Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Please Kill Me Now

Simultaneously feeling quite the fool, I am considering the purchase of some kind of reading tablet, maybe one of the Kindles. The mere consideration of this gives me a somewhat otherworldly feeling, as though I were viewing the event from afar. These new technologies, if one can generalize, generally sicken me.

None of this new technology lives up to its hype. Take this blog post, for instance. Do I own the copyright? Will I be able to access the copy in the future? Who knows? I am typing this in real time, with no back-up, so if someday there's a "pay wall," or a "software not supported" problem, that'll be that. (In a cooler frame of mind I save them all as Word documents, with appropriate back-up. I'm old fashioned, but I'm not stupid.)

Or am I? I'm typing on an Apple IMac, and although I really do love the interface and the display I must admit that I am convinced that Apple's major corporate emphasis is keeping the user from completely enjoying his own property. I just tried to make a CD of my own pictures, and although I did find, at last, the instructions on how to do so, and copied them out, and followed them assiduously, it was finally impossible to accomplish. I own an IPod, and I would dearly love to load the contents onto this Apple, but alas, that would be impossible. Apple is desperately concerned about so-called piracy evidently, so much so that it is willing to inconvenience nearly all of its dupes, I mean customers.

Maybe you could have done all this, but so what? Is new technology just for you? I ask for help sometimes, and I don't get it.

I then tried to print a couple of pictures myself, rather than having the CD to take to the store. I wanted to avoid this, because my printer makes me even more furious than the rest of my technology. It was cheap, the better to make the money on the always running out four colors of ink. Amazingly, printing only text uses up vast quantities of magenta, cyan and blue as well as the black. "Paper jam!" is my printer's middle name, especially with anything heavier than an Aerogram.

My deep conviction that I must jettison the printer to preserve my happiness led me in the first place to wonder if a Kindle would better serve me. All I want to do is pull text off of the 'Net and read it at my leisure. I don't really need the great reams of paper that I've been accumulating.

Oh, why do we struggle so? It'll all be over soon. Everything will be digitized, and everything "real" will disappear from the world. Get used to it! Digital is the Antichrist, but that's another story I suppose.

So, should I get a Kindle?

5 comments:

Aloki said...

Yes, you should.

fred c said...

What a succinct comment! Direct, and to the point. Thanks, Aloki!

Anonymous said...

I am typing this on my new Kindle Fire, an anniversary gift from my wife. For $200, it's pretty amazing. Just be prepared to have Amazon as your master, instead of Apple.
Ed

Anonymous said...

Hi Fred, yes you should get a kindle..i LLLLLOVVVE IT . have no space for books in our small apt, as you know, and i literally adore the idea of whispernet...from Italy it would be quite difficult for me to keep the pace with the literary (and non) output gushing out of the USA and the Brit Commonwealth... not to mention the cost.. sorry, but I've been reading more books than ever since amazonkindle has appeared on my horizon...i can take it anywhere, read it anywhere, buy books from anywhere in the world..gone are the days of my schlepping back home the books I would buy during our yearly trips to the US...get the kindle with keyboard, whispernet, 3G etc..and with the special ink screen..you can read it at the beach...no glare to speak of...kindle fire is a lot more but it doesn't have the special screen!! I also love your blog and your writing skills.....awesomely bravissimo. ciao Ony

fred c said...

Thanks for visiting, Ony! I love you! Keith and his wife surprised me with a Kindle Fire, so now all I have to do is figure out how to use it.