Keep your eye on the ball, not pixels

Here's a surprise: sometimes technology is superfluous. I don't expect this to come as a huge shock to readers, though sometimes people think that if you write about technology, you must live a cocooned digital life, in love with anything with a microchip.

I will confess quite happily to having a more, erm, enthusiastic approach to technology than most of my friends.

For example, if you were in London with an afternoon free, what would you be likely to do with it? Shop on Oxford Street? Go to a gallery? Hunker down with a pint of bitter in a pub? Stroll through Hyde Park?

I weighed up my options and made a beeline for the Science Museum and spent a blissful two hours in the computer section (and only the computer section), marvelling over such things as their working model of Charles Babbage's 19th century Difference Engine, considered the first computer.

Yes, I am one of those people who read all the exhibit information panels, too, so the computer section easily ate up the best part of an afternoon. And I won't apologise for it either.

Long ago I realised that I had to be true to myself and there was no point - and no personal freedom - in disguising the fact that I was one of those who (OK, this one is a little embarrassing) could take inordinate pleasure in an exhibit on Hollerith punch card machines and old calculators.

Thankfully, my family fully supports me.

My father even indulges it, accompanying me to the huge computer and electrical warehouse store, Fry's, whenever I am back with my folks in Silicon Valley.

No greater love has a father for a daughter, I think.

On the other hand, maybe it's because I am the only being in the universe who will willingly listen to him tell tales of his days as a member of the Sacra-Blues, the Sacramento, California IBM PC users group club he belonged to back in the early 1980s.

Yet despite these odd predilections, I will repeat again: sometimes technology is superfluous.

This point struck me while I was having a very interesting time seeing what IBM is doing technology-wise at Wimbledon, where it is the IT supplier. I like those behind-the-scenes looks at the tangle of wires behind such big events.

In this case, though, my sense of disgruntlement came from the lack of wires - a wireless information system set up to feed information about matches to one of O2's XDA handheld computers.

The idea is interesting: when you watch a match on the television you get a barrage of statistics along with the running score. And you get commentary.

When you are watching a match live, you only have the scoreboard and the display that shows the speed of the serve.

If you are a journalist covering a match, needing to file a story or provide commentary as fast as possible, having immediate access to such data could be very useful indeed.

So the company decided to experiment with providing wireless access to real-time match information as well as player biographies, scores, statistics, historical data, video clips and more. The vehicle for such information is 150 XDA handhelds.

An IBM spokesman said the company often trials technology experiments such as this at events like Wimbledon. In the first year or two, the trial tends to be very controlled and confined.

For example, wireless was used last year as well, in an even more subdued way.

This year, IBM decided to try this quite ambitious approach to disseminating information by allowing access to an internal intranet of Wimbledon information, including its Real-Time Scoreboard.

The Scoreboard is a java applet that gets details on each point in a major match within seconds of the point being scored. It is an impressive little program - you can check it out yourself on www.wimbledon.org.

However, I was not terribly impressed watching it in action on the handhelds. This is mainly because it was out of action more often then not. And many of the wireless functions didn't seem to want to function reliably.

This might be due to glitches in the java applet - I repeatedly got the message that I needed to reinstall it when trying to access the Scoreboard.

But that doesn't explain the failure to get other pages on the intranet to come up - or rather, to only come up sporadically, though the wireless connection was live.

All of this meant that I spent a lot of time tapping on the screen and reloading pages and also repeatedly rebooting the entire device.

Which means I spent a lot of time not looking at Lleyton Hewitt trouncing his opponent Irakli Labadze on Centre Court.

Even when I got the Scoreboard up finally - and it is a rather cool thing to have, and everyone nearby was trying to have a look at it - the temptation is to watch how quickly they post the speed of the serve and the percentage of first serves Labadze has hit in, rather than look at the darn match.

Why go to Wimbledon at all? Sure, the stats are nice, especially for working journalists writing on the match - if the thing is actually working properly - but you can look at a screen anywhere in the world.

This is one case where I'd rather have the tech stuff in the background, and be allowed to keep my eye on the ball - not on the pixels.