I have a secret fetish. Well actually I have several, but I sure as Hell aren’t going to tell you lot about most of them!
But I will admit to having an unhealthy fascination with the contents of other people’s computers.
When I ran an e-commerce site, people would sometimes send me a screengrab of their computer to show me that our site didn’t work on their Texas Instruments Scientific Calculator running Opera on Linux or some other bizarre, weirdo combination. They were usually right as well.
But it wasn’t this that interested me at all – it was the other information that the screengrabs showed me that fascinated me – the windows that they had open; the programs that they were using. It was like taking a little glimpse into their secret lives.
It’s the same when someone is presenting something to me on their laptops. I’m hardly paying attention at all to whatever it is that they are supposed to be showing me. Instead I am looking at all of the other stuff that they have on their computers.
Personal computers are very … um … personal. I guess that’s why they’re called personal computers and not impersonal computers. You can tell a lot about a person from their PC’s (and apologies to Mac users by using PC’s as a generic term [you lot are the most easy to categorize of the lot of us]). I get the same feeling from looking at the contents of someone’s PC as I do when I’m sitting on a train looking into people’s back gardens – as if their private lives are being laid bare to me.
Do people use their PC’s just as a business tool or do they spend much of their time screwing around with it? Do they just stick with the easy options – a full suite of Microsoft products and little else – or have they shown some individuality with some programs from lesser known suppliers? Can you tell what they do for a living just from the programs that they are using?
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours:
Nick's PC Screenshot
You can certainly tell a lot about me from mine.
The first thing you’ve probably noticed is that I have two monitors – twin 19″ flatscreens side-by-side for monster-sized hardcore computing. The last time I had a real job at an internet company, everyone had twin monitors (the Head of Finance had three, the greedy bugger). Once you’ve gotten used to having twins, there’s no going back, especially when you spend a lot of time copying information from one program to another. It’s also useful for having multiple IM conversations while carrying on answering the multitude of emails I get in every few minutes.
My wallpaper is the favourite shot we ever got of me and my baybee. We were lying on the grass on vacation in Turkey screwing around with the camera when a dog appear from nowhere and tried to lick us. Like all the best photos, it was totally unposed. It always reminds me of an ad for Nokia. Usually though it’s hidden behind a multitude of open windows and so I don’t get to see it much (especially as I keep my PC running 24/7 with just the occasional reboot every few days when it screws up).
There’s not too much useless crap on my PC at the moment as it crashed just over a week ago and I had to reinstall everything. So it’s pretty much just the bare essentials on there at the moment. But you can still tell plenty about me from it.
The open windows come at the end of a long day. You can tell that I work in real estate from the fact that I am in the process of checking out a new development that someone spammed me with. I’m in the middle of a Skype conversation with one of my employees and am in the process of tinkering with our website, which is why I have all of the files open as well as Dreamweaver. The fact that I always have an Excel sheet open shows that I crunch numbers often as well.
The fact that I have links to uTorrent and Limewire shows that I am a bit of a naughty boy with a flagrant disregard for copyright laws. I have one game installed, which shows that I use my PC for screwing around as well as pleasure (but not very often as the game, Europa Universalis 2, is well over five years old.)
So that’s what I think you can probably tell about me from seeing my screenshot. Why not post your own screenshot somewhere and I will try and analyse you as well?
If you don’t know how to do it, first of all make sure you have the All Programs button depressed so I can see what you have on your PC, then just hit the Prt Scr button on your keyboard, then copy and paste into your favourite graphics program (mine is the lightweight and thus very quick to load freeware IrfanView) and then upload it somewhere. No cheating though – it’s best to take it at the end of a full working day when you have a full variety of windows open.
Tell me where it is and I will tell you what I think I’ve discovered about you from it. Then you can tell me if I’m talking complete bollocks or not.
I did think that this would be a great concept for a website – where people could upload their screenshots and then discuss the relative merits and demerits of each program with other people. But everyone I mentioned it to thought that it was a totally stupid idea.
Maybe it is and I am the only one with such a strange fetish. Only time will tell.
2 Comments
September 19, 2008 at 3:43 am
So I am taking up the challenge here’s my desktop in the middle of the day – Secret Screenshot Voyeur?
What does that say?
cheers
September 19, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Whoa! The first thing it says is that you are a King Geek who is waaaay out of my league and always will be! There was tons of stuff on your PC that I’ve never heard of before and probably never will see the likes of again!
What are those multicolored dot things at the end of your taskbar? They look incredibly geeky!
Observations:
I reckon that you travel quite a bit (not internationally – just locally). I see you as either working freelance, or as an independent contractor, or working remotely for some company.
You’re either some kind of software engineer/designer or some other kind of engineer. Definitely something highly technical and if you described what you did in detail, my eyes would start to glaze over and I would never fully understand it anyway!
I think you need the laptop to make quite a few presentations to clients or co-workers and that you need to keep in touch with them through a lot of videoconferencing when you don’t get face-to-face meetings with them.
You are a serious music nutcase! Loads of different music programs on there plus Limewire. Like me, you probably never work in silence – there are always some toons playing on your laptop or iPod.
I was very interested with all of the audio-editing programs you had on there. I don’t see you as being a professional in that particular area, but I think you probably make your own podcasts.
Although you are big on communication, I don’t think that you are a person who uses their computer to screw around with a lot (i.e. not a real gamehead). I think that means you are probably either married or in a serious relationship.
I am guessing you are in your thirties – not some kid, but not an old middle-aged git (like me) either.
I imagine that you live in Northern California and you are an avid subscriber to Wired magazine.
I wrote all this without reading through your blog (because that would have been cheating!)
So tell me, how did I do?!