After a
moderately long pause from blogging, I am happy to report that I am sitting on
a Boeing 737-800 on the way to Vienna, therefore, this can only mean one thing,
and one thing only: a beloved airplane post! This time, however, I shall not be
looking my lazy, grotesque self, as there is a moderately good looking girl
sitting across the isle from me who I might talk to if I can musk up the
courage to, but then again, it does indeed look impressive when you are writing
a short essay on an iPad, although it may also look like I am a complete twat.
Anyway, we shall see...
Moving on
to the ambiguous title, as one always does. This post does indeed look like it
has some deep meaning, and maybe some English teacher will deduce from writing
style, similes, metaphors and tone that there is indeed one; however, I can
inform you that there is no intended deep philosophical meaning, only a
slightly mundane and irrelevant message, or so my mum would say!
At my
school, we are lucky to have many high-profile speakers, like Gordon Ramsey or
the chief environmental editor of the Guardian (notice the nice example of a
contrast, English teachers!). Many of these speakers, apart from Gordon Ramsey,
talk about something relating to their subject and then progress onto telling
us how this, that and the other will be the greatest challenge to our
generation. I believe the challenge count stands at about 10 now: world
poverty, an economic crisis, water shortage, social unrest, the potential
threat of war, energy shortage, global pollution, severe weather, the
destruction of humanity and another damn Gordon Ramsey reality cooking show.
Problem, no?
I can
inform you that this count has just risen to 11, with the addition of this
mundane thing that could possibly have dire consequences to the survival of
humanity.
I joke;
it's just a mundane point with annoying consequences.
Let me
give you an example of this. If any of you have tried to create, let's say, a
Google account, you are presented with a form to fill. Within that form, there
sits the dreaded U-word, the desired username. Now, if you are lucky, you will
enter that desired username and be presented with a tick, signifying that all
your stress has been ceremoniously lifted off you shoulders and you are free to
use the service; if, however, you are presented with the despised blood red
cross, you are destined for eternal damnation of the possibly most cryptic
username in the history of mankind, with a complex combination of
indecipherable Unicode digits and symbols. That, my friends, will be the great
problem generations to come will have to face, with ever increasing complexity
and length.
Well,
that was a nice paragraph there. Possibly the most interesting literary
features I have ever condensed within one paragraph. ACCOMPLISHMENT! Anyhow, do
you see what the problem is here? If that paragraph did not describe it to you
vividly enough, I suggest you contact @direthoughts to give you a verbal beating
over how you should go and learn some sophisticated English.
Now we
have got a grip of the problem, let us discuss the possible solutions and impacts.
As I have said, it's not a major problem, but it's one everyone worldwide with an
Internet connection will have to deal with someday. I was lucky enough to have
been online in the early days of account making, so I managed to get my desired
username across all my services. I do feel sorry for the next nicolasweninger,
having to deal with the username nicolasweninger1, only to find that all those
have been taken to. (hehe...)
We need a
different solution, like facial recognition or fingerprint scanning, but the
infrastructure and the web technologies do not exist or are too hard to
implement currently: it's kinda difficult to build a fingerprint scanner into
an old aluminium MacBook Pro, or to code up facial recognition on websites
without a decent dev team? Maybe we could take the PayPal route, were one
service offers the authentication and the website dev team just has to build it
into their site.
There is
no easy solution for this dire conundrum, and until someone works out one, we
will all be destined to be owning a ni357co-)£>+%.las£6;!73£9(weni69)?!&5§`~ger(£7£(£(;(33 username, considering
the ever increasing global population and unused accounts. Good luck!
