Jan. 16th, 2004

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None of them even like computers. My IT class sit there like sacks of potatoes, jaws adangle and eyes agape, like the kids in Ferris Bueller's school. They are taking IT because they aren't bright enough for Computing, which actually includes actual programming, or they think it'll look good on their CV. IT is everyone's poor-cousin subject, shoved to the dusty corners of their revision plans and coloured in with the least pretty felt-tip. And no wonder. It's bloody boring. I have trouble staying awake when I teach it; no wonder they do too.

My class is the last refuge of the apathetic and the inept, who have given up Maths or Politics because it was too difficult. They all have dogs who love to eat floppy discs, especially ones with homework on them. Several of them seem to be permanently asleep. One of them spent five minutes explaining to me that he didn't have his coursework because the server was down at half-term. What has that to do with now? I asked. I've seen your coursework since half-term and it was fine. No, no, he finally said, I was in just after New Year, and it emerged that he thought it was the Christmas holidays which were called 'half-term', rather than the holiday which is halfway through term. Right.

I talk about the Data Protection Act. I talk about how IT affects office work. I talk about the necessity of teamwork, organisation and attention to detail for IT workers, and about the old image of the lone programmer working in a fugue state through the night which has now mostly passed away. Coursework is based on mastering a major piece of commercial software; it's actually forbidden to code anything new. I have to teach a piece about the dishonesty and unfairness of using work computers for personal mail. It's all grey, flat and grey.

I flash back to colour and excitement. Summer 1998, to be exact. I was in the first year of a brand new ICT course and had scooped a summer job programming routers in Java. It was neuron-twangingly hard (I'd only been programming for less than a year) and frequently drove me to distraction, but I was proud of myself for having got it. We were all proud of ourselves, and excited about the future. We were on mailing lists about 'the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace'; we thrilled to MUDs and MOOs and all the other miniature worlds floating out there. We were all Neo (except with personalities), shaping the world with our code, intoxicated with information. We knew Pulp's 'Mis-Shapes' was about the poor, but it spoke for us too, the weird kids from school, surging into the new world powered by the one thing we had more of, our minds. [livejournal.com profile] gothwalk spoke for many of us when he wrote on his webpage "I love the Internet with a passion that knows no bounds."

Six years ago. Six years! Is that all?

I feel like Oisin returning from Tir na nOg. He thinks he's been away for three years, but the instant his foot touches the soil, he feels three hundred years thud into his bones. He looks around through suddenly rheumy eyes and sees an unknown, humdrum country, chopped into little fields. Magic has departed and his band of heroes have gone, and all around, dull alien bells are tolling the faithful to orderly, pre-written prayer.
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We braved a downpour to go and see Jonathan Lethem read from his new book last night. He reads very nicely, and sings well too despite apologising for his voice, and I stood at the back and dripped quietly, enthralled. Then it was time for the Q&A session.

This doesn't usually happen to me, but towards the end, a question leaped into my head. And it actually wasn't a bad question. It was something I really wanted to know his answer to. (He's that rare sort of writer, a literary type who uses sci-fi plot devices. I was going to say, "There's a school of thought who think science fiction can never be literature. What would you say to them? What do you think it has to teach us?") Three hands shot up, including mine. "Two more," he said, "you [a bald guy on the other side of the shop] and... you." Eep! Me! I'm sure he was pointing at me.

But a guy who was sort of in front and to the left of me jumped in. And I don't want to be a sore loser, but the guy asked a really boring question about JL's life in Manhattan, and JL went off on a ramble about how much he missed something called "Dave's Egg Cream".

Like I said. What on earth is egg cream?

Afterwards, Matt said he'd been thinking of asking the very same question. There was speculation about telepathy and who thought of the question first. It all hinges on whether thoughts are lighter than air, and thus float upwards, or are heavier and fall to settle on heads below the level of the original thinker.

Me, I'm for lighter than air, but then I would be.

Still. Egg cream! Humph.
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Meg has just done some work on the computer. This is what she came up with.

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