Musings of a happy scientist
It’s reading week, so instead of taking up your precious reading time, I’m going to post some pictures. I was up at Hart House Farm at the end of January for a retreat with Hot Yam! and again this past weekend for the Food-In Conference, so I thought I’d share a few pictures (click to enlarge) from the Hot Yam! retreat in today’s post and some pictures from the Food-In at a later date. More after the jump.
If your pocket calculator made a mistake every ten operations, would you still use it? Or if the brakes of your wheeled-vehicle of choice only worked 99.9% of the time, would you keep using it? Or what if one in every thirty flushes resulted in your toilette backing up and surprise alligators streaming out? After I lost all the data on my phone, save the Chuck Norris-like audio files, I started thinking about what technology I’ve abandoned because it was so unreliable that it was more trouble than it was worth, or “nonereliable” ((Yes, this entire blog post exists just so that I can make this word a “thing”)). More generally, I began to wonder what makes things or people so unreliable that we’re better off without them. So, in the blog post, I’m just thinking aloud, considering a few examples of things I consider to be unreliable and trying to determine some factors that influence whether I continue to rely on them.
A fair numbers of people are under the impression I don’t own a cellular phone. I do. ((I’ve had one for a decade, now. I’m just very bad at answering calls and haven’t figured out this “voicemail” business, so I usually don’t give out my number.)) In fact, as of September, I’ve been the unhappy owner of an Android phone that’s more “special” phone than smartphone. The reasons for my discontent, as I’ve alluded to in a past blog post, lie in both hardware and software. Two weeks ago, I noticed that a minor software update was available for my phone (version 2.1 to a more recent version 2.1) and I thought that it might at least help reduce the number of random crashes/reboots I was experiencing. I expected to be no worse off, in any case. Instead, this software update managed to sour my opinion of both WIND Mobile and Android.