Double Outage.

 Modern technology is so useful, but so annoying if it doesn't work.  I woke up this morning to find the Wifi in my apartment had quit.  It took until this afternoon for the techs to come along to fix it.  So no Internet.  On top of that I found out this afternoon that my cell phone wasn't working, and of course I couldn't check my account online because I had no Internet access.  I eventually tried a reboot, which has worked.  I guess it decided not to play nice because I was in Alberta on Tuesday and Wednesday, and disconnected at some point.  And if you don't use your phone, you don't know you're not getting calls because it's not working.

Singularity Fan?

Then you probably shouldn't read this.  On the other hand if you aren't a fan you might find it funny.

Unintentional Luddite?

Could I actually be considered that?  After all I don't have a cell phone.  Not even a cheapy from a place like 7/11, let alone a fancy smartphone.  So I don't sit on the bus playing games, or texting, which I don't see much point in anyway.  I don't have a Facebook account, although I quite obviously do have sorts of accounts that could fall under the social networking banner.   Can one in fact be a Luddite without deliberate action or philosophical stance?  I don't have some grand opposition to cell phones, just no need to spend the resources needed for one at the moment. 

Power Shortage.

It seems I need to have some 9 volt batteries around.  I accidently drained the one in my guitar tuner, and when I starting pulling them out of my other guitar gear I found most of them were dead or dying.  I managed to find one that isn't dead, but now I need several replacements.  Most of them can be powered by AC power, but a few are battery only, and using batteries is sometimes just convenient.

It's A Fact.

Power outages are annoying.

Supersized.

I was just checking the size of files in the recycle bin on my computer. There are 1.22 gigabytes in there at the moment. Just a few years ago having a one gigabyte hard drive on your computer was the cutting edge of technology, yet now I can have that much in junk files in one place alone. And the 80 gig hard drive currently on my computer is starting to look small by the standards of current drives. Of course as hard drive sizes have gone up so has the size of programs and the files they handle. I can't help but wonder though if it hasn't lead to sloppy programming. After all clever programmers did some amazing things with the by today's standard miniscule memories and tiny floppy drives on machines like the Commodore 64 back in the '80s, let alone the even more primitive devices on machines like the Voyager space probes.

Looking at the cover of the latest Wired today, which features James Cameron and a blurb about all these high tech research things supposedly on the way, I couldn't help but think of how similiar it can be to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. It features the same kind of breathless techno fetishing of stuff that often doesn't actually appear. Anyone who has paid attention to PS and PM content over the years will be familiar with all the "gee, that REWLS!" high tech stuff they've blabbed about that has never come to pass, including stuff of questionable scientific credibility in the first place. I'm probably not the first person to see similarities with the long defunct "pop science" magazine Omni as well. Omni often did the same kind of thing, but like Wired tried to appear more upscale that PM and PS, and was more interested in fringe stuff like life extension and psychics.