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Stop looking at me – WAIT! Look at me

That sullen black eye on top of my monitor, staring at me all day and night, what’s it seeing, who is it sharing it with? There is a big uproar about the Prism project and drones flying over our country. Add to that the security and traffic cameras and you have a narcissists’ delight—me Me ME, it’s all about Me. ...

Robert Dow

That sullen black eye on top of my monitor, staring at me all day and night, what’s it seeing, who is it sharing it with?

There is a big uproar about the Prism project and drones flying over our country. Add to that the security and traffic cameras and you have a narcissists’ delight—me Me ME, it’s all about Me. Isn’t it?

Now that you know you are being watched all the time, and listened to all the time, will you change your behavior? It is your only choice, the cameras and NSA aren’t going away, they’re here to stay. So now, how will you play?

I don’t really care. If you’ve got nothing better to do than watch me, you need a life—I for sure as hell don’t seem to have one. My best friend is a 30-in Dell monitor and a trackball—Jon in the fast lane. 

Oh, and I drink coffee. Lots of coffee. Too freakin’ much coffee, so by noon time I’m ready to kill whoever designed the UIs, file formats, and other anti-productivity elements in my life. I’m convinced (by noon) they’ve been put there to deliberately thwart me—ME ME ME, it’s all about me. (If it wasn’t all about me why would Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter be so popular?)

But Me wants to do work, a lot of work, fast and efficiently. Why? SO I can do more work, why do you think? You stupid or something? (Uh-oh, there goes that coffee again).

So now I want to get a file I save a few days ago so I can write a TechWatch story. That file is six directories down from the root or my data disc. I was last in a directory three layers down on my system disc. So I have to mouse around, clickity click dickity dick around to get to the folder with the files I’m looking for.

And there that ugly black eye sits monitoring my snarling, clinched jaw and pursed lips as I mouse around muttering to myself, even the cat won’t stay with me after noon.

I don’t want to wave my hands at the screen (and take them off my well-used and abused Logitech keyboard), I want to keep pounding away—but I AM looking at the screen and the directory. I’m looking at it! You get it, you stupid computer with all your wasted FLOPS running up my electric bill. So if you can see me, and see where I’m looking then do something for me. Get the damn file.

I tried Dragon (Intel calls this perceptual computing and says it will change computing as we know it.) Really, I did try. Dragon is now at version 11.5. I started using it at version 1.01, am I supposed to be delighted, surprised, enlightened and enabled now that Intel has discovered it? I’ve tried voice commands. They take longer than moussing around—even when I’m pissed off and making mistakes because of my impatience. Besides, it’s not (yet) really a natural interface. “Dragon” (The mic icon turns green). “Go to TechWatch.” It goes to an issue of TechWatch. “Go to TechWatch directory” (you stupid piece of….) “Open file ____”. It doesn’t. “Open file ____DOT DOC!” (You time wasting piece of…). Yeah, maybe I could invest a few dozen hours in learning (me learning, not Dragon) how to properly address the program—right, I’ve got time for that—I might as well learn how to use Win8 while I’m about it.

Just look at me, just as you already are. OK, you need a trigger. How about three or four rapid eye-blinks of both eyes—that’s got to be unique. The military used a schema like that to fire weapons in a fighter. Now highlight the files or folders you think I’m looking at. And when I double blink, open that file. Can you imagine how fast that would be? How many minutes of your life—and you concentration thought process, would that save a day?

This is old news. I asked for this ten years ago when web cams started becoming affordable. I’m still waiting. In the mean time I wink at NSA, I know they’re tapped into my camera. After all it’s looking at me. ME.

On being shy