Advent Thought 15

Very few products advertised as life-changing are truly that. But this tablet and I have been company for each other a few years now. This is my diary, my notebook, my social media accounts, my email and more.

The previous post, written largely on the tablet during a church service would previously have had to be transcribed from a notebook.

The knack, I believe, is to use labour saving devices to improve your quality of life; not simply to get more done.

If you get things done quicker you have more time to rest, hope, wait and pray. Which is what Advent is all about. Gaudete.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

I occasionally walk into glass doors. In one Nailsea church they open automatically to enter. But you have to press a button to leave. Clever. Stops children escaping. The price is a sore nose for the old and stupid such as me.

At Gloucester Services recently I noticed an older gentleman cursing that his hand drier wasn't working. Because he was holding his hands over a stainless steel waste-bin. Being generous, it looked a bit like the hand-driers of a few years back. He had not recognised the sleek air-blade driers on the wall. I gently assisted him without making him look a fool. After all, that will be me in a few years' time. If I haven't knocked myself senseless on doors.

I am delighted that justice appears to have been done for the family of Melanie Road, a teenager murdered in 1984. Her killer, Christopher Hampton, pleaded guilty after DNA evidence linked him to the crime. Hampton, now 64, will probably spend the rest of his life in prison.

In 1984 we were a decade from mobile phones being commonplace. No-one could have foreseen then that this unsolved murder would eventually be concluded with a swab from the mouth of Hampton's daughter in respect of an unrelated matter. We get cross with progress but forget what benefits it brings.

Take away those years of technology and a wise biblical author once wrote that we do not know what tomorrow might bring. We don't. But they added that we should not worry about it. Well, not if we are living innocently and righteously. But if you left DNA evidence at a crime scene 30 years ago it might be appropriate to be worried right now.

Thought for the Day

As delivered just now at BBC Radio Bristol:

It's St Jude's day today. Based on one of the final lines of his letter, 'Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire to save them...' he is called the patron saint of lost causes.

Are libraries becoming a lost cause? Not enough of us using them.

I recall the excitement I felt as a child when I discovered books. Matched by the wonder of being able to go and borrow three at a time from Selly Oak library, to read as quickly as I wanted. Jennings the schoolboy. The adventures of Biggles the aviator. Summer holidays' stories Swallows and Amazons or Coot Club.

In those days buying and owning books was not the family habit. The only books on our shelves at home were reference books.

I used to work as a writer. One day a week I would be at the library researching. Not yet was all information in the world available from my mobile phone - in those days the click of a mouse would have sounded like some weird magic spell.

E-readers, tablets and other devices have replaced books. I can't easily buy my wife a book for Christmas. She reads electronically so I don't keep up with what she has read.

Maybe book-libraries are disappearing, relics of a by-gone age along with old-fashioned pubs where you simply drink and the sort of churches that smell of Evensong and pigeon.

But the surviving pubs learned to do food and live sport. Growing churches are more guitar than organ. If libraries are information-exchange centres maybe it's not all about books. My local library is popular for internet access.

We don't quite need St Jude yet. But we have him on stand-by.

Quote of the Day

1092. You're worse off relying on misleading information than on not having any information at all. If you give a pilot an altimeter that is sometimes defective he will crash his plane. Give him nothing and he will look out the window. Technology is only safe if it is flawless.
(John Lanchester, Whoops! quoting Nassim Taleb)

What To Do Next?

I've Never Seen Star Wars. Marcus Brigstocke's Radio 4 programme introduces celebrities to experiences they have never had and asks them to rate them.

I recently came across an article Richard Osman (the boffin on Pointless) wrote in The Guardian. It was a smart deconstruction of the time commitment necessary to follow the advice of the '...100 X to do before you die' format.

To cut a longish story shortish - you can't. I have wondered before if it is a singularly middle-class developed-world expectation that every good thing in the world, be it painting, park or panorama, is only there for me to see and no other purpose. As natural resources that enable travel become fewer and fewer I need to jettison my expectation that I could see everything. The Golden Gate Bridge and Sydney Opera House can manage without my custom.

Osman looked at the time necessary, let alone the expense, to read all the books, see all the boxed-set TV series and movies, eat at all the restaurants and visit the galleries and concluded that there would be no time to do anything ordinary.

