Things that go click

Here's the thing about me and technology: I've been hooked since I wrote my first computer program in high school, in BASIC and stored it on punched paper tape (yes, I am THAT old!).

The whole idea of getting a machine to do stuff for me appeals enormously. Especially if it's something boring and repetitive that I have to do lots of times. I'd much rather spend 3 hours teaching the computer how to do a 3 minute task than have to do it myself 60 times. Does that make me lazy, or just efficient?

Anyway I've been mucking around with computers ever since that first program when the computers were BIG and the programs were small. Now I get excited as the programs get BIGGER and the computers get smaller. I fully intend to have a whole handbag full of computers by the end of the year: iPhone, netbook, camera and any other small sexy gadget that comes out between now and then.

Computers have become so ubiquitous that people take them for granted. The news recently focussed on yet another multi-million dollar system that doesn't quite, you know,work!

The tax-paying public are cross about this. My reaction is more along the lines of "thank goodness it wasn't my project". It is incredibly difficult to design and implement a new system. Ones that focus on the software and not on the people and processes that surround the system are doomed to fail. And there are a lot of those.

But it's really, really hard to find out exactly what ALL the things are that people do and why they do them, and what are all the things that they might conceivably do in the future, and what the system should do for each one of those.

Mostly the people writing the programs are really good at making the computer do what they've been asked to make it do. The problem is often that we've asked them to do the wrong thing.

A bit like getting the answer 42. A perfectly valid answer given all the information. It was just that it was the wrong information.