Walking is faster than email

My brilliant idea of taking a lot of happy snaps of the properties that might have potential and emailing them home turned out to be less than satisfactory. I think it’s pathetic in this world of computers that I’m being driven to use snail mail.

I took about a hundred photos of a property that caught my eye. My plan was to move in and around every room, hallway, carport, shed and drainpipe putting together a virtual tour of the house in the form of photographs. It actually takes a surprising amount of time to do this. I would then email the lot along with a few comments. The size of the file didn’t break the email, but it just refused to go. Too big, was the smug response from the computer (actually, the company mail server). I tied splitting the stuff into a lot of smaller files, zipped in various ways, but still too big. I gave up, and copied everything onto a disk, and let Australia Post do its trick.

Sometimes I get really fed up with the way organisations run their IT infrastructure, and this is just one example. One of the companies I had an association with had a contract with DHS, a state government department. Both had offices very close to each other, being just one city block distant. Anyway, this company was bought out by GE, an American company with tentacles all over the world. As part of restructuring its new acquisition, email was routed through GE’s network, which meant that sending an email from one Melbourne city block to the next Melbourne city block went via USA.

We become accustomed to email being relatively fast, but with this company change sometimes email took several hours to be delivered. When time was important sometimes it was more efficient to walk across the street with an envelope in hand, to their offices, and hand deliver the mail rather than using email. Pass the ink and quill, please, it may be quicker. While I’m in the mood for it, another example comes to mind.

The first personal computer I used at work in 1986 was in fact a Mac. (Mainframes were generally all the go, but they could be cumbersome.) The Mac was on a trolley so whoever needed to use it could wheel it from one office to the next. MS Works was the thing at the time, and to get it going you shoved in floppy disk and I think you could save your files to this disk too. There was no hard drive on this machine.

Then the developers of MS Works added bits and pieces to the software, and the new version of MS Works resided on two floppy disks. So, whenever you needed to use a function that it couldn’t find on the disk you currently had in the machine, you’d be prompted to swap disks, and swap disks, and swap disks. It’s not such a bad thing to improve software, but I hate the tradeoffs you get lumbered with. Your computer gets filled with stuff you’ll never use and it slows everything down in the process.

I have broadband on at home and it seemed great, at the time, when it was new to me. But it doesn’t seem great anymore. I have this feeling that about 10 years ago my old dialup modem used to access web pages and paint the screen at about the same speed as my broadband does now. I can’t help wondering about all the ancillary software that web pages come encumbered with that everything has slowed down again.