High Tech, Low Tech, and On-line Afflictions

My junior year of college I worked as a spy. At the age of 21, I liked to refer to myself as The Youngest Spy in the World. There was no real way of knowing if this was true or not.

There was no Facebook.

This was 1989. Before the Internet. Before hostesses stopped asking “Smoking or non?” and before toothbrushes started looking like sneakers. 

Today, kids probably have more opportunities to become spies at an earlier age because kids now do everything at an earlier age. They go through puberty earlier, they experiment with sex at an earlier age and they probably get hired as secret agents earlier, too. Which means I probably no longer hold the unique distinction as being the guy who was once The Youngest Spy in the World.

It is no surprise to anyone who knows me, that I received a 3rd Generation iPad on Friday. One thing I immediately noticed in the media upon its release, is how so many people were quick to say it wasn't that big of an upgrade. They could not be more wrong. Late in the day, I heard people say they saw Walmart had them in stock so they must not be selling. People don't lineup at Walmart or Target for an iPad. They go to an Apple store. Smart people order it in advance and have FedEx deliver it right to their house. Why waste your gas and time?

Upon first perusal it looks the same as the iPad2. I say, why change perfection.  Under the hood I think there's a lot of amazing features that have been added to this version that make the upgrade worthwhile.

The Screen: It initially looks like what's on the iPad2; however, it will quickly make you remember the day when you first saw HDTV and realized you could never go back to a regular television. It's even more apparent if you compare the new to the old.  Even two days later it's amazing to see they were able to get such a crystal-clear screen inside this small device.

My husband’s last name is Einbinder.  We’ve always assumed the German translation (one binder) meant that it was the moniker for the trade of bookbinding. It’s a rare name. In fact the only other person we’ve ever met with any connection to that name is the movie director Mike Binder. One day, years ago, at the Pumpkin Patch in our neighborhood, we struck up a conversation with him.  Blank Man, a movie he directed, was absolutely the funniest movie that year.  It still holds up.  David Allen Grier kills in it.  Of course, he always kills. It turned out that Mike’s last name was shortened from Einbinder.  Since then, when we see him places, we exchange that twinkle of recognition of our ‘kinship’.

Recently I decided my copy of The Joy of Cooking deserved better than duct tape holding it together.  Months ago I’d read an article in Daily Candy about Charlene Matthews who practiced the lost art of bookbinding. I put it in my email archives under “of interest”. I’m actually getting things done on my list of long avoided tasks and this was one of them.  What an adventure. 

When was it ok to just blithely accept that products are now engineered for obsolescence? Case in point: our stinkin’ Panasonic cordless phones!!!

We were perfectly happy with our KX-TGA650B Panasonic cordless phone when one day we found one of the handsets sprawled on the living room floor, like eviscerated lion prey. The antennae had been mangled by our dearly departed dog Satchmo. Here’s the evil part; not only had that model become obsolete, but once you’ve lost the use of one handset, you have to replace the whole effing system!

Now we have the Panasonic KX-TGA939T. We have 4 around the house and I hate it! The handset in my office, where I do all my work, is haunted. At first it was just an irritating quirk it had where if my ear was close enough to the receiver, my mouth wasn’t close enough for people to hear me and vice versa. So, my husband suggested I put all my calls on speaker. Personally, I think putting people on speaker makes everyone an automatic douche bag but what was I gonna do? And, it was no solution. The quality of the sound began to erode that way too!