Thursday, August 26, 2010

The drawbacks of progress

I am pretty accustomed to finding out that whenever I upgrade my technology, I lose something I liked and was used to. What the nerds who make the stuff value and what pedestrian me values are apparently not the same.

Microsoft  used to have a very nice little graphics editing program. It did almost everything I wanted. Eventually they not only stopped making it but made it incompatible with newer versions of MS. WTF?

My biggest gripe was with cellphones. My primitive phone, which I lost by dropping it into the garbage along with my lunch debris one day at the Serramonte Mall food court, enabled me to have the phone ring once or twice and then go silent, while still giving me 20 seconds or so before it went to voicemail. Very very useful.  I could be in a session or meeting and know that I had a call to get later and still not interrupt the flow of my present engagement. Do you think you can do that now? Forget it. It rings endlessly and you have shut it down manually or you put it on vibe and, if you're me, don't know the call came in.

Apple is not immune to this phenomenon. Now that I have my first Apple item, the iPhone 16G 3g. I discover that you cannot delete an individual recent call from the list of recent calls. All or nothing. Amazing. And there is no video cam. Who knew? More discoveries, doubtless, await.

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