My Love Affair with Computers

You could say that I was never properly introduced to computers. At school we shared one between three and the other boys seemed to know them much better, negotiating them as they would girls at the school disco. As such, I hung back, dreading my turn. We'd bump teeth, I thought, step on each others toes.


It wasn't until my dad brought one home unannounced from God-knows-where (probably the same place he got my mountain bike or the VCR) that we got know one another. The Amstrad PC-1640 sat on the dining room table, eating actual floppy disks; sometimes it took two to get going and you had to pull a latch down over its mouth so it didn't spit them out.

My dad had no idea how to use it, but somehow it fell for my lines and showed me a rudimentary Paint programme and eventually a Bruce Lee video game, which I amazingly accepted as playable.



A year or so later, my uncle handed down his old Windows 3.1 laptop. And while I was initially impressed with its mobility, the feeling soon evaporated when he explained the battery and the power cable were both faulty. It still worked, mind you, but only when you kept your foot on its power cable.

So while I couldn't take it into school, I could swap its not-so-floppy disks with my friends. I traded a 'perfectly playable' Bruce Lee video game for some pixelated photos of Gillian Anderson, which loaded on my laptop's greyscale screen, one line at a time, coming into focus to reveal a frowning FBI agent in a trouser suit.

My network grew with the advent of a new PC - the Advent 'Astute', which ran Windows 95, CD-ROMs, like the Encarta Encyclopaedia, and the revelatory Internet. It was with this that my love of computers grew. I couldn't get enough. I ripped demo CDs from magazine covers, I clogged up the phone-line and ran up the bill. "You hang up," I said to the Internet. "No, it replied. "You hang up!". And I made what was probably the wisest investment of my life: a box of old .Net magazines from a car boot sale for just a pound. At the back of each issue was a section on how to code your own website. Now, 12 years on, I'm making a living doing just that.

We were never properly introduced, but computers, the Internet and that box of old magazines changed my life.

Talking-point pen

I spend most of my time at my computer. And now that I have push email on my phone, it's like I'm carrying around a baby monitor, constantly listening out for the gurgling of an inbox or the wailing of an unread RSS reader.

So it felt very strange indeed to shut down my computer, as I did last week, and sit at a desktop not cluttered with icons and folders but with pens and pencils and actual paper. I thought I'd revisit an old pastime by drawing a relatively new one - my guitar. I'd taken it up when I last eschewed technology, albeit not through choice, when our Internet connection went down at University. (I taught myself how to play 'I Can't Live (If Living Is Without You)' whilst waiting to be reconnected.)

And - do you know what? - it was pretty good! So I signed myself up for a life drawing drop-in session in Islington. "To draw," as I kept telling people. "Not to model!" Like anyone thought that was the case. But it wasn't until I got there that I realised how strange it was - not to be in a room with naked strangers (if anything, it was probably the best way to wean me off the Internet), but to be in a room with strangers altogether...

I work from home and for myself; I rarely have meetings with people I haven't Googled; and I've been with my girlfriend long enough to know all of her friends and for her to know all of mine. And yet there I was, in a room full of strangers, two of them completely undressed, not knowing a single soul.

For the most part it didn't matter. We sat there, scribbling away, trying not to look directly at the penis, as if it were the sun peeking out from a solar eclipse. Occasionally someone would hold up a pencil as if they were trying to block it out completely. But it was quiet and everyone got on with it.

But then the tutor called for a break. 'Oh no!' I thought. 'Chit-chat'. Thinking I could bypass the whole ordeal, I skipped out to the bathroom and stayed as long as I could without appearing to have an actual medical problem. But by the time I got back the students had paired up exactly. There must have been an odd number of attendees - and I was that odd number.
The tutor announced that we had ten minutes left of our break.
'How long is this break?!' I thought. I tried to fill it by alternately looking at my own sketches, which made me feel conceited; by looking at other people's, which made me feel nosy; or by looking at the models, who were now draped in sarongs, sipping coffee. That made me feel more like a pervert than when they were naked. And so I realised that I had no choice but to make conversation.

