Recently in Technologic Category

I don't understand television any more.

I used to understand television, and this is how it worked. All three channels were beamed out of transmitters, in to space where they got caught in aerials. The signals then ran down the wire into the box, which got warmed up and then little pixies ran along 625 lines turning off and on the red, green and blue dots that you could see if you scrunched yourself up to the screen really really close.

Then they introduced new stuff like satellites and cables, so you didn't need to get television through your aerial as you could get it out of the ground, or out of space. That was fine too. You paid for television from the ground or space and you got to watch The Simpsons and endless US imports. I could get to grips with that.

And guess what, you could still connect up your old gremlin-run television to the aerial, and you could still get all three channels, and that was all good.

Then they got even more digital, sending more television programmes out through aerials, but these were squeezed up really really tightly, rolled up in a ball and kind of stuck together. You needed a special decoder to take these squeezed up programmes and translate them into real moving and talking pictures. That was okay, though. Generally, it worked pretty well, except when the signal is bad, when the picture jumps rather than getting snowy, and the sound crackles in a "hello I'm going to break your speakers" kind of way.

However, as I come close to buying a television which I will be watching through a wire connected to an aerial pulling programmes from a transmitter that's probably up a hill somewhere, I realise I have no idea what I am doing.

The television will have a digital tuner - which I can understand. It'll automatically unroll squeezed up programmes. Hurrah! That means I don't need an unsightly box (insert "unsightly box" gag here later). However, which unsightly box is it replacing? Freeview? Freesat? Top up TV?

And critically, do I really care as long as Mr Twinky can watch Saturday Kittens?

Interestingly, it appears that web pixies have abducted my layout. This is called 'an upgrade'.

It's all my own fault, really. I should have thought about what I was doing as I gleefully clicked that yes, over-writing all these files was fine and no, I didn't want to back up.

And so it's gone, as though to outer space. Hours of hard HTML, hand-coded by a fumblefingered amateur, and replaced with uniform grey, bland and uniform, simple, clean, functional.

There is a lesson here for us all, I think. As we travel through life there will be times when we do stupid, illogical things. These may be small things like overwriting files or big things like rigging national elections. We won't always step back and think through the consequences fully and these may be minor, like the layout of a website changing, or major like setting the progress of a country back a century.

The test of personal character and integrity is how you behave after these mistakes. I like to accept that I screwed up, and hopefully learn and become stronger.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some elections to rig