Computer Creep

Most people who use their com­puter too much find them­selves doing silly com­put­ery things when the com­puter is nowhere in sight - glanc­ing at the top right hand corner of a page in a mag­a­zine or book to find out what time it is being the most common exam­ple, I imagine.

This morn­ing in the shower, I heard some­thing on the radio and thought, ‘Oh, I must remem­ber that!’¹ and at the same time my left hand formed the shape required to hit Shift+Ctrl+S, which is the com­mand key com­bi­na­tion I use to launch the del.​icio.us Fire­fox exten­sion.

In the future, this will, of course, be a com­pletely rea­son­able response. The Spinex 9000 OmniLog­Puter embed­ded beneath the skin on the back of my neck will respond to such a ges­ture by auto­mat­i­cally scan­ning my recent thoughts, link­ing the desire to remem­ber to the time­coded BBC Radio 4 stream, record­ing the audio snip­pet in ques­tion and its asso­ci­ated URLs, adding a huge array of meta­data, and plac­ing a new item in a queue for later review so that I can choose to post to either my pri­vate todo list or my public MegaWe­bLife­WorkEn­ter­tain­ment­Fil­ter­Log (which will be called Submit Response for nos­tal­gic reasons).

Just now, though, it is a sign that I really need to get out more.

1 - Lack­ing both an embed­ded Spinex 9000 OmniLog­Puter and a work­ing short term memory, I’ve for­got­ten what it is I wanted to remem­ber. ↩

Posted at 12pm on 04/08/05 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: future, ideas, technology