"That's an interesting pen," I heard one student remark to another. It was my way in, I thought. I'd mention the pen.
"Yeah, you squeeze it to control the flow of ink," replied the other. They were both student age of the conventional sense. Student students.
"That's an interesting pen!" I interjected. It was only when they turned to face me that I realised how close we were all sitting. We nearly bumped noses. There was no way I couldn't have overheard their conversation.
"Yeah," she went on, looking bemused. "You, er, squeeze it."
"Okay, that's time!" shouted the tutor, signalling the end of the break. I wasn't sure whether I was relieved that the agony of breaktime was over or disappointed that I hadn't moved beyond pen chat to redeem myself as a conversational virtuoso. I didn't get another chance. In fact, "that's an interesting pen," was the only thing I said all night. And - do you know what? - it wasn't even an interesting pen. It was a ball-point.

Luddite to lady

I've been using Twitter for about three years now and have never, in that time, been approached by anyone urging me to 'tweet'. In fact, I think the only conversations I've had on the topic have been with sceptics, urging me to stop. So, where this fear comes from - that one day soon 'Tweeps' all over the world will rise up and force us to open accounts and update them with the oft and ill quoted "I'm having a sandwich" line - is something of a mystery to me.

And, I think, there are two ways of dealing with mysteries; that is, dealing with that which we don't understand. You can, like the great mystery solvers - Holmes, Marple, Fletcher, Creek - attempt to unravel them. Or you can fear them, run and hide. Or really go for it - galvanise your fear into a pitchfork and torch-waving angry mob. Well, I don't much like crowds, so I'm going up the Jonathan Creek route with this one. And I'm taking a paddle.

I spent the early part of this weekend politely batting comments from a techno-sceptic on a number of topics, from records versus MP3s to e-book readers versus paperbacks. And I'll discuss them here, even though I don't think they're really versus debates.

But I think there's a word for the kind of person with whom I was debating and that's a prosophobe - someone who is afraid of progress. You could say that she was a luddite, a term that has come to mean an opponent of technological progress. It comes from the social movement of 19th century workmen, who destroyed laboursaving machinery and stood against the Industrial Revolution. But since the debate ended with her gently pulling out her iPod nano and not by flinging it across the floor in protest, I don't think that would be quite fair.

To be fair would be to say that even the luddites would find it difficult to stick to their principles in the 21st century. My prosophobic friend mourned the death of vinyl, but pulled an iPod out of her bag; she derided the Twittersphere in a Facebook status update; and I imagine she wants to take London off the Google Map over this Street View controversy.

As a luddite might realise, that's a lot to smash up. But a cure for what scares you, as a prosophobe, is to realise not that the new replaces the old but that it lives alongside it. Take, for example, the e-book reader versus the paperback debate.
"It's just ridiculous," she said. "What will people put on their shelves?"
"Well, books." I said. "You can have both."

Books are, as Stephen Fry reminds us, themselves a technology and one that many called, at their advent, the work of the devil. "They only went and taught people how to make e-book readers, didn't they?" I said.

As Fry puts it, "You don't throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don't abandon the past. The past co-exists."

And the future is forged by the curious, not by the fearful. The greatest mystery solvers weren't Holmes, Marple, Fletcher or even Creek. They were Darwin, Edison, Curie, Obama. And, if they were around today, I reckon, they'd be on Twitter. Obama is.

And, I shouldn't say this in the same breath, so am I! Follow me at: twitter.com/sansharma

Knowing meme, knowing you

Quick question, pop quiz fans: What do I have in common with Rick Astley, Snakes on a Plane and a golf club-wielding fat kid? No, it's not that we'd be terrible company on a long-haul flight (I may look like a terrorist in all my hirsuteness, but I couldn't hijack a second bag of peanuts).

The answer is, we're all subjects of Internet memes - a sort of web 2.0 inside joke, a catchphrase or concept that's spread quickly from person to person via the Internet.