A while back I developed the rule of cyclical proficiency - you can't get better at one skill without getting worse at another. So this last year I read a good number of books, better than average, but I seemed to be constantly behind with the newspapers and didn't see enough films.

So as a thought for the start of the year may I encourage the skill of selection. Can you decide on one area where you might become more engrossed this year? And work out the cost. What will have to have less time devoted to it in order to compensate? One of the best-read people I know has no TV in her house. Another manages to blot out all around her in order to be lost in a book for a couple of hours. Chaos may reign in her household but she will not be moved.

The alternative is to continue to be a massive generalist, in which case there will often be 'Did you see?' Or 'Have you read?' conversations where your answer is negative. And this can feel bad if everyone else has seen Gravity3D and you haven't, or read The Da Vinci Code or seen 'that' clip on YouTube.

A Radio Bristol presenter recently announced that he had just seen The Sound of Music for the first time. He followed this up by saying that he had, really, never seen Star Wars. He managed it without shame which was cool.

I find that the lot of a parish priest is to be a generalist. When you meet someone new and they tell you what they do for a living it is helpful to be able to grasp the next question to ask and to discuss their life with some sense of being in on their secret a little bit.

All this means that the skill of selecting, from the huge range of human experience on offer, which ones you cannot afford to overlook, is a peculiarly third millennium one. There comes a time when you need to know about Harry Potter, The Sopranos and One Day I am sure. But when? Tough call.

January 2nd

Good morning. How things change. New to my life last year is a tablet which, along with the wi-fi, means that on a slow day, or a day off or holiday, I can sit in bed with a cup of coffee and:

• Listen to BBC Radio Bristol and get involved via Twitter or Facebook.
• Wish friends a happy birthday.
• Check the news headlines online.
• Check my things-to-do list and diary.
• Compose a blog post.

There are certainly ways in which life is getting worse for some people but progress in technology is time-saving, relaxing and brilliant. Thanks to the people who work in that industry.

One of the things about labour-saving devices is the temptation to use them to over-commit our labour. When we first got a dish-washer we made a decision to spend a few minutes continuing to sit after every meal, using the time we now saved to relax with a coffee. The trouble with stretching your labour when you have a labour-saving device is that the stress and tension caused when the device breaks down is greater than the stress and tension you used to experience doing without it. Things have changed and dish-washers are pretty normal and reliable now. The psychology of their ownership is that you live your life expecting it to be there. The post-prandial chin-wag stopped.

But it is important to remember that if you fill all time saved with extra labour you will be unable to deliver if your time-saving equipment malfunctions. Embrace it gently.

I'd better get up. Not because I need to but because I am hungry and you can't, yet, heat a croissant in an iPad.

Progress

I probably follow too much the devices and desires of my own heart but this post is the first one on a desired device. Yes dear readers, Mrs T and I have joined the world of hand-held, portable device owners. I think, for me, I am not an early adopter but neither am I last in. The thing what flipped me from want to need was the amount of paper I needed to print off and take to the Church Council meeting last Monday. We had one discussion which required us to be armed with a thirty-five page booklet of diocesan guidelines. Whilst I am usually pretty content to leave details to others who are more interested in chasing down intricacies, on this occasion I felt left out. So when Mrs T announced that her company was going to take four weeks to purchase her a new laptop and set it up in order for her to be able to do her job she said she was going to get an iPad. It seems a bit daft to have to spend almost your entire week's wages on a machine to enable you to do your job but I am an interested observer of her working life and don't get involved at that level or I'd go madder. So anyway, to cut a long story by a very small amount, I told her to get two. So here we are. Fun aren't they?

Enjoying the battle between Apple and Google spell-checkers on how to spell iPad. I can either have it underlined in red or highlighted in yellow, until I press 'ignore' twice.

Also finding it hard to label posts. Something glitchy going on there.

Unintrusive

No messages. I've been out of the house for four hours on a work day and there are no messages when I get back. A moment please. Thank you.

The first few years in this job 1984-1992 would have seen at least three or maybe more mesages on the answerphone (not called voicemail in those days) if I had vacated my study for any length of time.

Non-intrusive communication of messaging, email, tweets and texts has come along and, wait for it, made life easier. Moments spent in the dentist's waiting room, as I have just done, can be used to reply to messages rather than them stacking up for my return home. A quick question can be answered as I walk down the street.

