{"id":2994,"date":"2015-08-17T08:30:26","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T08:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=2994"},"modified":"2015-08-19T17:02:57","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T17:02:57","slug":"howls-of-a-technoprat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=2994","title":{"rendered":"Howls of a technoprat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Evil<\/a>

Evil Clock Radio\/damesnet<\/p><\/div>\n

There is an evil thing squatting on my bedside table, yet I dare not get rid of it, for its name is Clock Radio.<\/p>\n

For over 20 years I had another Clock Radio, a Nice Clock Radio, whose name was Digicube. Digicube was brilliant, and I kept it close as long as I could, until the little\u00a0slider switch fell out\u00a0and you could only\u00a0turn it on by inserting a sharp instrument, which I decided was a bit of a health hazard. All I wanted was another Digicube, but sadly they were obsolete. (Though there was one that didn\u2019t work on offer on Ebay \u2013 why?)<\/p>\n

So the hunt was on to find a replacement. It took me two goes to find one that didn\u2019t drench the bedroom in an eldritch light that would have made sleep impossible. I finally settled on a compact Pure device that I thought was pretty cool. Only once I\u2019d got it home did I discover that IT WOULD NOT DO WHAT I WANTED IT TO DO!<\/p>\n

I am one of those pathetic people who like their clocks and watches set fast. For over 20 years Digicube was 13 minutes fast, but Evil Clock Radio takes its orders from a higher power and will not have any truck with human foibles. It turns out that ECR also has firm views on when we should be getting up, too. You can set two different times, so we tend to use one for weekdays and one for the weekend. But if you try to select the weekend time for a weekday, ECR just ignores it. Why not just reset it, I hear you ask? Well, I don\u2019t know how to, I\u2019ve lost the booklet, and ECR is deeply, deeply counterintuitive, so the infinite monkeys have a better chance of writing Hamlet<\/em> than I do of working it<\/span> out on my own.<\/p>\n

I found the move from an ordinary mobile phone to a smartphone three years ago pretty painful, as my fellow Dames will testify. But at least it only took about six weeks of cursing and moaning for me to get used to it, with only a dozen or so half-baked messages being pinged off to baffled recipients. I also learned the hard way that if you are offered an update, just say \u2018no\u2019. That way madness lies.<\/p>\n

The scourge of updates was demonstrated very neatly soon after the launch of dames<\/span>net<\/span><\/strong>, when I wanted to put a table into a blog, but I couldn\u2019t make it work. This was a mystery, as I\u2019d done it before. When I searched for an answer on line I found that an update to the software meant you could no longer copy tables in. To complaints about this WordPress sniffily replied that being able to copy tables was an aberration that was never meant to happen. So ordinary people who want to do practical things are the casualties in\u00a0an arms race to introduce unspecified benefits that only a geek could love.<\/p>\n

And as for intuitiveness and user-friendliness, well, what can you expect from people who want you to click on \u2018start\u2019 when you want to \u2018stop\u2019?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evil Clock Radio takes its orders from a higher power<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,55,56],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2994"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3008,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions\/3008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}