I constantly find reasons never, ever to trust technology enough to become an astronaut.
Reason #1: The iPod-cum-brick. Today, there was an Adobe User Group meeting. On the way across the oval (which has recently become an uncrossable sea thanks to constantly freezing and melting ice sheets which once were snow. It’s pretty neat, because your shoes simultaneously come into contact with 1) water 2) ice and 3) mud, which means that you can get your shoes muddy, soak your feet, and fall on your ass, all at the same time!), I was listening to it just fine. Full charge, no problems, no skipping, nada. I put it away for the meeting. On the way back, the damn thing wouldn’t do anything! No apple screen, no iPod-sticking-his-tongue-out, nothing. I tried to fix it at home, first plugging it into its power adapter. No dice. Then my laptop’s USB. Still, nothing. Reset, reset, reset — zilch. The ‘5 R’s’ yielded no results. So now I apparently have a dead iPod. The worst part is that this isn’t the first time this has happened! About a month ago, I actually had to call tech support. For some reason (and this is before I got through, so the tech-guy-gadget-fixing-auro wasn’t in effect yet), on my twentieth attempt at restarting it (hold-on, hold-off, Menu and Center pressed and held together), it started working. Oh, yeah, and this isn’t even my first iPod! My first one died one day for similarly inexplicable reasons. Gee, Apple, you’d think for a grand total of $650 dollars I could possibly not by an unreliable piece of crap… twice.
Reason #2: Retarded torrents. For some reason (possibly the alignment of the moons), every time I’m downloading sweet TV shows via BitTorrent, nothing works. Usually, setting my client’s encryption to forced or enabled (whichever it currently is not set to) cures the problem. Not tonight. I tried four or five times, then snagged a torrent I knew would have seeds, all to no avail. So I got started on Reason #3 (see below) and came back to it after half an hour when — voilà — it started downloading. Of course, my episode of Heroes was going at 100 k/sec last night, but now, with only a third left, it was going at 20 k/sec, despite having the same number of seeds.
Don’t you love that? It seems that, regardless of your method of illicit p2p download (BitTorrent, Gnutella, even ancient Napster), you always wind up having 5 minutes left on your download for at least an hour, often more time. I assume my seeders are all d-bags who coordinate their efforts to frustrate me just enough so that I come back for next week’s episode.
Reason #3: Tried to write a paper about Python (the language, not the aeronautical beast). Finished it. Tried to upload it with the shitty Blackboard upload applet (that’s right! Start the JVM to accomplish something that can be done with a plain old HTML form!). Guess what? FireFox crashed! Tried in IE — now the whole box crashes! And I’m not running a bunch of crap software, as far as I know. After the restart, it went right up. But I found it amusing that submitting the paper took about 3% of the entire time spent on the damn thing.
Wait. It wasn’t amusing. It PISSED ME OFF.
By the way, while writing this I must have clicked out of the form text area and tried to delete something, because I hit backspace and immediately navigated away from the page. My blood boiled for half a second as I realized I might have lost this entire rant. To Blogger’s credit, it did warn me. But I’m so used to irritating popup messages that I typically click through familiar ones without thinking them through. Thankfully, I’m paranoid enough to copy and paste (
just did it) after ever sentence as a poor man’s save.
And I was going to try to install Windows Vista on my computer tonight. With my tech karma right now, the setup would probably error out so immensely, so enormously that I’d wind up reformatting my Mac’s hard drive, too.
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