I’m not a three year old

I am not a Luddite when it comes to technology, I’ve mentioned before that I’m usually considered an “early adopter” of new tech. When we switched to Windows 7 at work, I begged to me on the first wave of adopters. I ran beta test of some of our systems on it.  I provided all kinds of useful feedback.

Heck even Bob’ll tell you that I’m the first to find a new website or gadget to assist with this learning to fly lark. The other day when he texted me I was in the middle of watching someone else’s flight to Peterborough via YouTube on the TV and using my chart to follow the journey.

I’ve stalked the airspace around my destination airports thoroughly on Google Earth and use an app on my phone to plot a 3D course of my flights superimposed over Google maps.

But I won’t just use technology  for the sake of it, I have to perceive a benefit, for instance I’m holding out upgrading my iPhone to OS 7 because I know it’s going to slow it down to a crawl.

At work I don’t have a lot of choice over technology decisions and our IT people have been slowly changing everyone over to the dreaded Windows 8. I have been trying very hard to avoid them. I managed for a loooong time. They tried to switch me over the week before my summer conference, when i was up to my neck in registrations,cancellations and transfers. I told them if they came near my computer I would hurt them.

They believed me.

They should.

I escaped their attention for a while but despite my best efforts, they finally caught up with me and now I’m struggling my way through Windows 8

I hate it

Here’s why (in no particular order)

·         The Metro screen is blocky and has too many colours. It was designed for Kindergarten students. It reminds me of kids building blocks, garish and plasticky

·         It thinks it is smarter than me and hides everything, the search function, directory structure, control panel

·         The new version of office has the ribbon labels in ALL CAPS. It’s like it’s constantly shouting at me

·         It just feels wrong, it’s all soft animations and blurry transitions. I like crisp clean and functional. Yes I can probably personalise the crap away but everything is hidden so it’s gonna take a while

·         It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to switch the damn machine off, seriously you have to

o   Click in the bottom left corner to get the metro screen

o   Then click in the top right corner to get the settings panel

o   Then select the settings button

o   Then select power

o   Then switch off

·         It is designed for touch screens , which they don’t let us mere minions have

·         Finally, none of my Google toolbars will work with the IE version installed

So in a fit of pique, I’m ditching Microsoft wherever possible. I’m not a three year old that needs primary colours and blocky screens. I’ve switched to Chrome* because I’ll take Google over Bing any day, which means that I’m probably going to take the leap that I’ve been pondering over for a while now and ditch the iPhone for an Android device.

I really hate Windows 8

*  I mention this because Chrome formats my blog text slightly differently and it may take a while to shake out the kinks.