Pipe n' slippers

I am getting old.

Apparently teenagers are shunning email for instant messages. I still have trouble with email. I remember when email was something reserved for people who were doing computer science at university. I remember getting my first dial-up at home. I remember the excitement of sending and receiving emails. Back in those days if you got a couple of email messages a week, it was a busy week. But you could guarantee that every email message you got was a real message, as opposed to spam. These days I get thousands of emails a week, but still only a couple I want to read.

I remember my first mobile phone too. Again, back when very few people had them. They were brick sized and weighed about the same as a bag full of toffee-apples. SMSs didn't even exist at the start, but shortly they were introduced. It cost 12p per message. Now I get 500 a month free of which I use about 30. Seems every kid you see has a mobile their hand and is busy sending texts. Statistics seem to back this up with over 25 billion SMSs sent in the UK last year. That's over 400 for every person alive in the UK.

Technology confuses me. I remember when HTML was in its infancy and web pages were made up of gaudy colours, flashing text and animated gifs. Web Programming meant emailing a form from a web page. I remember the mysterious world of cgi and perl scripts. I remember when php came out and web programming took a leap forward. Now there seem to be more frameworks than cars on the road. Ruby on rails? I seem to remember ruby being about in the old days ... I don't remember no rails. I used to laugh at my parents lack of understanding of email and the internet. Now I am the one being laughed at by kids when I ask what AJAX is, how I grind a Java bean or where I plug in my bluetooth device. And what the hell is scaffolding?

I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out (1992 that was). And then was amazed when Doom appeared on the scene. Amazing 3D graphics produced in real time. It was amazing a computer could do this AND it was multiplayer ... many an hour was spent playing that in the labs at school. Computers graphics also appeared in films. None of your fancy Pixar stuff, but things like Tron were enough to amaze me. Star Wars (the original ones) were something special.

I used to spend hours in a pub, then could stagger to a club, get a few hours sleep and get up for Uni the next day. Now I'd rather have a few drinks in the pub and go home and have a cup of tea.

Sometimes I long for the good old days. Sometimes I just feel old.

Where's my pipe and slippers?

Moo

A bit of perspective

This evening, as I was packing up at work to come home, I noticed a most odd light coming through the office window. The windows in our office face west, and through them was coming a bizarre orange light, almost as if there was a fire directly outside. It didn't make much investigation to find out the source of this glow was a most excellent looking sunset. A small amount of clouds in a most clear sky. All lovely.

A few minutes later, I opened the outside door of the office preparing for a nice walk home on a clear evening. The door to the office faces west, and blimey Charlie, it wasn't sunny. Not in the slightest. Before me was Glasgow city center sitting under a huge, black, ghost-busters-esque pile of cloud. And we're talking fire and brimstone black clouds here. Obviously I'd done something to anger the Gods.

Or had I?

So ... on earth these days, the estimated population is in excess of 6.5 billion people. That's 6,500,000,000 people. More than you're likely to get at you're average Robbie Williams concert.

To try and make a little more sense of that ... let's say you live to be 80 years old. That's about 29,220 days. And let's assume, that for these 80 years you get an average of 7 hours sleep a night. That leaves close to half a million waking hours in your lifetime. If you spent the entire time you were awake (let's forget eating and anything else you might need to do) meeting people, to get through the world's population you'd need to meet 13,000 people an hour. Or 216 people per minute. Imagine trying to say hello to more than 3.6 people a second.

Now ... those 80 years that you're alive. It might seem like a long time (especially when you're saying hello non-stop) but our world has been around for quite a long time. Earth is estimated to have come into existence around about 4.57 billion years ago. That's about 4,570,000,000 years ago. Suddenly your 80 years isn't looking that long. Your brief time on this planet will equate to about 1/57,000,000th of it's age. To put it another way ... if the world had been around for 1 year your entire life would equate roughly half a second of that time.

So ... are you thinking "Blimey, I'm one person out of 6.5 billion, and I'll be around for a minuscule amount of time"? Well, hold on there a second.

Let's take a moment to put this into perspective. According to the greatest scientific minds in the world (also commonly known as Google), there are likely to be at least 70 sextillion stars in the universe. No .. honestly .. .that's a real number. It's 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Yup ... that's 22 zero's there. So that's quite a lot. Now ... our little solar system here is not large by any means .. and we have 10 planets circling our star. Ok, ok. 9 planets, but when I was growing up there was 10. So .. taking us as an average there are probably over 700 sextillion planets in the universe. That makes 23 zeros. I'm not even going to try and quantify that.

So ... out of an absolutely mind-blowingly huge number of planets our there, we spend a minuscule amount of time on one of them, surrounded by a massive number of similar people. Kinda insignificant, huh?

OK ... so maybe, just maybe it wasn't anything I did that caused the gods to pile mountains of clouds over Glasgow this evening. But you never know. On the plus side, it also puts into perspective the rest of the things I worry about. Suddenly, stuff doesn't seem to matter quite as much....

Moo.