As soon as he had it unwrapped, he grabbed the DVD, trotted into the living room, and -

Well, he doesn't quite have this down pat. He put the DVD on the shelf under the TV, grabbed the remote control, and started pushing buttons. After all, the DVD player is too high up for him to reach, so it's worth a try.

At two, he's realised that if you put the shiny round thing in the silver rectangular thing and push the little buttons on the small grey oblong thing, pictures and music come from the square black thing and you can dance along - which at that age consists of spinning in circles until you fall over.

Unfortunately, the DVD was warped, and in the middle of Wobbly Camel the picture and sound broke up and it swiftly became unwatchable. We found that only the first two and last three of fifteen or so songs played properly.

Which kind of ruined the magic...

What I'd like to do here is write a Whittleian essay about how what engineers really want to do is magic - build machines that work so well that the very workings that they laboured so hard to create are effectively invisible to the user. You do this and that happens, every time, without any noise or smoke or heat. You don't need to pull it apart twice a year to grease the flanges or re-tune the interociter. You don't need to prime it with margarine before starting it when the weather's below freezing.

It just works.

I guess I went into computers because it's the closest useful field we have to magic. You move this thing until that thing points to this other thing, then you push on this thing and music! Movies! Books! Your printer springs to life and prints out a newspaper, or you send a letter to your friend on the other side of the world (and it arrives in a matter of seconds.)

Bugs are the mis-aligned gears and dry solder joints in the engineering magic of programming. When you run into a bug, it reveals the workings you've tried so hard to hide. The magic is ruined, though we're used to it and we usually manage to pick ourselves up and move on.

(Like, say, when my ADSL connection drops out and destroys the illusion that the internet is "just there".)

One recent failed spell has reduced Tuning Spork to speaking in tongues in a most amusing way, but usually the results are just a bloody nuisance.

I have no idea where this post is going, though, so I'll stop here. If you do happen to know, please tell me and I'll do my best to finish it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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