And that is good. We get uptight about our email inbox and our spam but forget to get pleased about what has got better. Life has. Just a bit. Rejoice.

Disappointment

I haven't had huge amounts of disappointment in my life. If I told you some of them you'd laugh at how trivial they were. They might have been life-changing - failing a football trial for instance - but terribly unimportant in the scheme of things.

Now here's a ridiculous one. In about 1982, in the days when video recording was out of my price range and the internet wasn't a word, I had two small children and a busy college life training for the ministry. One Saturday evening Mrs T and the small children had gone off to visit grand-parents and I had finished my work. I was preparing to watch a TV programme of a gig by my favourite band of the seventies, Genesis.

Being somewhat guilty about this space I decided to hoover the house before settling down. I ran the hoover into the tele and one of the two items broke. Sadly not the hoover. No catch up TV or iplayer. No-one else had recorded it.

My disappointment lasted, on and off, nearly thirty years until just now when I realised that I could probably find that programme on YouTube. I could. I did. It was good.

Who knew thirty years of hurt was so easy to fix? It's not quite meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two the same, but if something has gone wrong maybe in time we'll figure out a way to fix it that you couldn't possibly imagine. Cryogenics anyone?

The other lesson of course is that if you have something good coming up don't do anything to jeopardise it. Wait with a beer, not a hoover.

Amazing Flexibility

I was sitting on a bench outside Holy Trinity Church whilst waiting for something else to happen and my twelve year old self sat down next to me for a chat. This happens from time to time.

The train of thought had begun a few hours earlier when a candidate just back from a Bishop's selection conference for the ministry had been chatting to me about the constant stream of texts from home which had arrived while she was there. Encouraging and yet also, in a strange way, distracting.

I went to my Selection Conference at the same place as her in 1979. I queued at the telephone kiosk for a once-a-night call home.

My twelve year old self is interested that I appear to be making words appear on a screen. I explain that I am updating a web-site using a Nokia x6 mobile phone. Then I have to explain what a mobile phone is, what a web-site is, who Nokia are and, because I was quite dumb aged twelve, what updating means.

Can you believe how much we have done since 1967? My twelve year old self would have no idea what half the things on my desk today do. As inaccessible as the uses of his grandfather's woodworking tools, which were from a previous century and sat on a work bench in neat order.

A moment's pause for thought to remember to stop taking things for granted.

Sony e-Reader 2

I blogged a few months back about problems with Mrs Mustard's portable electronic reading device, the Sony e-Reader. Read it here before this post will make sense.

So she gave it to our friend M (I won't print his name because he will end up swamped) in the knowledge that he would be the sort of person who would love fiddling about with it and since it was allegedly a write-off he could do no harm.

Well the lovely M diagnosed the precise fault we had reckoned - a dodgy on/off switch rocker or screw or something (I have no idea about the terms here) - and returned the device in perfect working order within a short period of time for the price of simply thank you and we owe him a favour.

I still think asking £176 minimum for such a repair is a con of the highest order and do not advocate anyone else risk their money, but I am pleased Mrs M is happy again and clicking away before lights out.

The Sony E-Reader

In order to take enough books on holiday without bursting her hand luggage, Mrs M purchased a Sony e-Reader last year. I warned that her holiday reading would be devastated by dropping the device in the pool, whereas my book would dry out by the next day and in the meantime I could start another. 'Technophobe' she chanted.

She failed to drop the device in the pool and enjoyed reading on holiday last year and this. 117 free books came her way as a bonus. Shortly after returning from holiday the on/off switch of the Reader began to feel a little strange, then loose and then stopped working altogether. A minor fault but annoyingly two months out of warranty.

She contacted Sony who charge £176 for all e-Reader repairs. This compares to the current £179 cost of a new device. 'Blow that for a game of soldiers' she would have said if she said that sort of thing and took the Reader back to John (never knowingly undersold) Lewis. 'Ah' said a helpful, assistant. 'We probably could fix that easily but Sony won't release their parts to us so you have to send it back to them.'

So, dear Sony, I am advising my friends, family and lurkers not to buy one of your products and to purchase a different sort of electronic reading system. They tell me Amazon's Kindles are OK and so are i-pads. Hope you don't mind.

Security

I have had some calls from Orange over the last few days since I upgraded my phone. All these calls have begun with 'Is that Mrs ...' I was a little paranoid at first that the truth was getting out but call centre operatives rarely hear the first words uttered by the 'phone answerer so I forgive them. I am often tempted to say 'Yes' and see what happens.

