Experience vs. Technology

The most truthful thing I've read so far this year, is from an interview with Claudia de Breij. She's lamenting the fact that technology has pretty much screwed up society to the point where experience does not count, unless it was recorded, photoshopped to make it look nicer, and put on Youtube. People go to concerts, parties, sports games, and instead of experiencing the event live, they just squint through a cell phone camera. And what is it good for? Just to have proof that you were actually there, while you could get nicer and better pictures from the professional photographers working around the event.

Games used to be around a table, whether it be a card game or a a board game. Now you play World of Warcraft in solitude, with thousands of others doing exactly the same thing, but not in the same room. And what is that good for? No matter the voice-over-ip, IM, live-action video, how can you honestly say you connected with someone for real, if the only experience you have with someone is his dwarf avatar in Azeroth?

Sometimes things shouldn't be recorded for later. Experience comes from being in the moment. Not from watching a copy.

The Next Encounter

You know what happens when you meet someone friendly, cute and nice, years later, for the first time in a long time?

1. You get distracted.
2. You make mistakes.
3. You bump into things, more often than not knocking them over.
4. You miss cues, beats, signals and whatnot.
5. You lose money. Lots of it.
   

Because even if it was only five minutes, that vision can haunt you for some time.

Royal Dutch Airlines disses the Hoff

The latest commercial campaign to bring Internet Check-In to the masses is not exactly respectful of the former Baywatch star:

You might as well get paid in guilder

With the euro now worth $ 1.60, and a barrel of oil almost $ 120, you might say that our U.S. friends haven't been able to keep their value up well. Just think that at the NFL Draft this weekend some poor sap will be drafted first and earn a multi-million dollar contract, which in Europe will just get him as far as McDonald's. He won't be able to drive around lots, because his monthly wages can't even get him halfway past The Hague.

That's it. I'm buying a house in Malibu.

Cause and effect

Funny how that works. You drive fast on a particular stretch of road, people build speed bumps on said road. You drive fast over the same speed bumps, people make the speed bumps higher. People get pissed off with the cars bouncing off the speed bumps, so they lower them again.

End result: we still drive fast over this stretch of road.

Too Late To Go Another Way

The way people are protesting the Summer Olympics in Beijing is ridiculous. Of course protesting the way the country handles human rights is all good and well, but why would you wait until now? You know since 2001 that the Games are going to be held here. And it's not like Tibet and Taiwan are issues that just happened to pop up four months before the Games.

If you wanted to protest, you should have protested then. They could have still gone another way. Now people have trained years to get to the Olympics, businesses have signed multi-billion dollar contracts for merchandising, people have a vested interest in the running of the Games. And you think any of them will be persuaded to boycott the biggest event of the summer, just because you were to negligent or lazy to do something about it seven years ago?

The genuine nobility of a protest has a day of expiration. That date has passed sometime around the 2002 holiday season. Also, any protest coming less than four months before the start of the Olympics, is just a way for adolescents to plead for attention. There's nothing genuine about it, and I would be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise.

But you can always try.

Spelling chequer

I may be mistaken, but lately spelling seems to be a problem for more and more people. Not just on forums and IMs, but also in serious documentation, newspapers, advertisements and leaflets, even on television (although thankfully, not as prevalent as the others). Where does this come from? My generation got regular writing exercises, and we would get bad grades if we wrote the way people do now.

And it's not even about new words, internet memes or new spelling either. People don't seem to understand something straightforward like the difference between 'lose' and 'loose', 'then' and 'than'.

My theory is that after some time in affluence, a society stops caring about the old rules, and relies more on the fact that people can't be bothered to phone in every single spelling error, and be branded either a boring git or a grammar nazi. Without sounding like one, I think it's a matter of courtesy and respect to communicate in the same way as your audience, or if you don't know the audience make the communication as neutral as possible. This way you don't insult anyone, or intrude in anyone's business.