Category Archives: Social Commentary

Ender’s Game

Jon Goff has some gripes (with spoilers) about the movie.

I haven’t read the book in a third of a century, so I wasn’t as bothered by some of those things as he was. As he notes, in retrospect, it’s probably a mistake to read the book just before seeing the movie. If you haven’t read it, it would probably be better to watch the movie first.

Printer Hate

Lileks has bought another buck-sucking fail box:

The aforementioned cord situation is miserable – unless i turn it around, so the control panel faces away. But: it has wifi, so I think: put it in the unheated porch which is sorta-kinda my wife’s office, except A) it isn’t, because it’s unheated and bone-cold half the year, and B) she’s a kitchen-table-iPad after-hours worker now. So i could put it there and communicate with it, wirelessly.

Except you know how that goes. You know. You send a document to the printer. You hear nothing. You get up and walk over to the next room and make sure it’s on. Wifi light is blinking red, because the tech has an attention span that makes Dory from “Finding Nemo” look like the fargin’ Sphinx, and it can’t remember networks, or forgets it was connected, or gets all confused because there’s a box for the city’s wifi system down the block and it keeps saying things and making it lose its place!!!! And then you have to enter your password on a printer touchscreen, which ought to be a field-sobriety test, and then you go back and send the document again and wait for the sullen complaining sound of plastic crap feeding a piece of paper into the machine, and the sudden shocked kadunk! as the print heads swing into place, and then silence, because it jammed.

Like wi-fi, this is a really screwed-up technology.

Smartphone Subsidies

The downside.

I’m currently month-to-month on my three-year-old two-year Verizon contract with a Droid Global 2. I think that if I upgrade, I’ll just buy it outright, but right now, I don’t see anything on the new phones that I can’t live without. Of course, I only use my phone when I’m traveling, or out of the house, so since I usually work at home, it’s no biggie.