conversations with computers

open pod bay door comp.
silence.
you heard me right, open pod bay door.
silence.
ok, change of tactics required here.... you open the pod bay door now, or i reprogramme you with a large axe!
silence.
and then i wake up and realise that i am not talking to hal, or eddie, i am having a conversation with my rather stupid sgi irix which decided to be helpful by giving up the ghost yesterday. now, its not like i have anything against computers, i love them! but get me straight here, at the point where i begin drooling over the kde desktop is when i realise that something is missing from my life. computers have decidedly turned me into an even more xenophobic person than i normally am. i keep wanting to reach out and run top -o -cpu on people to know just what they are thinking at any time. poeple talk to their cats. i have been accused of having a computer as my best friend. and guess what's really strange? i don't code! thats the strangest part of it.. i am not a computer person at all. i am the last person you want to have around while debugging tenn thousand lines of code. algos go whoooosh over my head and for me functions are still well behaved only if they dont diverge, or if they do, have a finite number of finite discontinuities. i use two fingers and a thumb on the keyboard and despise the mouse.
as with many devices, the sheer joy of getting an obdurate piece of software to work overshadows the fact that it is fundamentally useless and you could have just as well done with a piece of paper. having said that, i don't know too many people who remember long division, and one of the things my students do is to put in as many places of decimal as their calculators can accomodate. which, with a ti-765765765757 can be somewhat large. at which point, i have to let them know that we haven't determined the masses of atoms to that precision upto now. somehow i think cavemen were better off. atleast, they had rock music.