5 posts tagged “observations”
My trusty iPod Nano (generation 1) served me pretty well. I didn’t use it every day, but I did use it extensively on trips and in the car occasionally. Yes, I did have to swaddle it in thick heavy plastic to protect its scratchable body and face. Yes, I did have to use it with the backlight turned off in order to get more than 1/2 the promised battery life. But, as my first iPod, it certainly was cool. Now, it is dead. When we got back from Hong Kong, I turned it on, and the display was all messed up. The bottom half of the screen was frozen in a pattern that looked like a UPC code, and the right upped quadrant was blank. I hadn’t done anything to it, but i figured that somehow the screen must have been broken (which seemed unlikely given its protective plastic suit that it wears all the time). Well, I went off to class, and when I got back to my desk, the battery had gone dead. I tried to charge it. Nothing. OK, not exactly nothing — a high pitched squeal. It could have been the sound of a tiny whirring hard drive, except the Nano doesn’t have a disk drive. I have no idea what it is. It doesn’t charge. It doesn’t reset. It doesn’t do anything but sit in darkness or squeal when plugged in. I guess I’ll take it by the local Apple store and see if they’ll do anything for me, but I don’t hold out much hope since they don’t even know where to lookup the meaning of “customer service”. Oh yes, and it’s conveniently out of warranty. Silly me, my wife is getting me a new Nano for Christmas and I got myself a matchbox-sized new Shuffle to work out with, so I’m hooked on iCrack. R.I.P. iPod Nano #1. Long live iPod Nano #2 (or at least more than two months past its warranty running out).
I tried to go by my local bank, TrustOne Bank, to get some crisp currency for my godson’s present. I dropped by just after 3 p.m. yesterday and found them locked up tight. On the door was a sign, letting us customers know that they would be closing at 2 p.m. Why? Don’t they think their customers might need to transact some business before the long holiday weekend? Maybe they should have even stayed open late? Nope. Yet another business that seems to place the convenience of their staff above the convenience of their customers.
Well, they’ve made me think about why I even need a local bank account if my local branch isn’t going to be open when I need them. Maybe I don’t need them at all.
60 hours in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving break.
See the fun! (we must have done something other than eat, but not much…)
Boing Boing, one of my daily reads, posted about a new book by former Talking Heads leader, David Byrne. The book is called Arboretum, and is described as a “collection of drawings/trees/maps.” The Boing Boing post included the illustration below as an example.
I guess it’s long hours spent proofreading, but even with the tiny type, the thing that jumped out from the illustration was “Virtual Spontenaity”. Oops! “Spontenaity” is not a word. “Spontaneity” is. The reason this seemed obvious to me is that “spontaneity” comes from “spontaneous” and there’s no question there whether it’s an “a” or an “e” following the “spont-”.
Now, I make errors in my writings and blogs with alarming frequency, but I try not to preserve mine for posterity.
“It’s printed in a black-and-silver duotone for an uncanny graphite finish that preserves all the erasures and scribbles of the originals.”
Too bad one of the erasures wasn’t “spontenaity”.
An article from Yomiuri Online quotes a survey of 1741 Japanese on their attitudes towards eating US beef.
“Asked whether they want to eat U.S. beef, nearly 90 percent of respondents had negative views, with 45 percent of the respondents saying they did not want to eat it, and 43 percent saying they would like to decide after more consideration. Only 10 percent of the respondents said they wanted to eat U.S. beef.”
At our favorite Japanese fast-food beef haunt, Matsuya, they’ve been serving Australian and Japanese domestic beef since the ban on US beef imports. Prior to the import ban, US beef was a staple on the Matsuya menu. I didn’t like the Australian beef I had at Matsuya (too fatty, though that could have just been a particular batch), but the Japanese beef (which is priced at a premium) was excellent.
US beef exporters are going to have a tough time breaking back into the Japanese market, but if the US beef industry were more responsive to customers’ concerns about food safety and less reliant on lobbying trade groups, they might have made a lot more money in the future.
