On Buddhist Monks And Data Capture

So the new new iPad is now fully up and running and I'm just that little bit more of an Apple whorefan than I was before.

Why?

Well my iPad was stolen and it cost me quite a lot of money. But, had the same thing happened six months ago, my briefcase would have contained no iPad, just my hard copy of my daily journal. It would have held no information that would have been decipherable / of interest / of use to just about anyone, but would have been quite sad and irretrievable for me.

As you might know for many months now I've been doing a mindmap diary thing for every single day and all of them in the journal would have gone, probably lying on some street in Putney by now.

And within a couple of hours of taking delivery of the new iPad I'd restored it from the last iCloud back up. I only lost one mindmap that I'd done on Monday morning (the day of the theft), nothing else. It's hugely satisfying and, as mentioned earlier, has made me a bit more of an Apple whorefan than I was before.

But the whole restoring saga, though easy, reminded me of a post I've been meaning to write for some time. It's about passwords, well those data capture things you see. You know when you're commenting on a blog or buying something or doing any one of all sorts of things on the net and you're asked to copy the following two words and type them into the box below, to confirm you're not a robot?

Well good God, I've now got to a stage of crapping a large one when I have to do it. I just never seem to be able to read the words properly. It's not my eyes either as they're pretty good these days. I stare at the words, sometimes wondering if I'm losing my mind. Does that word say "amusing" or "arnusing"? Does it say "Large dog" or "Large clog"?

Usually I end up going for the wrong one, to be faced with a message telling me that I got it wrong and please try the next one. I've come to dread these things. If your blog is one that asks me to do it there's every chance I might comment less that I used to purely because of the serious stress involved.

And another thing. What is it with photographs of Buddhist monks these days?

We all know they're quite photogenic, especially the younger ones. With their fresh cherubic and innocent looking faces and their saffron robes (I'm running the risk if sounding like a peadophile here!) who can resist trying to take an atmospheric picture?

But we're not all Dominic Sansoni, him of the sarongs and photographs. It seems all we need is a young Buddhist monk, a window with a brightly coloured frame made of old wood and some subdued lighting and bang, or rather flash, off we go with our iphones, thinking we're all original and innovative.

Well enough. We're not.

That's it really.