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April 18, 2005

Computers Controlling Us

If you're a computer person like me, you'll be doing all sorts of things using it. Things like your personal accounts, your email, storing and organizing your music and photos. You are probably not using software for any of these tasks that is designed specifically for you. It's most probably you are using a package that millions of other people also use. And the chances of this package exactly fitting your needs are slim.

I see this all the time, and without even realising it, I often find myself altering the way I normally do things in real life, just to fit in with the way some piece of software works.

Here's an example. Microsoft Money. Before the ubiquitiveness, err ubiquitivity, hmm... before we all had the internet available all the time, I started putting all my accounts into MSMoney. It's a really good package (and all you Quicken users will have little choice but to use it soon as that package is being cancelled in the UK). But before automatic statement downloads, typing the details from credit card bills and bank statements every month into the computer was a really tedious task. So I wanted to reduce this work.

MSMoney works best with payees that are already in the system. So, the answer is to always shop at the same place. I've avoided buying things in unfamiliar shops and bought them locally at shops already in my system just to reduce my typing.

Data entry is also is faster if there are less transactions. So I made a rule to use cash for as many small purchases as possible. All well and good. Except that MSMoney also likes you to put categories like "food and drink", "Household Bill" etc for each item. Extrapolating the cash rule, I'd probably end up with everything bought by cash and then have no accountability, so what benefit would the package be giving me. So I've had to make sure that every category that I really wanted to track, like CDs for example, are bought on a card.

Tescos causes a huge problem though, as they sell everything. If you've spent £100, but some of it was clothes, some CDs, and the rest food, how do you remember one month back what the split was when all you have is one line on a credit card bill. You can't, you've got to keep your receipts and enter this manually. Or, you do a much easier thing, you go through the till twice :-)

I used to listen to music in a different way before computers. All my records and CDs used to be at home, and if I wanted to listen to one on the move then I'd just tape it and take a walkman. Now, I've got an MP3 player for travelling which stores about three CDs worth of music. You would think that that was better. The problem is that a huge amount of my music isn't digital, and my tape player is now consigned to the loft. Even worse, I've only gotten round to installing the software for transferring music to my player on my laptop. This means that I can only listen to digital music that is currently on my laptop. And as this is quite a small amount of music, I generally end up listening to the same music for weeks and weeks on end. I know I could fix this, but I never seem to get round to it.

My final example is a more positive one. Flickr. I'm storing all my digital photos on Flickr, which is a great site. As well as just allowing you to see your own photos, you can look at the public photos of other Flickr members. People like to show off their snaps, and once you get bitten by the bug, you want to try and produce interesting images too. Flickr even tells you how popular your picture is. So now I'm out and about with my camera in my pocket constantly looking for an image that will get a good reaction on Flickr. I'm pretty bemused however to find that a picture of my bicycle, which wasn't even taken for artistic reasons, is still way out in the lead as my most popular photos so far.

I've taken some interesting shots recently, and have encouraged my friends to do the same, and even though we don't see each other in real life much, we know what we're up to. We're also semi-competing to get the best artistic photos, and it's forcing us to look at the world in a different way. We're and enjoy challenge of sooting in the snow and rain, and looking carefully at each sunrise and sunset to gauge whether it'd make a good background on our PCs. Without Flickr I know I wouldn't be using my camera half much.

So computers are controlling me in many small ways, some good, some bad. They are even making me write more gibberish, like this article for example :-)

Posted by se71 at April 18, 2005 03:16 PM

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