The movie, Snakes on a Plane, inspired a raft of parodies, songs and fan fiction; YouTube made a reluctant star of the 'Star Wars kid' (now, sadly, under psychiatric care "for an indefinite amount of time"); and the recent surprise (though not undeserving) recipient of this year's Best Act Ever MTV award, Rick Astley, was the subject of a phenomenon called Rickrolling, whereby web surfers were tricked into watching the 1987 music video, "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Similarly, users of the social networking website, Facebook, might be mildly irritated to click the status updates of their friends, which are beginning to lead to my website. Mine changed last week to "San Sharma is sansharma.com"; it was followed by similar URL-toting updates from my girlfriend and now two of her colleagues. In the nicest way possible (and in a way that won't alarm my girlfriend), I'm viral! And my web statistics are beginning to show. Facebook is the top referrer, followed by Google, where one visitor found me with the query "massage parlours shropshire" (I'm on page 8 of the results, which says more about said visitor's appetite than it does my website).

Let's hope I don't befall the same fate as other Internet memettes (though I'd rather a Best Act Ever award than a lifetime of psychiatric care). On that note, I'll leave you with my favourite of the memes, viewed an estimated 1 billion times - ladies and gentlemen, the Star Wars Kid.

Facebook Chat: A poke too far?

My sister, Suman, is late to the party that is social networking. At 29, she graduated before Facebook became the big man on campus it is today and left high school while MySpace was still a twinkle in Tom Anderson's eye.

In the last month, she's joined both networks, muddled them up in her head and failed in her attempts to stay relevant by referring to each as MyFace. (I had to stop her from inviting friends to meet there. It was a conversation I never wanted to have with my sister.)

Just as Suman's getting to know Facebook (and her friends in a more intimate way than she imagined), I'm trying to distance myself from the social network that's costing UK business over £130m a day and 233 million hours of 'lost time' every month.

I'll be running for the hills when it rolls out its new instant messaging feature in the next couple of weeks. It's hitting some networks and the reviews are pretty good, but Facebook's already given me a second inbox to battle, not to mention another Wall to climb, and I'm terrified that I'll never keep up with friends, nor will I want to know that they're getting a sandwich, packing for their holidays or being surprised at the result of a football match, reality TV show or STD test.

It's hard enough trying to sneak onto Facebook without someone noticing that you haven't replied to their message ("oh, I haven't checked," doesn't really work). Now its new chat features promise to bring back into fashion a certain keyboard shortcut dance I used to perform when avoiding friends on instant messengers. (If I log on and then off immediately, you'll know what just happened...)

It's not too late for my sister, Suman - she's not yet hooked. However, by making Facebook a more real time experience, its developers are hoping session length will go through the roof. But it might just be the poke that pushes users, like me, over the edge.

In Jobs we trust

It's the age old dilemma: the secular world versus the spiritual; the things you can't touch and the things you can't stop touching. And this Friday, the conundrum continues, when Apple's long awaited iPhone lands in the UK - on Diwali.

I'd booked the day off work, picked out a traditional outfit, planned my route to the temple (casual shirt, hipster jeans, Central Line to the Regent Street Apple Store). I was all set to get in line and get an iPhone (at 6:02pm - its official launch time, inspired by Apple's O2 partnership), when my mum called.

"Don't forget Diwali on Friday," she said.

Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights. And although the iPhone boasts - amongst other things - a backlit touchscreen, queueing for one on Regent Street is not, apparently, an appropriate way to give thanks to God.

At £269, with a minimum 18 month contract, the iPhone is rather an appropriate way to give thanks to Steve Jobs, blue jeaned and turtle necked co-founder and CEO of Apple, who in September announced the iPhone's arrival in the UK.

"We can't wait to let UK customers get their hands on it," he said.

I can't wait either, Steve. But instead, at 6:02pm tonight, I'll be putting my hands together and celebrating the return of Lord Rama. I'll also be praying that there'll be iPhones in stock by the time I get to an Apple store on Saturday.

But why am I so blasphemingly excited?

Well, the iPhone is, to the mobile phone market, what the iPod is to MP3 players. Neither are the first, but both are quite easily the best - light years ahead of anything else - and clear solutions to the problems that have plagued consumers since computers could talk to peripherals.

For years, you've been able to synchronise your mobile phone with your computer - it's nothing new - but, honestly, who does it (without wincing)?

