On Drug Dealers

Part of my job is going around to local school districts and selling them on the magic that is our proprietary tablet computers.

I feel like a pusher.

"Hey, kids, you wanna buy some eReaders??"

Scary stuff.

Which is probably why it feels like I'm really cool. Cool guys do drugs. Rock stars do drugs. It's not cool to sell to little kids, yeah, but I'm not, man. I'm selling to the teachers. It's fantastic.

Get the teachers and soon the students are hooked anyway. I'm building my own market from the top down. They're middlemen and I'm Tony Fuckin Montana up in here, shoving my face in a pile of circuit boards on my desk, inhaling the acrid fumes of heated silicate and wiring, ready to face the day as a king on my own little corner of the tech world.

Say hello to my little friend. He has an 800x600 Pearl eInk display and a frontlight.

Technoageism - Because we always need new ways to condemn other people

My father worked at IBM for 15 years. He says he has a degree in computer science (from 1979). He owned an Apple II on which he taught me the command line

a://keen.exe

I was DOSing Commander Keen before I could reliably read.


So for the love of God, why does my father turn and twist an iPad like a squirrel staring at a stubborn nut?

An Open Letter To My Internet

Hey, fuck you, Internet. You don't want to work for me? You want to tell my computer that you're working just fine but not transfer any data to or from my house? Really? After all the delightful content I've provided you? All the good times? All the goddam porn I've watched on you?

I thought you were cool, Internet. I really did. In fact, I still kind of do. I can understand that this is a momentary slip-up. It's happened before, I'd understand, but it's the way you go about telling me. You keep hiding it, pretending like nothing's wrong and hoping I won't notice. You're acting like Sammi from "Jersey Shore."

No, I'm not calling you Sammi; I'm saying you're acting like Sammi. I know you're better than that. You know you're better than that. You can just tell me you're having service problems, baby. I'd understand that. We don't have to do this every night. I know sometimes you need your space. But you don't have to lie about it.

And you know what? I can still do me.

I don't have to put up with this kind of nonsense. I have a jailbroken iPhone with tethering and an unlimited data plan. I hooked that shit up as soon as I knew you were playing me. There wasn't anything wrong with my modem, you were just trying to hide the truth.

But I respect you.

That's why I turned off the tethering. (That and it's slow and I'm paranoid AT&T might notice the sudden explosion in data usage on an unlimited plan that doesn't already pay extra for tethering.)

Right now, I'm writing this from my phone, using regular old 3G and the official Blogger application. I'm not sneaking behind your back even though it might be easy, or because it might feel like I'm getting back at you.

I don't want that type of relationship. Not with you. Not with anybody.

Please come home, Internet. Please just stop the lying and the running away and come home and talk with me.

I miss you.

I love you.

You don't have to do everything on your own. Just trust in me to support you as much as you support me. I'm a big man if you look to see it.

Please bring my porn back.

-Your heat sink snuggle bottom

On Your Calling

When I was in school, all the social studies teachers thought I should be a social studies teacher. All the math teachers wanted me to be a math teacher, the art teachers wanted me to be an art teacher and the English teachers wanted me to be an English teacher.

Now that I'm doing what I want to be doing and what I actually majored in, all anyone ever tells me I should be is "something with computers."

I'm starting to wonder whether or not "Grandson Computer Repair" could undercut Geek Squad's prices and remain profitable.

They train 'em young, now.

Of Family Tech Support Part II

Best stock photo ever.

I had to go over to my grandmother's house today to set up her new laptop. Apparently she'd been playing "Bejeweled" on my aunt's computer while she was staying over between Christmas and New Years. She got to go to parties, one of them with Bernie Madoff's secretary, but it looks like Bejeweled was the pinnacle of awesome this go-around. So much so that she went down to Walmart, picked out a laptop, was told it was out of stock and bought the one they recommended to her instead.

