"Whooooa I'm afraid I can't do that Dave, dude"

And so the blogs continue with some regularity, much like a bowel movement or a tic..

And I'm still ill, in fact my blogging thus far has been rather like Louise and Tim Arthur's heartbreaking account of living with terminal cancer Shadow in Tiger Country but less ultimately life-affirming and with more puns (and hopefully a happier ending).

Anyway, today I'm blogging about irritating computer programs; first and foremost Google Chrome. It's more efficient to use than Firefox and certainly glossier, but there are a handful of things which really irritate me about it, the hipster Too Cool for School attitude for starters.

"Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed" for example, sounds less like a program experiencing an error and more like a hippie on hallucinogens who thinks he's a web browser having an out of body experience and describing it in the third person. And it's disconcerting.

Even more irritating is "Aw, Snap!" which wasn't even a phrase I had really heard until it popped up in the middle of a window when I was trying ineffectually to load the Guardian crossword. At first I thought it was a reference to the titular card game and had to resist the instinctual urge to slam the Queen of Diamonds down on the keyboard, but Urban Dictionary tells me it's a "disheartened response to a negative situation." Google Chrome is using a cultural lexicon I'm not even familiar with, and it's making me feel uncool.

Anyway, I don't like my computer talking to me in this fashion, it feels over-familiar and awkward. I want my computer to be an ice-cold processing machine with perfect logic circuits, I want it to say "Hello... Rob" in that weird disjointed way that Sci-fi computers do and not "hey dude"; I want HAL 9000 not Arthur Fonzarelli (incidentally, if Chrome is The Fonz then Internet Explorer is a stuffy science teacher who wears too-tight stone washed denim on his day off and listens to Michael Buble, I'm not sure what that makes Firefox.. maybe the weird kid in the corner who picks the scabs from his elbows and eats them?).

And Facebook is almost as bad. There's something distinctly creepy about a word like "Oops" being used in conjunction with "something went wrong" or "fatal error," it sounds like the fevered mutterings of a butter-fingered serial killer who just accidentally stabbed a prostitute in the wrong eye socket.

And on that note I'm off to spend my Valentine's Night playing retro video games on a Megadrive console emulator. So maybe my web browser is cooler than me after all.

x