The software has been clunky, the hardware flimsy and the whole process of navigating your phone awkward and messy. Apple cuts through that predictable haze with a phone that's a joy to use (I know because I've used one), and built on the iPod/iTunes model that's served an unprecedented 119 million customers.

At its price, and worrying O2 lock in, the iPhone might take some time to reach those kind of sales. I don't doubt that we'll see a price drop in the next year (or an iPhone nano), but in the meantime, expect to see iPhone-flourishes in all new mobile phones, as manufacturers step up their game, as they have post iPod.

It looks like we can all give thanks to Jobs. So, this weekend, put your hands together, in your pocket or on your iPhone and have a Happy Diwali/iPhone Day.

• iPhone - [via Apple.com/uk]

Get ready for iPhone

Apple has its own 'Get ready for iPhone' guide, with advice on how to prepare your contacts, calendar, music and videos. In anticipation of tonight's UK launch, I've prepared my own pre-purchase to-do list.

'Finger tips'
Before you reach your grubby hands into your soon-to-be empty pockets tonight, make sure your fingers are worthy of the iPhone's gorgeous 3.5-inch touch screen display.

It takes at least fifteen seconds to wash your hands properly, which - according to a dedicated NHS hand washing website - is about the amount of time it takes to sing the 'Happy Birthday' song twice through. The site includes a 10 step guide, but if you can memorise the routine ("Step 6: backs of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked"), you might as well learn this.

Look the part
You might think that buying an iPhone is your ticket to the lifestyles of the rich and courageous. But remember, tonight's launch is for the first generation model, so expect to see some early adopters and hardcore Apple fan boys in the queue.

Plus, this isn't San Francisco.

So, stand out from the crowd of the great unwashed, the forum fanatics and - dare I say - the Windows users, and pick an outfit that's casual, clean and as close to Justin Long as you can manage. (Unless, of course, you're a girl, in which case wear nothing and make a queue of geeks very happy.)

Make a nest
You're going to want to play with your iPhone right away (make a few 'emergency calls only' before you activate it), but think about how you'll carry it from one curious admirer to another. Don't just stuff it into your jeans' pocket with your keys, redundant iPod nano and Wii controller.

If you're going to put it in your jeans, make sure you wash them first, inside out with the pockets reversed. Fortunately, the iPhone gets a winter launch here in the UK, so most punters will be wearing jackets to brave the queue. Pick one with a lined inner pocket and place your iPhone with its screen facing you.

15 minutes

Since the Stephen King/Rob Reiner chillfest, Misery (1990), having a "number one fan" is an altogether terrifying prospect. (A number two or three is fine.)

In the film, a novelist, played by James Caan, is rescued from a car accident in a blizzard, by a particularly fat Kathy Bates. Wait, it gets scarier...

It turns out she's his "number one fan" and has no intention of letting him go. She also lops off his feet with a hammer (don't click this link if you're squimish!).

It's no wonder then that I had cold feet (or any feet at all) when I agreed to meet one of my fans last week. ('One of' suggests there are more; 'one and only' may be closer to the truth.) She'd read my blog, saw that I'd moved to London and wanted to meet up.

Why the hell not? I thought.

Well, there was one prettyyy big reason why not:

• Kathy Bates.

But anyway, I chose to look beyond the Bates and found instead a very charming, not at all psychotic, PhD student.

And it got me thinking, perhaps prematurely, about the notion of fame (and the fifteen minutes of it promised us by Andy Warhol). I realise that it hasn't yet touched me in the same way that it did, say, Princess Diana, but it has sort of tickled me on the nose.

The PhD student knew only a persona, pixelated and preserved on this blog; a "true story of a single, metrosexual, twentysomething, British Indian male."

And while one fan does not a fan club make, I imagine it's just a matter of time before I'm shaving my head and checking into rehab, dangling a baby over a balcony ledge, or dying in a high speed car chase in Paris.

That's a lot to cram into my fifteen minutes.

SuperPoke!

When I was younger - maybe 13 - some kind, possibly sympathetic soul told me that when girls were into guys they just ignored them.

