One of my favorite TV channels is BBC America; but unlike the real BBC channels, you have to endure advertising on the satellite-delivered version. Unfortunately the channel is obviously not in the category of ratings where the advertisers are classy or have money -- no advertising for fancy cars or expensive prescription medications to hit your doctor up with. No, BBC America depends on strangely architected beds (which even the hired cat won't get on) and blow-up products that you can keep in your car. But by far the most pernicious advertising is for a product called the "Handy Bundler."

This is a plastic cable tie system that uses a large reel to deliver the material and has an automatic cut-off when you have pulled it tight around whatever it is you want to tie. The advertised argument is that the plastic tie you buy is never long enough for the job to hand. Of course one of the examples is the complex spiderweb of cables behind a home entertainment system; once the Handy Bundler has taken care of them everything is really shipshape and, I'm sure, entirely inoperative.

Tidying connectivity is never that clean.

Today we have a myriad of connections between humans; are we ever going to be able to tidy this connectivity? With the fixed/wireless phone, pagers, answering machines, voice mail, call waiting, e-mail, cellular phones, and PDAs do you ever feel that you are spending your time moving between "devices" instead of work tasks?

At the moment, for example, I am moving between three different PCs in order to accomplish things in both my work and personal life, only one of which has a fixed location. I am paying, one way or another, for six different telephone lines, with two answering machines and two fax machines, plus a cell phone. I have four different e-mail addresses with two different ISPs and one remote mail server. It is complex and time consuming, and I'm sure that it is not at all untypical.

I'm not a connectivity nut by any means. I don't live with my cell phone (as regular readers know, that is considered by me to be an emergency device) and I will never own a PDA (again.) But I'm still really easy to track down if people want to, and it is no longer professionally permissible to hang a sign on your door saying "Gone Fishing," unless you actually say where and which channel you'll be monitoring.

I know a number of people have been working on possible connection solutions such as a single device where all your messages are routed, with no regard for how they physically originated. We might, for example, have a mobile telephone number where we could receive voice messages direct -- or re-routed -- and other messages delivered by voice synthesis. That sounds attractive as long as the control software is smart enough that you cut it off, jump messages, delete any kind of source, and that sort of thing. But isn't this just a small step from being required to have a handset with you at all times and to plug yourself in when you change location? You know, something like an Ethernet port at each restaurant seat, one by the seat in your car, at each seat on every bus, taxi, train, airplane, bathroom...

...Even the ability to hide your location on a portable device is going away. By law we are having the ability to track wireless products built into the devices. The next jump will then be for your boss to know you are sitting in your car having a job interview with the competition. I even received an e-mail recently from a company that sells tracking software, trying to get some PR. The pitch was that you can surreptitiously monitor the use of a computer. The company had expected, it said, for the majority of sales to be from parents anxious to follow the kids' excursions on the Internet: Where they visited, what chat rooms they went into, etc. Surprise, it said, the vast majority of sales were to people who wanted to track what their spouses were up to. What an incredible sign of mistrust! But the company did point out that using the software uncovered a plot to dispose of a husband by a pair of on-line lovers. Something I'm sure a lot of us worry about every day.

And yes, GPS is another wonderful technology. But are we completely losing our ability to use maps, read charts, and generally look out for ourselves? The Europeans are developing their own GPS technology, for civil use, because they don't trust the U.S. Government; as a military system civilian use could be terminated with the throw of a switch. As we move into an era where commercial aircraft will be allowed more direct navigation -- on their own -- let's hope your pilot can navigate the old-fashioned way if that ever happens.

I would generally vote for more disconnection, not more connectivity. I want the buckets that I have for work, projects and personal life to be kept as separate as possible. I want the ability to take myself and my family away from the demands of a machine . . . when I want to, or when they need to. I'm not in favor of going back to the days when you had to get the operator to connect you to the phone next door -- or you needed a suite of operators to get you long distance -- although it was a lot more neighborly, but machines shouldn't take precedence to people.

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