Technology & the elderly

There are a few things in life the simply do not mix. Water and electricity, fuel and fire and technology and the elderly.





Yesterday I managed to explain to my grandmother about the digital switchover in which by 2012, any un-upgraded TV set will cease to work. After which, I managed to get her a Freeview box so that she'd be ready by the time Emley Moor's analogue transmitter gets switched off in 2011.

That's still four years away yet but given the huge supply of cheap digital tuners that my firm have managed to get hold of, and the previous track-record of the electrical industry to be able to anticipate demand a key periods, I decided to take advantage of the current over-supply of Freeview recievers.

And yesterday I set it all up, explained how it worked and explained how it would make her life better, mainly because all those god-awful soaps are repeated ad-finatum on ITV2, 3 and 4.

She managed to get the jist of it fairly well, but the morning was more focused on how she should turn the thing off, rather than actually using it.

"Well I'll turn it off for now and use my normal tele, just until I get used to it."
"But you won't get used to it if you don't use it."
"I'll manage but I stick to my normal telly now, how do I turn it off again?"
"Just make sure that red light is on"
"So the red light is good then?"
"No, the red light means it's switched off"
"Yes, I know"
"But if it's switched off, you can't use it"
"Oh........"

I know full-well she won't use it, but at least I tried.

Welcome Back! Normal service has been resumed

What must be the longest Christmas break in history has just ended and I'm finally allowed back into college to start trying to learn something again.



After fighting though what seemed like three of the most pointless traffic jams this morning, I'm sat here and it's reassuring to know that not much has changed at Leeds Trinity & All Saints.

So far, the computer I'm typing this post on now has crashed twice in the space of 23 minutes, is struggling to open two windows in Internet Explorer and has made me reset my password because the IT geeks don't trust me to remember a seven character word for anything more than 28 days.

The timetables have been cocked up again, there are already a number of tutors that appear to be 'missing in action' whilst other lectures have been moved but nobody seems to know to where and when.

It's all in a days work at Leeds Trinity & All Saints.

Well, that was a waste of everyone's time

The Consumer Electronics Show will have packed up and left Las Vegas by the end of today, so what fantastic new inventions will we be seeing in our homes in the next few years?





Errrm, not much actually.

The CES used to be the place where we'd all get a glimpse of the latest technology, the sort of thing we'd never seen before but yet, something we could buy within a few years time in our local Dixons.
We saw the VCR in 1970, Pong made it's debut in 1975, people looked in awe at the CD and camcorder in 1981, gawped at the processing power of the Commodore 64 a year later and applauded the DVD in 1996.

This year though, we haven't seen much, nay anything new.
Just look at one of this year's 'Best in Show': Ford and Microsoft have collaborated to create what they believe is ground-breaking, must have technology that will allow you to select mp3's, reply to text messages or make phone calls just by shouting at your dashboard.
The only problem is that isn't new technology, not in the slightest. Top Gear viewers may remember Jeremy Clarkson venting his frustration at an identical system in a Mercedes CL-65, before sending the German voice-activated sat-nav to Warsaw. In other words, a CES award winner is a technology that has been commercially available for a good few years, just with a minor tweak. You can even go down to your local dealer tomorrow and pick up a Ford Fiesta with bluetooth already fitted.

Then there's the Blu-Ray - HD-DVD battle. This battle has been going on for a while, mainly fuelled by the announcement of the Playstation 3.
The manufacturers were getting wary that people weren't buying either model because they didn't know which version would become the norm (hands up, who bought a Betamax recorder?).
So LG came along and some boffin in their creatives department decided "Why not have both?" and hence, the BH1OO. It's cheaper than a Blu-Ray player, will do twice as much as a Blue-Ray player and so, in theory, it's the one to buy. Debate over, no news story.

The only thing that actually sounds of any interest is the 'One laptop per Child' scheme, basically a £50 laptop designed to make computing accessible to those in third world countries. It's a superb idea, but one that's got lost amongst the gimmicks from the multi-nationals.

And that's been the problem with CES. The whole show hasn't been about inventions, it's about compressing as many stupid ideas into one to give the impression of a new invention. I don't want my PC to control my central heating via a touch-screen panel linked to my XBOX 360. I don't want to transmit videos from the internet via WiFi to watch on my cooker. I would like a stable Microsoft operating system that isn't riddled with security flaws, but that doesn't sound quite as fancy.

One Small Step for Man

When you were a kid and used to dream about technology in the future, what did you think of?










The Flying car would have to be up there, robots that do menial tasks would be on anybody's list and surely and maybe even hover shoes?

Well today we are one step closer to the latter at least. Boffins at Electrolux haven't quite come up with hover shoes, but they have gone one 'o' further with their 'Hoover shoes'.

Long story short, they're shoes that vacuum the floor as you walk.

Feel free to insert sexist jokes in the comment's box ;-)