Imagine how I got on, all lanky limbs and awful hair, thinking that every girl I passed, eyes glued to the pavement, was secretly admiring me: tall and thin, ugly and assured.

God knows how else I would have made it through my teens.

But 10 years on and I'm beginning to seriously question that small piece of advice. It may have got me through my teens, but it sure as hell won't get me through my 20s.

If it were true then London loves me. In fact, by that logic, I got a whole lot of love at the pub last night. Indeed, it's a wonder I didn't get raped on the Tube home.

Now, of course, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to indicating your interest. Glances on the Tube are generally ill-advised, especially at night. But, ladies, when you get home, why not log on to Craigslist and post about your "missed connection", in the hope that Mr Right-Across-the-Carriage will reply.

Here's one from a few of weeks ago:

Victoria Line, Monday Evening, discussed Harry Potter

Going North on the Victoria Line, sitting across from you, talking to my friend about how we still haven't gone to King's Cross to have our pictures taken between Platforms 9 and 10. You said you bet we'd meet on the train again a week from now, and I still wouldn't have had my picture taken. I said I'd get it done the next day on my way to see the Tower of London.

I only realised later that I should have given you my number.

And you were right, I didn't go to King's Cross - I'm hoping to go with you!

Craigslist is just one way in which you can flirt online. There are, of course, countless other, more explicit ways - and I've already covered match.com's virtual winking feature - but we won't dwell on those sites that charge to do it. Because, frankly, it's pretty sad. I can say that because I've done it.

A more popular, kid-friendly way (though I wouldn't try it with kids) is Facebook's built-in poking device. With it, you can let your 'lover' know that they've been poked when they next log in.

Here's what I saw when I logged into Facebook tonight:

Pokes

You were poked by Meghan Vaughn.

poke back | remove poke

And when I clicked "poke back"?

Poke Meghan?

You are about to poke Meghan. She will be informed of this the next time she logs in.

Poke | Cancel

It's about as far removed from actual poking as you can get. If you've ever been poked by or even poked the person next to you on the Tube (and again, I'd advise against this), there is no option to "remove poke" nor is it wise to "poke back".

And now that Facebook's opened up to third-party applications there are even more ways to poke people. You can use Poke Pro! Super Poke! Party Poke! Pokey Poke! Edgar Allan Poke! The list is endless...

But despite all these options, the third-party application support, the AJAX controls, the JavaScript widgetry, even logging in to see that I've been poked in every conceivable way, I feel no closer to an actual physical connection than I did those years I spent being ignored by girls.

At least when one looked up it meant something. And if they ever poked back, I knew I was in.

Rock, roll and RSI

You know, it's funny - I've been working at my computer for almost two years and am suffering from repetitive strain injury only now, after spending just two days away from my computer.

The cause?

Guitar Hero for the Playstation 2.

If you've never played it before, I urge you - go out, get it, buy a Playstation if you need to (you can sell your real guitar for the cash), and say good bye to your social life.

It's the most fun you can have without leaving the house. I bet you'd love it.

I'd shake on that, but my hand is wrecked.

• Guitar Hero II

Powering down.

I am today simultaneously impressed and disappointed by modern technology.

I'm finally blogging from a coffee shop in Birmingham - here's me, looking a little worse for wear (and like I'm leaning on that guy's arse). But it took me some time to get here.

In what may have been an act of defiance, my phone switched itself off last night, when it's battery died and the whole thing powered down for the first time in ages.

It's like it was saying to me, "hey! Silent's not enough, buddy. I'm powering down."

This led to a series of panic attacks. What if someone needed to get in touch with me? What if someone died? Or, worse still, what if my other communication devices join forces with the phone, form some sort of union and go on strike!

Thinking that I ought to check the former before fearing the latter, I tried to give me mum a ring. But, lo and behold, her number was stored on my phone. My sister's too, and my best friend's.

Don't worry, I thought. I've got backup.

But, when you're standing on a train platform in England's second city, having your phonebook backed up online is really no use.

I needed to get inside and find some wi-fi. This shouldn't be too difficult, right? This is England's second city, after all.

