It's the first of June already!
Monday, June 1st, 2009 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanA pinch and a punch; it’s the first of the month.
Five months down and seven to go; how did that happen? I have only just got used to thinking of it as the 21st century and the decade is almost up. It doesn’t seem that long ago when the year 2000 was an impossibly distant date and I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like. And here we are nearly ten years past it and apart from mobile phones and the internet; it is pretty much the same place as it ever was. The music is worse, everything that was good for you is now bad for you and flying cars and jet packs have failed to materialise, but other than that I don’t think it’s significantly different to when I were a lad.
Last night at the pub, we tinkered with our new GPS gadget for the first time. I think I can say with a degree of confidence that it is not the most intuitive operating system that I have ever seen and it we were not helped by the fact that the manufacturers have seen fit to include operating instructions for models other than the one we bought. Have they highlighted them so we can ignore them? No, they have not. Have they written the manual so that it tells you the model the feature works with before it goes into detail? No they have not. To that end we spent ages getting cross with each other trying to set features we hadn’t got against instructions that were irrelevant. Of course, it would have helped if we had just allowed each other to read the booklet and play with the gadget uninterrupted, but hey, it’s a shiny new toy. I shall have to investigate downloading maps to use with it – at the moment we get an overview of the UK and North West Europe with the motorways drawn in. That’s probably of more use when you are at about the same distance as the satellites themselves, rather than in a beer garden.
Thinking about it, that’s one thing they didn’t have when I was a kid, but the principles of poor manual drafting haven’t changed in an age.
Five months down and seven to go; how did that happen? I have only just got used to thinking of it as the 21st century and the decade is almost up. It doesn’t seem that long ago when the year 2000 was an impossibly distant date and I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like. And here we are nearly ten years past it and apart from mobile phones and the internet; it is pretty much the same place as it ever was. The music is worse, everything that was good for you is now bad for you and flying cars and jet packs have failed to materialise, but other than that I don’t think it’s significantly different to when I were a lad.
Last night at the pub, we tinkered with our new GPS gadget for the first time. I think I can say with a degree of confidence that it is not the most intuitive operating system that I have ever seen and it we were not helped by the fact that the manufacturers have seen fit to include operating instructions for models other than the one we bought. Have they highlighted them so we can ignore them? No, they have not. Have they written the manual so that it tells you the model the feature works with before it goes into detail? No they have not. To that end we spent ages getting cross with each other trying to set features we hadn’t got against instructions that were irrelevant. Of course, it would have helped if we had just allowed each other to read the booklet and play with the gadget uninterrupted, but hey, it’s a shiny new toy. I shall have to investigate downloading maps to use with it – at the moment we get an overview of the UK and North West Europe with the motorways drawn in. That’s probably of more use when you are at about the same distance as the satellites themselves, rather than in a beer garden.
Thinking about it, that’s one thing they didn’t have when I was a kid, but the principles of poor manual drafting haven’t changed in an age.