Here is where we come to the travesty involved: my grandmother just bought a Sony Vaio with 500GB of storage and 4gb memory, a 15" widescreen LCD display and Windows 7 Home Premium 65-bit edition, with a free month's trial of Norton antivirus.

My grandmother does not have the internet.

Yes, she paid $600 for a pretty decent laptop–and made sure to get both "Bejeweled 3" and and value-pack of 250 thousand games (500 of them solitaire, seriously?)–all for the express purpose of playing Bejeweled. Me setting up her laptop involved making a user profile (her initials) and a password (her old dog), then basically deleting, disabling or otherwise removing from view/active function any program which might get in the way of spinning up the hard disc to get at that sweet, sweet gemstone action. I'm basically helping my grandma mainline fire gems directly into her eyeballs.

We still need to get her a mouse because a trackpad is just insanity to her. For reference, her last computer was about as useful as a 2nd generation iPod Touch basemodel with broken WiFi.

Seriously, it's this beige IBM box with a 3 1/2" floppy and a then-state-of-the-art CD drive. The monitor is newer than the rest, so that's about thirty pounds with a 12" screen, and maybe it's only about twelve years old. It's got an 8GB hard drive and 125mb of RAM.

Do you guys remember the Pentium processor from all of a few years ago? I remember the Centrino coming out for laptops that were made to be wireless. That was I think the first or second Pentium chipset to break from the "Pentium #" name scheme. That series was Pentium 1-4.

My grandmother's computer ran a 486 processor. 98% of you don't even know what that is. It's the thing that came before a Pentium. I don't even know why it's called that. The numbers don't work in base-2. I have no idea why it was called that. Whenever I've mentioned it to my Computer Science friends, they just stare in stupefied amazement that such a thing still functions. I'm pretty sure that any college kid who decides to be a CS major from this point in time forward will only ever learn about a 486 if (s)he takes the Comp-Sci equivalent of an art history course. This thing's like a a Rodin, just not by Rodin. It's friggin' kinetic sculpture more than it's actually a useful piece of machinery.

It runs Windows 95, for chrissake.

On Kids Today and also Teen Moms

Kids today are weird as hell.

I really mean it. I call them the "Little Brother" generation. They have such a sense of entitlement, even over what I grew up with. Like us, they innately desire and are adept with using technology, but something's off: because they never grew up blowing into Sega and SNES cartridges, these kids don't know how to boot in safe mode to run diagnostic programs and filter out their porn viruses.

It's a direct line of succession, really. Kids don't grow up learning how to make their toys work when something goes wrong, then they grow up to never know how to fix their computer when the software gets buggy. My father had to wipe a hard drive twice because it was more virus than data at one point. That's like the Darth Vader of HDDs.

Soon as something stops working, kids toss it aside and ask for a new one. Bitch, do you have any idea what it'd cost me just to get a working copy of "Battletoads" these days? No, you wouldn't, because you just think in numbers. You have no concept of the time put into cruising eBay and Craigslist for a working Sega 16-bit with the original controllers and a working RF adapter and a copy of one of the most cultish, rare second-hand gamed available. You don't understand how fucking awesome it is that you can jailbreak an iPhone and make it do damned near everything. It's Batman's utility belt. Hell, the new Nanos are DickTracey's watch, with the wristband accessory.

And yet they show no signs of interest in understanding how any of their best toys work, so of course there's never any thought to upgrading existing tech rather than buying up to the newest shiny. Still, they're obsessed with whatever their new thing is for a couple weeks, to the exclusion of all else, like a kid on Christmas.

This Christmas I saw my cousin's two year-old playing a game I'm pretty sure was inappropriate for his age group on a Nintendo DS. He was in the living room of his great-great-aunt's house, and Return of the Jedi was playing on TV.

Return of the futhermucking Jedi. Do you know how many muppets are in that movie? Like  247. Muppets everywhere. And they sing! And dance! For God's sake half of them are giant teddy bears. What is wrong with a kid that Return of the Jedi is on and he's engrossed in a video game he doesn't understand with questionable educational value? (I think he was killing 'bad guys.')