Well, I don't know how they rank these things, but finding wi-fi was pretty difficult. And when I finally did, my MacBook dimmed and whirred, as if to say, "sorry boss, the phone was calling me a 'scab'," and powered down, it's battery dead. It had joined the strike, the aluminium encased bastard!

And so the last hour or so has been spent, scouting Birmingham for a power outlet. Starbucks didn't have one spare, neither did Costa, and security weren't best impressed when I stole power from a Coke machine in the Bullring (though the act itself was rather empowering).

So here I am now, having been thrown out of Europe's biggest shopping centre, sitting in the concourse between it and my train back to London. I'm powered-up and connected; I've Skyped my friends and family, they're all fine. But I'm terrified to check my iPod. If that powers down I've got a two and half hour journey in silence.

What will I do? Read?

Apple: "We need to talk."

Probably the best thing I've ever seen.

• Apple iPhone

The future's bright. The future's useless.

After two days of presentations and for the most part being asked "is television dead?", Emma and I decided to leave the 'Buzz Hall' of Cross Media Week's main conference building for the 'Tree House', and a line-up of speakers and presentations very much more alive.

'New Interfaces - How to interact with a connected world' presented the studies and developments of four scientists working in the field of advanced media interfaces.

The most impressive was John Underkoffler, inventor of g-speak gestural interface technology and advisor to Steven Spielberg. G-speak replaces a conventional computer mouse with a glove that allows the user to point, push, pull and grab objects within a 3D graphical user interface.

If John de Mol was right yesterday and "the meaning is in the use," what followed was impressive but mostly meaningless presentations. Dr. Emile Aarts from Philips Research Laboratories premiered LED technology that lit a room according to scenes in a film, placing the viewer in an immersive environment; a collaborative canvas on which two children could virtually paint together and thus, to quote Dr. Aarts, "be kept off the streets, and from smacking one another"; and, the most useless of all, LED fabric apparently best demonstrated by a soft cushion that bore a pink glowing heart.

Though I won't be running out to buy one of those, if Jo Reid from HP Labs gets her way school children will be running from creatures great and small as she subjects them to what she calls, "Virtual Experience Environments" - or what anyone else might call, "placing small children in horrifying situations." The technology allows schools to advance their pupils by allowing them to walk around existing environments, such as playgrounds and parks, and make them virtual by attaching audio and video feeds of scenes from the Discovery Channel: riots in Northern Ireland, hunting in the Savannah, the Second World War.

The future's bright, I thought to myself. It's also a little bit useless.

Google This

As part of the free service that www.statcounter.com provides I can see what keywords people are entering in Google to find my website. Here are some of my favourites:

• dork on bike
• booty consultant
• macho men
• solar generator briefcase retailers
• arnie-who is your daddy?
• swingers in telford
• shit stained
• black surfers
• crazy ass lights
• www.tiffanyrose.com

End of the Line

You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your mobile phone until it happens to you. At first there’s the sinking feeling that it’s not coming back, an anticipatory worry, building like the interference that interrupts a radio signal – pip-piP-pIP-PIP; then the silence, and a brief moment of liberation, when you can just about imagine a world without it; before the ringing sound of panic, blaring in your ear, like an inaudible melody of the names and numbers that you realise you’ve lost for good.

This happened to me yesterday, like some sort of comeuppance for actually engaging in any kind of physical exertion, on a golf course. I guess I swung too hard, and now, only a day later, I’m quickly realising what a handicap it is to be without my phone.

In that time I’ve been unable to cancel a meeting with a mate, respond to the outrageous advances of a lady friend and wish my big sister a Happy Birthday, leaving three people waiting, wondering and wanting to kill me, respectively. Worse still, sitting now on the train, I can’t tell the woman meeting me at the other end that I am more than one hour delayed.

I guess that’s two people wanting to kill me.

Message in a To: Box

Top Tip, readers: When sending a mass group e-mail, address it to yourself and put your contacts in the BCC box. That way, you get a copy (and everybody likes e-mail, even if from themselves) and the warring fractions of your social circle aren’t awkwardly placed together in the To: box, their e-mail addresses on display.

