technology

A EUO Day

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone how useful Ipads can be: Not only do I use mine as my communication aid, but also to browse the web, check my email and keep in touch with my PAs when I’m out and about. I also often use it to draft blog entries, ready to put online when I get home. The problem is, that all uses quite a bit of battery power, so it is fairly essential that my Ipad is put on charge every night. When it isn’t, it can be rather problematic.

Today, for instance, I was out on my usual trundle when I noticed my Ipad hadn’t been charged. I’d got as far as Lewisham when I noticed it was down to 52%. Now, that wasn’t catastrophic, and no reason to abandon my outing and return home, but I knew it would limit me. Today would have to be an Essential Utterances Only (EUO) day: in order to preserve my Ipad battery, I would need to talk to people only when I really had to. There would be no chatting to strangers or telling street preachers to shut up. Otherwise, if I got into an emergency and needed to ask for help or give people instructions but my battery had died, I would be totally stuck.

It’s rather strange when you think about it: this situation effectively rendered me dumb or voiceless. I had to go all day trying to avoid talking to people, just because my Ipad hadn’t been charged. In a way it put a barrier up between me and the rest of society. If I met someone new I would be unable to introduce myself and tell them who I am or what I do. If I bumped into someone I knew I wouldn’t be able to update them with my news. In the end it wasn’t that much of a problem; yet I find it odd to reflect upon how such seemingly insignificant things can have such large social and psychological consequences.

Foray Into Flowcharts

By and large I think it’s fair to say that I like prose and that I’m a fairly prose kind of guy. That is to say, whenever I have an idea, I write about it in nice, formal, clear-cut sentences, more often than not posting it on here. Once or twice recently however, I’ve found myself craving for the ability to create flowcharts, ie putting single words or phrases onto a page and drawing lines between them, connecting the ideas. When I was studying psychology over twenty years ago, I remember our tutor Pat using them on the whiteboard: it seemed to allow him to link concepts far more freely, quickly and easily.

I can’t write with a pen, so I never took to them. Obviously, to make a flowchart you need to be physically able to jot down words onto a sheet of paper and draw lines between them. That isn’t easy for me, which is probably why I usually prefer to write things out in prose. Recently however, usually when I’ve been out in my powerchair, I’ve had interesting ideas which I wanted to note down as flowcharts or notes rather than pieces of writing. They were connections between concepts rather than fully formed, articulable pieces of information. Of course, they could then be developed into something I could write about, but first I wanted to jot down the interesting connections between the ideas. This afternoon, for instance, I started to play with the connections between cinemas as physical spaces and ideas concerning ‘the urban’, and the metropolis. That way I could unify my interest in cinephilia, my fascination with metropolitan life, as well as my work with the local Free Film Festival. It’s only a rough idea at the moment, but I certainly think it’s worth exploring more.

I’m very pleased to report quite a bit of success. When I got back here, I had a quick Google for a piece of software I could use to make flowcharts, and found Flowchart Designer. It’s fairly simple, but it was free and easy to start using – certainly far easier and less fiddly than trying to make them long-hand using a bog-standard word processor or drawing program. I have already made the flowchart I had been thinking about, and I suspect it could be the start of an interesting new project. Now that I have found a way to make flowcharts, I also suspect my ideas will flow far more fluidly.

Infernal Imac Updates

Yesterday was a long, difficult, bitch of a day which I’d frankly rather just forget. It started on Tuesday evening when my Imac suggested I install an update to my IOS. I did so, and it seemed to go perfectly well so I thought nothing of it. The problem is, I idiotically forgot to note down the verification code, so yesterday morning when I came to turn my computer back on it wouldn’t let me into my system. My brilliant new PA Artur and I tried and tried, but no matter what we did the wretched machine wouldn’t cooperate.

In desperation, at around eleven I decided to go up to the Apple shop in Stratford to ask for help. Long story short, they agreed to get a technician to ring Artur at three to advise him on how to fix my computer. It was a long wait, but when they rang it quickly emerged that there was nothing they could do without the code I had neglected to note. When the call ended I was beginning to get really frustrated – without my computer I can’t really do anything.

I think Artur could see this, so he very kindly agreed to go with me back up to the Apple shop, carrying my Imac. By that time it was starting to get dark, but I was fast losing my patience. The tube was getting crowded so it took about an hour to get back up there. Another long story short, when we got to the shop we were told to wait about half an hour before we could be seen.

What followed was long and exasperating, but ultimately it emerged that my Imac would need to be wiped and rebooted if I was ever going to be able to use it again. At one point I had to text my mum to get her to send proof of purchase for my computer. We got back here at about nine last night, tired and irritable and dying for some beer. I had a computer to set back up, but that could wait for the morning: luckily my documents etc were safe on my Icloud, so I don’t seem to have lost much work. I had made a stupid mistake which it had taken an entire day to put right. I suppose I’m lucky that I got back to normal so quickly, but that is certainly the last time I update my IOS, or do so without taking a note of the zarking verification code.

Why Does Elon Musk Want to Kill Wikipedia?

I think I need to direct everyone to this Steve Shives vlog, in which he explores the reasons why Elon Musk is apparently trying to shut down Wikipedia. According to Shives, Musk says Wikipedia is now too woke and needs shutting down. It’s an obvious attack on free speech: Musk doesn’t like what the online encyclopaedia says about him and wants to stamp it out. More to the point, because it has so many contributors and editors, Wikipedia is much more likely to be accurate about any given subject; the more people can contribute to it, the more perspectives it has and the closer it is to ‘the truth’. But because that kind of system does not have one single overarching author, it is manifestly opposed to the way right-wing p’tahks think things should be. If he can’t buy it, control it and have it saying the things he wants it to, musk wants to destroy it.

You know, I didn’t know much about Elon Musk until recently; I hadn’t heard of him a year or so ago. Yet the more I learn about him, the more I think he’s a jumped up little wankstain. How did the p’tahk get so rich? Did he really earn so much power and authority, or is he, like Trump, just where he is through inheritance, arrogance, and through climbing over far better people.

I’m a ‘Cyborg of Necessity’, Apparently

One of the first things I came across when I started browsing Facebook this morning was this very interesting academic paper by my friend Darryl Sellwood, et al. Darryl is fast becoming a great disability studies academic and writer, who I must admit puts me to shame. The paper broadly argues that the choices and decisions surrounding Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) should be primarily made by AAC users; that is, people who actually use communication aids should be the primary voice in the future of the field, the rules, customs and habits surrounding it. I find that perfectly obvious, and it gets no argument from me.

Reading the paper, though, I came across quite an interesting phrase which stuck in my mind. The text seems to switch from area to area quite a bit, presumably as it goes from sections written by one of it’s five authors to another. One of the authors refers to AAC users as ‘cyborgs of necessity not choice’, a phrase which resonated with me quite a bit, and which I think needs exploring. In my 2014 MA thesis, I touch briefly on how the equipment I use to communicate and move around could be said to evoke Borg implants. The Borg are, of course, the cyborgs of Star Trek. When I was writing my thesis, I think I meant this as quite a cute, throwaway remark; yet I am obviously not the only person to pick up upon the correlation. Does the use of specialist equipment by disabled people really render us cyborgs? What could the sociocultural implications of that be? Could we really seem like the hostile, unfeeling drones bent on assimilating every other lifeform which Star Trek depicts? After all, most mainstream science fiction franchises frame cybernetic organisms, from The Borg to Darth Vader, as some form of aggressive, malevolent enemy. To be honest being called a cyborg, albeit one of necessity, throws up a few quite dark implications and connotations which aren’t all that comfortable, yet which I think need looking a bit deeper into.