Sharpe's Opinion
Tuesday, 17th Mar, 2009
Tangled Cables and Dongly Things
A rather excellent cartoon-blog from the New York Times ‘Abstract City’ column, bemoaning the state of a world which requires so many messy, tangled and inconvenient cables:
Over the years I have made multiple attempts to tame this mess. All my strategies share one fatal drawback: replacing a single cable means I have to untie the entire arrangement.
This is how I how I deal with the situation these days: If I get a new device, I just stuff any new cables right into the swamp of existing ones. And if I need to remove a cable, I optimistically pull on it, like a madman.
I feel his pain, and as a condolence I can only offer that it’s even worse if you’re trying to set up a home recording studio. This also reminded me of Douglas Adams’ fabulous rant about dongly things:
The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.
P.S. Notice, this is a double-link – that’s twice the value. Plus, I managed to include a link to Douglas Adams and to Stephen Fry in a single post, which I would like to think would please both of them, somehow.