Have you ever glared at an impossibly impersonal group e-mail, its To: box a-brimming with addresses, and wondered why Timmy’s came before yours? Whether it would be inappropriate to e-mail your mate’s fit sister? Or who eatonsht@dku.edu is? (It’s Helen Thomas Eatons of Duke University, if you were wondering.)

I certainly had a few questions (and a few answers) upon receiving an ex-girlfriend’s change of address e-mail this morning. It seems she’s still with her boyfriend, whom she addressed first, and whom – it appears – has a surname worthy of ridicule. She’s also still in touch with her hot friends, whose e-mail addresses I now have, and with whom it has been a pleasure sharing a To: box.

Even more interesting was how fervently she added me to the list. I was the only recipient to appear thrice, ensuring the message’s delivery. Interesting especially since we don’t talk. Well, not since I wrote an extensive post about her on this here blog (see Postcard from the Camel's Mouth). Perhaps, knowing what a fan of Google I am, her switch to Gmail is an effort to get closer to me. Or perhaps I’m reading far too much into it. Perhaps, in fact, I should get back to work, before I find myself the only recipient of an angry e-mail from the boss.

Message from sansharma.com

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by Bylli Crayone (xxx@Yahoo.com) on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at 20:14:49

---

Location: Boston, MA USA

Body: Hi. I found your site from another fan of MJ who had your pic on her site. I thought to myself "Wow, he is cute!" I clicked the photo thinking it would make the photo bigger but instead brought me to your website. Very impressive. I think you are amazing and would love the opportunity to talk or even meet you.

Sincerly, An online Admirer.

~Bylli Crayone

www.BylliCrayone.com

write back please.

---

Lost in Transmission

You may remember the story of Dana, the girl from Ohio, the bunch of roses I sent and the ‘thank you’ that never was: an episode we at sansharma.com are calling ‘flowergate’ (conjures a lovely image, doesn’t it?). I had just as soon put the whole incident behind me when, late last night, my mobile beeped (or rather played a Bright Eyes song, as I have it set) with a message. It was Dana, clearly unfamiliar with the workings of the world clock, texting at what was already an unsociable hour in her time zone, and, evidently, the middle of night in mine.
“How are you doing” it read, sans punctuation. “Well I hope”

Having just woken up from a particularly harrowing dream (Vanessa Feltz again), my brain, booting in Safe Mode, struggled with the syntax of the short and punctuation-free message. I remembered how texting is far less of a common thing in America and assumed that, being unfamiliar with the system altogether, Dana had sent the message prematurely, failing to finish her sentence.
“Well I hope,” she may have intended to write, “you might forgive me for not thanking you sooner…”

And so in my semi-slumber I replied with what, in retrospect, might seem a remarkably rude message.
“If there was anything interesting in that message,” I wrote. “I didn’t get it,” thinking, of course, that something was lost in transmission. Then, alluding to the bunch of roses, “did you get a delivery recently?”

No sooner was my message delivered when hers suddenly made sense. “How are you doing?” it should have read, question mark and all. “Well, I hope.” Full stop. “Well, I hope.” Not, “well I hope...Liverpool win the bloody Champions League tomorrow night.” Needless to say, she did not reply to my message. I doubt even that she got my flowers. She would have said thanks, wouldn’t she? Well one would hope so…

Bebo Be Gone

If, like me, you shy from junk mail, avoid 'keep me informed' tick boxes, and savour actual human contact above all else, then you may have noted with annoyance, Bebo, the new online service that promises to keep you connected by synchronising address books and essentially replacing a basic procedure – and indeed, the smallest effort – with an automated process.

Bebo sends an e-mail on your behalf, asking the recipient to register for the service in order to notify the sender of your address, which by definition sounds rather pointless. That is until you realise the snowball effect of its marketing. The good people at Bebo make a simple website with plenty of ads, offer a basic service that people have thus far coped without, and use its members' contacts, whom are given freely, to target with relevant advertising.

You'll have noticed something untoward about the e-mail itself. The subject line is always "Updating my address book", and the message continues in the first person, assuming the identity of the sender, but fails to convey any sense of personality. Consider the tone of this e-mail from Piers Thompson, a guy I've not since high school:

Hi

Can you please enter your contact details in my address book. Click on the link below:

http://www.bebo.com/friends/8873160a734712708b21

After we are connected, in the future, any changes you make in your contact details will be sent to me.

