calebbrown.id.au

The digital age, with its intanets, computamigies and webs is now truly apart of our lives and we seem to be dealing alright with it. We do our homework on computers, we talk to friends on our mobile phones, and we cook our bread in computerised toasters.

But despite our hard work digital doesn't really fit with humans. I think this comes down to two facts:

1. the digital age is inherently discrete (mathematically) in its representation of things - it doesn't deal very well with fuzzy areas. e.g. when describing the weather at what temperature does it go from being 'warm' to being 'cold'?
2. it depends on software to be written thoroughly, with every possible exceptional circumstance taken into account, or failing nicely when something goes wrong - something rarely acheived. Every crash, or lost Word document is proof that this is the case

Because there is this disharmony between man and machine, there exist points where things can go wrong. As the digital machines are pushed to fit into a human world, all the exceptional circumstances that we happily tolerate need to be precisely defined and programmed into the machines. But there are many exceptions, and programmers really aren't that smart, so quite often these exceptions aren't handled correctly everywhere. These bugs usually sit dormant, waiting for an unsuspecting person to come along and enter the piece of information that causes the beast to fail.

These exceptions are fairly common. For example some years have more days than other years, some months have more days than others. Midnight in Greenwich, England is not the same time as Midnight in Sydney, Australia. Some postcodes have letters in them. Entering a zero into a form can often mean the same thing as entering nothing. They are everywhere.

For the mischievous amongst us this disharmony can be exploited. One simple thing to do is to only ever subscribe to a service on the 31st day of any month that has one. The good companies will process your bill sensibly, the bad companies might behave like the monthly recurring events in iCal where they don't appear at all in months with fewer than 31 days. You could also have fun at work and after having a meeting on the 31st of May say that you'll have another exactly a month from today.

The challenge is to find the everyday exceptions and start messing around with them. Test the boundary values. Try and break systems by feeding them seemingly normal data they cannot cope with. Stuff around a bit and break it. In the end the machines that deal with your mischief may cope as well as humans do, but every now and then you'll hit the jackpot and make someone a little red faced.

Yesterday was great. A public holiday on a Wednesday nicely splits the working week into two easy to manage halves. It makes Monday feel like Thursday, Thursday feel like Monday, Tuesday feel like Friday and Friday feel like, well, Friday. Taking it easy and hanging with some friends was an excellent plan too. Everyone I've spoken to hasn't had a bad thing to say about the Wednesday holiday.

But I noticed a problem - and its all about petrol.

Well the price of petrol.

If you're an Australian driver then you've probably noticed that the best time to buy petrol is on a Tuesday. For some reason thats probably related to the schedule of petrol tankers, the day of the week, and when people usually get paid, petrol is cheapest on that day. Monday is usually okay. Wednesday and Thursday are pretty bad.

Another time you don't buy petrol is the day school holidays start. Actually buying petrol near holidays is generally a bad idea - including public holidays. And yesterday was no exception.

On Tuesday night driving home from work the price was at about AU$1.25 per litre, which was about the same as it had been over the weekend before it. On Wednesday morning when I drove past it had actually dropped to about AU$1.20 (ooh 5c). Come Wednesday evening it had jumped dramatically to AU$1.34.

So there wasn't the usual Tuesday night dip in prices that one has come to expect. Disappointing.

I eventually remembered ;)

My mum carries a photo album with her pretty much all the time (hi mum!). It usually contains the latest photos of whatever has been happening - the last trip, the new granddaughter. It usually comes out when she's meeting people she hasn't seen for a while, or wants to show her friends what she's been up to.

I used to think this was strange, and slightly embarrassing (cause there'd often be at least one unflattering photo of yours truly in there). I also found it particularly amusing.

But then something happened. I got a video iPod. I got a digital camera. I started taking photos. I started putting them on my iPod. I even started showing my friends the photos on my iPod - just like my mum!

What's worse is the iPod doesn't just store a limited number of photos like mum's physical album - it stores thousands of photos! It'd be like mum carrying around her entire bookcase of photo albums where ever she goes - which I'm sure she would if she could.

So I'm now officially worse than my mum in this area.

Update: Mum says that the technical name for her small photo album is brag book. So I hereby coin the name BragPod to refer to an iPod being used for the same purpose.