Basket Case?

We've all heard the classic IT support helpline recording of the guy who thought his mouse was a parmesan grater, and who could forget the young woman who couldn't understand why her laptop wouldn't function underwater? Well this week saw the addition of yet another wondrous entry to the tech support hall of fame. The call starts off sounding fairly ordinary, the caller explains that he's having a problem with email. The support engineer goes through the usual questions, then things start to get weird. After trying without much success to find out what email client the caller is using, the technician starts explaining the steps to find out. As the call transpires, and the caller is unable to carry out the clicks, double clicks and keystrokes the technician describes, it gradually becomes clear that the caller's computer doesn't have a mouse, keyboard or monitor attached. Long story short it turns out it wasn't a computer at all, but a crate of Brazilian mandarin oranges.

They Know Not What They Do

Research has revealed that a startling 89% of UK computer users have no idea how to perform a rudimentary system refresh and propositional reinstatement on their PC in either auxiliary or comprehensively stable mode. The news flies in the face of many recent claims regarding the assumed improvement of the average person's technical skills. It seems people are still as thick as ever, they just point and click like spider monkeys toying with a 1980's era handheld tilting Lando flexiWizard, without the illuminated wand...

Key Value?

Marketing inside-geeks are putting it about that a new technology is being utilised on ad-bearing websites. The state of the art marketing system performs an analysis on the person browsing the site based on the speed and pattern of their keystrokes. This information is then fed back to a database application, and the user is matched to a specific personality category. This category is then used as the basis for targeted adverts on the website pages. Critics of the system claim that it's at best tricky to categorise an individual based on the way they type on a keyboard, and leaked reports of testing from back when the system was under initial development showed that it categorised anyone with a typing speed over 40 words per minute as a sociopath with a tendency to impulse-buy dairy produce.

Cut of your lib?

Excited about wearable computing? Get with the programmable interface for Christ's sake, that's yesterday's hard-off. The next big thing in portable technology? Transforming parts of your body into technological components. Skin grafts that function as mobile devices. Having your eyeballs replaced by screen implants so that all of your friends can enjoy watching their favourite episodes of Friends while pretending to listen to your appalling drivel. And now there's the new iPad that you get tattooed on your body and control by poking your fingers up your nose and arse. Sound scary? I've already had every strand of hair on my entire body coated in an LCD substance capable of rendering images in RGB colour and am currently displaying a still from Spliced Pleasure - The Vampyr Directives VIII as my scalpsaver.