Thanks for your help.

Piers

That's alright Piers. But it seems hardly necessary to synchronise our contact details when we've not spoken for what is approaching four years. I wonder if, when certain we have the correct addresses, we'll be more likely to write. And the same goes for the ex-girlfriends, colleagues, someone I met once in Liverpool and even my sister, whom I see often anyway, who have all BeBo'd me recently. To all of you I say 'no.' I will not join your cult.

Worse still is the service provided by www.sms.ac, who continually bully you into joining their mobile phone community, resorting to guilt by the third attempt:

"This is the third request. Should Ed Batlle give up on having you as a friend in his mobile friends network?"

That was actually a shame. I lost a good friend there.

Me, myself and i

There have been grumblings from those bastions of integrity, the Op-Ed columnists of the broadsheets, that, as Andrew Sullivan of The Times writes, "society is dead." We have all, with the aid of those pretty, white things, "retreated into the iWorld." Sullivan is not referring to the attractive WASP community of The O.C. but, with his clever inference of the lower case ‘I’, the Apple iPod – friend of the music lover; enemy, as the article suggests, of the regular human being. Yes, the portable music player, capable of storing 15,000 songs, has usurped the mobile phone, cable television and indeed the pocket watch of yesteryear to become the feared slayer of society.

"What was once an occasional musical diversion became a compulsive obsession," writes Sullivan. "Now I have my iTunes in my iMac for my iPod in my iWorld. It's Narcissus heaven: we've finally put the 'i' into Me." What would happen, you might wander, if we tried to take the 'i' out of me. Well, partial blindness, you might say. But just yesterday I became an accidental guinea pig in one such social experiment, when my iPod, damaged under the heavy foot of drunkenness, slept quiet in its dock, while I, in upper case, went about my day - not a wire from my ears, a hard drive in my pocket or a song in my heart. This is my story. iStory, if you will.

9:02am Walk from my flat to the office without the usual spring in my step. Feels less like a music video than usual. I sense a draught in my inner ears and the discordant music of a town waking up. Am also reminded that traffic lights make noise. This makes me laugh.

9:05am Arrive at the office and immediately say hi to co-worker, Pat, without having to fumble around for the pause button on my iPod. With nothing to do with my hands, and not wanting to grope Pat, I fumble all the same, and comment on how great her new hair looks. I do not start up iTunes and instead turn on the radio. It's the news. An Italian intelligence agent has died under US fire while escorting a freed hostage.

11:15am Leave office for meeting. Overhear what I suspect is a conversation about anal sex. Am tempted at this point to walk the rest of the way with my fingers in my ears. The conversation however recalls the Backstreet Boys' song, 'I Want it That Way', which plays in my head. Ordinarily, I would replace it with something more sophisticated. *Nsync perhaps. Instead, I enjoy the catchy hook and eyebrow raising lyrics. I attempt to raise an eyebrow, but can't, and board the train.

2:15pm Arrive in Leeds. The outward journey was pretty horrific. ('Silent Coach' my arse.) And with no music my mind wanders to food. Time however only allows for the purchase of lunch but not its consumption and so, rushing off to my meeting, I push the snack into my jacket. Its plastic packaging rustles whenever I shake hands and introductions are made all the more uncomfortable with a hummus wrap peering out from my pocket.

3:15pm Stomach rumbles throughout meeting. Someone asks what South Yorkshire will do when EU funding runs out. I think of the David Gray lyric, "what we gonna do/when the money runs out," but can't name the song or recall any other lyrics. I begin to dread the train journey back, and the frustration of being unable to locate the track in my iPod music library. Grrr...

4:45pm Train changes at Manchester Picadilly. With the few minutes that I have I cave and visit the Apple Store. The song is 'Nightblindness' from the album, White Ladder. And the daydeafness, finally, is lifted. I turn on, tune in and cop out. If society is dead, I think to myself, then this is its funeral music. Rest in peace, I say, and turn up the volume. Loud.