Honestly, this is what happens when teenagers have kids. No respect for the classics. I swear to the force ghost of Sebastian Shaw, if I ever have kids, they don't get to see the Star Wars prequels until they run around the backyard yelling "IT'S A TRAP!" every five minutes.

On Thinking of the Children

The South Korean government is proposing steps to set a sort of curfew to restrict the number of hours children spend playing online video games.

Unsurprisingly, I have an opinion about this.

But surprisingly, for once this opinion is conservative, well-informed and personally experienced.

In college I like to think I was an excellent starter roommate. I was neat, pleasantly (if not neutrally) smelling, I had a large stock of movies which could be borrowed without question and over the three years I spent in my super-conveniently located dorm room, I became busier and busier with outside work and shenanigans, such that I was often never around during daylight hours and much of the evening. In short terms, I was cool when I was around, but mostly unobtrusive.

However, I personally have to admit there were two roommates I did not take to very well. (I only actively liked one, but that's beside the point.)

One was a twenty-six year old Korean student who had his own apartment in Vermont, but was forced to live on-campus for a semester as a new/transfer student. He was fine, except for when he made the room smell like rice and fish by cooking with his little hot pot. Since I'm the one with an uncommon aversion to seafood, this I allowed to pass by unmolested. In return, I got the room to myself nearly every weekend when he went back to his actual home to see his girlfriend.

The other Evil Ex-Roommate was also Korean. Before you start to rag on me for being some kind of crazed M*A*S*H reenactor with bents against the entire population of Seoul, understand there was a very awesome temporary roommate for a semester in between these two who was also Korean and had zero bad habits. He was awesome, and got along swimmingly with my other close Korean friend. None of these friends ever met my Japanese or Indian friends, but based on thousands of years of living on the Asian continent together, I have to assume they could only be friends. Right?

Anyway, the short of it is this last kid was a fat little butterball or awkward, fowl-smelling otaku, with no drive to become a better, more social person. I saw more man-boob that year as he sat indoors with a fan pointed directly at his sweating convalescence than I care to remember.

In fact the ill-wind that blew off this boy's body circulated through the room thank to the fan, placed mere inches from his sagging cleavage, and made the entirety of our domicile wreak of sadness and rice.

The one truly racist part is that I never once saw him eat rice, let alone cook it.

What brings me back to my min point was this: this boy sat in front of his computer all day playing side-scrolling Korean RPGs with his friends back in Korea, on Korean time. I'd be trying to go to sleep at 3 a.m. after hours of thoughtfulness and legitimate work and this lousy freshman is getting up after skipping class all day so he can play seven hours of what looked like a Warcraft 1 knock-off with his fat little Eastern Hemisphere counterparts. I'm not begrudging the kid friends, but seriously, dude, I don't need to see your fat ass half-naked in front of a glowing screen at night almost-silently clicking away at some giant lobster monsters. All I want is to be able to get to sleep while it's still dark and quiet, wake up without the door always slamming and maybe just once come back to find a note the three times you go out for a LAN party so I know if I have enough time to Google "big ol' boobies" before you get back.

So yeah, I support these South Korean Video Game Curfew Reforms. But too late for this guy. Too late, indeed.

Of My Ridiculous Relationship With Computer Products

When I was four my father did not help teach me how to read. Instead, he taught me to type by rote the precise series of keystrokes necessary for MS DOS to run Commander Keen from 5" floppy on an old (then new) IBM desktop with maybe a 256 processor.

When I was twelve I had a classic beige Dell that ran Windows ME. Through some bizarre occult ritual performed on the device before it arrived at my home, this little box was the complete opposite of every other ME machine, that is, it actually ran programs. But not just programs that didn't run on other ME machines. Any program. Because ME was the last Microsoft OS to run with a DOS base, I could play all my early-nineties CD-ROM games, floppy games that'd been transferred to 3¹/2 floppy and a host of other games that should not have functioned properly.

