of course, you could always try again. And again. And again. Our library had a one hour limit on com­puter usage, but I’d always hope and pray there wouldn’t be any­one wait­ing in line so I could try JUST ONE MORE TIME. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever got to the end of that game. But I sure had a good time trying.

In between rounds of Swiss Family Robinson, I explored the Apple IIGS sys­tem soft­ware. The graph­i­cal user inter­face fas­ci­nated me. I was intrigued that you could click on these lit­tle pic­tures and open up new win­dows with more lit­tle pic­tures in them; and some­how all of this rep­re­sented knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion – stored in that lit­tle beige box. I really took a lik­ing to the thing. And I became the library’s de facto IT depart­ment as a result.

Which, it turns out, is kinda the story of my life. I don’t know how many calls a week I get from fam­ily and friends ask­ing me a ques­tion or want­ing me to “come over and take a look.” And I’ve devel­oped a bit of a mantra that has become an almost auto­matic response when I get those calls. It’s like a scripted dialogue:

Them: Standard com­puter related ques­tion. (I half lis­ten to this part of the con­ver­sa­tion. Seriously, I’m on autopi­lot for the major­ity of these calls.)

Me: Are you using a Mac or a PC.

Them: PC.

Me: This wouldn’t hap­pen if you had a Mac.

If they ARE using a Mac the conversation’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent at this point.

Them: Mac.

Me: That’s odd. Have you tried rebooting.

Them: No.

Me: Why don’t you reboot the com­puter for me.

Them: Okay. (Sound of the famous BONG in the back­ground as the Mac reboots.)

Them: Okay. It’s com­ing up now.

Me: Okay. Now try to do what­ever it was you said you were doing when you had the problem.

Them: Okay. Just a sec­ond. Wait, wait. Oh. Wow. It’s work­ing now.

Me: Cool. Talk to you later.

This may hap­pen mul­ti­ple times in the day. With the same per­son. And every time I ask if they’ve rebooted, the answer will be no.

Here’s the thing about the reboot: some­times it really does fix an actual com­puter prob­lem. But, more often than not, the reboot is for the user, not the com­puter. Rebooting makes the user I’m talk­ing to slow down, retrace their steps and do the task the right way. It’s unbe­liev­able how many times the per­son on the other end of the phone will say, “Oh. I see what I did wrong!” when I have them go through this process.

I hear a lot of peo­ple com­plain about com­put­ers. Many see them as annoy­ances, how­ever nec­es­sary they might be. Some see them as unnec­es­sary gad­getry that stands in the way of get­ting any real work done. And oth­ers, like the ranter I heard this morn­ing, blame them for the down­fall of west­ern civilization.

Me, I think com­put­ers are as use­ful as you let them be. I hap­pen to love mine. Whether I want to get things done or just kill some time, chances are I’ll be using a com­puter to accom­plish either goal.