Month: December 2010

Categories
Should We Talk About The Weather?

Tornado season

This morning’s deadly surprise was yet another reminder that the 2010 Arkansas tornado season doesn’t end until December 31st, 2010.

I have to admit to having a certain keep-the-blinders-on-and-focus admiration for the guy who stuck to his guns and was milking his cow when the storm hit. Hate the price tag on that bucket of milk, though.

But we can rest easy for a little bit. The 2011 Arkansas tornado season doesn’t start until January 1st.

By the way, if anyone in the government wants to know how to spend some stimulus money, this passage of the news item contains some vital clues:

There was no warning for the residents of Cincinnati. The closest tornado sirens are about 12 miles away in Lincoln. People who live here said they can’t hear those sirens here. They said they knew it was over when it went silent.

… Read more
Categories
Gadgetology

Gadget bad: the tablet that broke in a month

Riker shatters into A ZILLION PIECES.I’m pretty protective of my gadgetry, especially since I have more of it on my person at any given moment than the average bear does. Also, I’m not exactly loaded with money, so the gadgets I have are the gadgets I’ve got – I’m generally not in a position to replace stuff very quickly (see also: the Avid that’s been out of commission for most of 2010).

But this is beyond the pale. Not even a month after I bought the Sylvania wi-fi tablet, I grabbed it one night and saw… this.

Sylvania Wi-Fi Tablet

As visible as the crack is from certain angles, you can’t feel it from the surface, because it isn’t on the outer layer, nor does it affect the display itself. The crack is right across the touchscreen sensor. At its “epicenter”, you have absolutely no touchscreen function right on the crack. Starting about about half an inch our, the touchscreen does work, but its calibration is way off, and remains that way on the rest of the functioning portion of the screen.

At least that’s how it was at first when I started writing this blog entry. Now, a few days later, the touchscren doesn’t function at all. For a tablet, that’s death – the touchscreen is its function, and without that it’s just about useless.

And it gets even better.

The company listed in the back of the manual as the customer’s point of contact for technical issues is Digital Gadgets in Monroe, New Jersey. Now, granted, at the moment, New Jersey is (A) an iceberg, and (2) an iceberg that’s just come out of the Christmas holidays. I’m trying to be patient and understanding of that. But this problem began before Christmas, and my attempts to communicate with them were… spectacularly unsuccessful. Their 888 phone number directed me to their web site. Their web site directs me to a trouble ticket system. I open a ticket, describing the problem in great detail.

Within a few hours, I’m sent an e-mail that my ticket is closed, but I have to follow this link to their website to see it.

Problem: the link produces an “invalid login” result at their site. In other words, their trouble ticket system isn’t working.

Only half-jokingly, I submitted another trouble ticket for that. And that’s where things stand right now.

I know this thing was fairly cheap on the gadget price scale, but I expect it to last more than a month. This didn’t. And that’s incredibly disappointing.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology

Gadget good: Little E gets a camera

Edison Carter, live and directChristmas this year didn’t go quite as planned, as I wound up having to work most of the day on short notice. We opened gifts at our house on Christmas Eve. The runaway favorite among Little E’s goodies was his very own digital camera.

To say that he has photography in his blood is probably something of an understatement. I’m a video production geek, and both my and my wife’s maternal grandfathers were professional photographers. I remember going to my Grandpa Harvey’s place in New Jersey and seeing all of his photo gear and thinking that maybe I did have a kindred spirit in my family after all.

Little E’s camera is a Little Tykes model, built to withstand a not-inconsiderable amount of punishment. It has 640×480 resolution and can hold 1,000 pictures in its flash memory. There’s a “trap door” that hides a USB connector so these pictures can be dumped to the nearest computer. I’ve made it a point to try to “borrow” the camera every couple of days while the little guy’s asleep (even though he complains bitterly about not being able to sleep with it) to check out his work.

The verdict: he’s three years old and he’s right on the edge of cranking out photos that aren’t documents of blurry motion. As soon as he gets a handle on the basics, he’s going to be leaps and bounds ahead of me in this department.

I think back to my friend Jason and Mike, who ran the darkroom in the yearbook department when I was in high school. I wonder how old they were when they first had something like a Polaroid instamatic camera thrust into their hands. My son is not even going to have to worry about developing pictures, emulsion fluid, or any of that. He is never going to have worked with film. Anything he does will have always been in the digital realm.

I have some useful ‘shopping skills that I can pass on to him as he gets older, but I have no doubt he’ll quickly exceed my abilities there too. I hope so.

One other thing: if one needs an example of how far digital photography has come, consider this. My first digital camera, purchased in late 1999, was a Sony Mavica, or as I affectionately call it these days, the “floppycam.” It used 3.5″ floppies to save its pictures. These days, you can’t find a computer that can accept or read 3.5″ floppies. So the boy’s first camera is the equivalent of the state of the art about a decade ago – no, actually, in terms of storage and data management, it’s superior to my first digital camera.

My first digital camera and my son's first digital camera - equals

I really am getting old – by the time I get anywhere near the state of the art, the state of the art changes its address and doesn’t leave a forwarding notice.

Here, then, are some of Little E’s first pictures. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Funny Stuff

You keep using that word

Pizza the Hut!Conversation with the little guy on the way home today:

LITTLE E: I want to go home and eat pizza.
ME: I think Mom’s already got dinner planned.
LITTLE E: But I don’t like dinner. I don’t like it!
ME: Dinner isn’t pizza or green beans. Dinner is what time you eat at night. You like dinner just fine.
LITTLE E: I don’t like dinner.
ME: Do you like to eat food?
LITTLE E: Yes.
ME: Then trust me, you like dinner. At dinnertime, you get to eat food.
[pause]
LITTLE E: I don’t like to eat food.
ME: Great – that’ll save us a lot out of our budget. Thanks, buddy!

Me and Little E, solving the world’s problems together since 2007. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.… Read more