So many years ago I have lost count, Mrs Mustard's mobile phone became mine when she was given a work one to use. We have never changed the contract details and she continues to pay the bill, bless.

All the operatives have asked when Mrs M might be in so they can ask her a security question. My explanation that she is never in has not put them off and they have continued to call at regular intervals at the specific time I have explained she is not available. It doesn't appear to have crossed their minds that she may be buried under the fireplace.

This afternoon I was asked if the account had been taken out for me and I said that it had. No secret that, after all. 'Then I must ask you a security question,' said the bubbly lass on the other end of the call. 'What sort of phone is it you have upgraded to?'

This was a terribly baffling security question but I did what any self-respecting 'phone thief would have done and LOOKED AT IT.

'It's a Nokia X6,' I said.

She complemented me on having a lovely phone and proceeded to try and sell me the insurance I had declined on upgrading because my bank account already includes free phone insurance as does something else I can't remember.

Curse this demanding security everywhere.

Learning Methods

As a group of us sat in my conservatory looking at garden birds the other day the conversation came round to how to tell a dunnock (hedge sparrow) from a house sparrow. I (because sadly I know this) explained the slightly greyer neck and head colouring. I pointed out the behavioural differences that led dunnocks to ground feed and house sparrows to prefer the hanging feeders. It's a bit complex because house sparrows will ground feed but dunnocks will not go on bird feeders full of nuts or seeds in any circumstances.

I pointed out a few examples. My friend said, 'I'll never forget that.'

If you like learning by show and tell you do tend to retain things taught that way rather well. Next time you see a dunnock you can replay the lesson, as it were, as an internal DVD and make the distinction.

It works for me too. Whist I enjoy the general raising of knowledge you get from lectures or books, when it comes to learning a new technique I need the demonstration, one-to-one. I am not particularly a technophobe but don't find it easy to teach myself new devices and software from manuals. On-screen tutorials are a little better. YouTube is currently raising my game in blues piano playing several fold.

My greatest advances in computer knowledge were made 1992-1997 at the hands of the wonderful Kelvin and Pete, two techies with a great bedside manner. The things they showed me I learned. Kelvin's particular skill was never to touch the mouse of his pupil. Everything that needed to be done you had to do yourself. He was very patient.

I am quite proud and smug when I manage to, for instance, load my digital camera pictures on to the computer. It took me a while to read the manual, load some software and then learn to use it.

But if someone had shown me. Ah well. The peril of working home alone.

New for the Noughties 4

Well I had to get to it eventually. New social media, that's what. In 2000 I was only eleven years into owning a computer at all and had had a mobile phone and email for, say, five years max. Who would have thought in 2010 I could stay in constant touch with what my friends are up to, moment by moment at the click of a mouse.

The question being discussed amongst social-media-savvie clergy right now is whether someone is going to tweet from their Christmas service live. What would you have made of that sentence in 1999?

An interesting portion of Christmas spending this year is on downloads of gimmicky applications for iPhones. Have some virtual bubble wrap to virtually pop. Have a pint to virtually drink. Go on, it tips if you tip your phone. Facebook has virtual gifts for birthdays and anniversaries. I love you so much I sent you nothing real.

I don't mean to sound critical. I'm in this, although not into farming, Scrabble or Bejewelled in the way some of my friends seem to be. But relationally it is fascinating. On one level all this is a new land which people are colonising. On another all the rules, customs and cultural habits are up for grabs and observing the development of the Charter is exciting. It's a cross between a gold rush and a missionary journey.

And we're all (those of us who are getting into this) learning to speak in a new language of mini-ads to draw attention to longer posts, or simply trying to say it in 140 characters or fewer. New decade; new skills.

Fantastic privilege to have lived through this precise fifty-four years, but this last ten especially.

5 in 1

Sorry there are so many numbers in the titles lately but I wanted to say that I just noticed my dishwasher tabs are no longer 4 in 1, but 5 in 1. Is this the same technology that has led to my razor blades now having three edges (and even that is seen as old fashioned; four is for real men)?

Soon my dishwasher tabs will pop round for tea, advise on wine selection, make the coffee, share the mints they brought and then head off and do six unmentionable things to my dirty dishes. Odds of 10-1 on that.