Proud to be a gadget geek

I am proud to be a geek. I love technology. I know it will fail, I know I will spend my time shouting at Alexa and it won't understand my voice or it will be playing music so it can't hear me. I know the internet will interrupt so my Nest Thermostat will go offline for a few minutes. I know when I ask Siri to text my wife that I will have to manually change some of the words, and I know that most text to speech systems will have a problem with my surname, Glaister, even though it follows all the standards of the pronunciation protocols held within the English language. GL as in Glad, LAI as in Laid, and STER as in Sterling, however as most humans or telesales get it wrong, I am not surprised.

I am happy with all these problems. Happy is probably not the right word, content is more apt, because, the thing with all these shortcomings, is that they are within live environments. And they will learn and get better. A new update will fix things, a new patch will improve it, and as time progresses we will get more and more of the technology that we were promised as kids. I can now wander around the house, pretending I am in Star Trek. "Computer - Lounge lights on", " Computer - bedroom lights off"- and by having a number of these gadgets around the house, I can say it anywhere and it will work. The next stage is that the house will have these as standard, and this becomes the norm. The novelty will wear off, and this will just be everyday life.

The heating comes on when I am 10 miles from the house; if it is dark, then the outside lights of the garage come on when I drive around the corner. With an update yesterday I now have an intercom to most rooms of the house, so can be called for dinner when I am in the home office, as opposed to a shriek of dinner is ready.

I have been called a gadget man as if this is a bad thing, but this makes me curious and I have no regret. I think this is a positive attribute as opposed to an insult. Now I know there will be those who will have conspiracy theories that the big companies are listening, and to be honest, I don't care. I am not a terrorist, I am not planning bad things. If Amazon wants to listen in to my wife and I's conversation about Strictly Come Dancing, go ahead, it really is their own time they are wasting.

So what is the point of this article? Well, the good news is, I get to do this at work. I get to look and play with the possibilities. We get to create solutions for people, to look outside of the box, and know the first solution may be a bit, Heath Robinson, but after that, we can put resource into it, and make it better, and then keep making it better and better, and keep developing and pushing the product so that it can be everything it could be. Our customers then have the agility to change our product into something they want and then we work with them to make it suit their needs and then make it better for them, and develop it for them so it can be the best it can be. But that bit of childlike curiosity and geekiness is still there. That "what if we did that?", "would this work?"," how about doing this?". If that is what a geek is, then great, that is what I am.