Most recently, after a full 18 months of talking up the little gadget, I convinced my mom that an iPhone actually was the cheapest method by which to upgrade from admittedly wonderful and always in-service Verizon EnV and sleek clamshell models to something that could receive weather updated and browse the internet. And replace her maxed-out iPod. And her old Palm Pilot. And her expensive coverage plan.

Anyway, the point is I got an iPhone and I was as happy and a dung beetle with the world's largest 3G-enabled dung ball.

Aaaaand a friend of mine in a CS major who also works for Apple. For my birthday, he said he'd jailbreak my iPhone for me, something at which I had already failed repeatedly.

And then he did too.

I seriously have like the fucking Alcatraz of iPhones. Shit is impenetrable.

Fine. I can live happily without. So I don't have tethering and I can't make it play the sound of the Power Rangers communicator every time a get a text message. I've learned to deal.


Well tonight I came back from a 30 minute dinner to fine my hard drive clicking and every program not responding. The cursor moved, as little good that did me. Gentling tapping the beast did nothing, shooting down my go-to Fonzie method of machine maintenance. I had to to a hard shutdown. Then … nothing.

I got the white start-up screen and a little flashing folder with a question mark. According to the documentation this was either a Mayan glyph representing creation or my computer telling me it could not find the hard disk to start from.

Some frantic calls to Apple Friend later, I took the "couldn't hurt" approach; I unplugged the power and used a coin to release the battery from the rest of the laptop. I was disheartened to see Apple's fine construction prevented me from getting at any of the wiry bits without taking a real screwdriver the the body case. I was left with only one ultimate last-ditch doomsday sudden-death hail Mary desperation play:

I rubbed off the battery contacts and blew into my MacBook like an old Nintendo cartridge.


And I'll be damned if everything wasn't perfectly fine after a slightly drawn-out start-up and some minor prayers to the 'puter gods and a small goat sacrificed at a golden alter of Steve Jobs.

Guess I'm buying a new back-up drive tomorrow.

And a goat.

On Tech Support

Whenever I have to deal with tech support I tend to run into three classes of people. The first are the stereotyped guys in India who read from a script and don't realize I'm more tech savvy than anyone short of having a CS degree, who obviously I don't like but i still feel bad for them because it's not their fault their job got outsourced so far away from the clients they have to deal with.

The second type of person is the asshole who actually does reside in The States and simply treats me like an idiot because I have a problem setting my new wireless printer to sync with multiple Macs, one wired desktop and a wireless Laptop running Windows XP with firewalls put in place by AT&T to disallow wireless connectivity and prevent corporate espionage.

You know, child's play.

But happily there's the third class of tech supporter who, much like an athletic supporter, don't override but rather cradle and support you to help you do your job better. I have been raised to cherish, praise and even reward this type of behavior, usually with baked goods.

I had an issue with an iPod accessory this week and after trying what I could think of n exhausting the online technical documentation, I called a help number. Took maybe 5 minutes. Dude on the other line heard my problem, laughed and said, "Well that's not right!" (One of my favorite phrases.) Got some advice, did a soft restart and boom, everything was fixed.

I have not had that experience with my mother's printer. AT&T is an evil, evil company and their software will randomly decide to delete all your added printers. Also, their tech support is in India and you need to go through three levels of management to get approval to ship it out; their are no "tech guys" at your semi-local office branch. They've set back every business they've purchased 20 years in policy and practice and as we continue to say, they are trying to run an internet telecommunications company like a phone company.

I will give up this writing nonsense and go back to school for my MBA, just so I can become powerful enough to buy AT&T and fire every asshole on their board of directors.

On the up-side, my mom seems to value my tech support services for this project at 5/3 my estimated rate, so, awesome.