OTHER PLANS

First it was the price reduction on the iPhone. It was to be expected that the price would drop. Most early adopters have to know that if they wait a bit they'll pay less. If they wait for a year, they'll pay even less and for a better product. So the people who lined up to be first and camped out in front of stores to get theirs were just doing what people have been doing since the great Cabbage Patch Doll craze in the eighties. That was the first incident of its sort that I remember, but since then there's been similar hysteria over Tickle Me Elmo and Playstation version something or other, just to name a couple. There didn't seem to be a manufactured shortage of iPhones so there wasn't much violence or black marketeering. It was just a need to be first and willingness to shell out more money than you really need to. I imagine the rancor was caused by the fact that Apple kind of violated a kind of rule of retail etiquette by dropping the price too much, too soon.

That was one thing. Incurring huge international calling charges while your e-mail updates your spam messages is probably another. Apparently there was something in the documentation somewhere that warned that taking your iPhone out of the USA could be very expensive even if you never turned it on, but the warning probably could have been a little more prominent. This will probably be sorted out the way that things usually are - with no one being really happy.

For the rest of us, it's an updated object lesson. Early adoption of gadgets is not for the faint of heart or thin of wallet. Personally, our household policy is to wait until it becomes a real problem not to have a thing before we actually go out and buy one. My husband was a computer programmer for 30 years and we didn't have a fully functional PC in the house until Windows 95 came out. And of course it cost about 5 times as much as our current, much, much better one. My husband no doubt came to his late adopter point of view through his experience with quadraphonic sound in the 70's. He bought the equipment as soon he was able, which was very close to the time that it abandoned as a home audio technology.

I guess Opera restored all the inboxes that had lost messages. In my case they did too good a job. I'd just deleted all the old messages and now they're all back. Even the one spam message from a now banned user. I guess I'll let them sit for a day or so and see if they disappear on their own again.

Today was obscenely gorgeous. The weather was truly perfect here. That's not so common in August, which I general associate with muggy heat broken up by occasional torrential rain, with heat. Today was all deep blue sky with a few fluffy little clouds, temperatures in the 70's (that's Fahrenheit, of course. 75 Celsius wouldn't be so pleasant.) I felt guilty not being out on a nature walk or something. I did get out to the supermarket. It's Saturday. Stuff has to get done. We did manage to find some time to hang out in the backyard with the grandkids. It was a great day for just about anything.

Tomorrow there should be new air conditioners installed here by the time I get home from work. Should be. I'm not counting on it, though. One of them was already delivered once. It was the kind meant for slider type windows and although I did give the nice college student who waited on us the right measurements, as it turns out, it didn't fit. I didn't think it would, but he was so confident about the whole thing that I was swayed. We bought these at a local chain that's been supplying the region with appliances since Noah needed a matched washer/dryer set for the Ark. It used to be that, while the salespeople might be a little over-eager, they did the job fulltime and knew the product lines pretty well. You could ask questions. They'd answer them. It worked out that way. Now it seems that's not happening anymore. The college student was very nice, very bright - he's going to a good school, too. But you can bet that home appliances aren't even in his radar for a future career and he doesn't know a whole lot about them now. When we went back to the store to get the situation rectified we figured we might get someone who was in appliances for the long haul, but no. A gentleman who was around my age (probably a refugee from a career that's recently become obsolete) came forward to help but said the whole thing looked complicated and kindly located our original sales student. Thanks a heap.

So, I'm not optimistic about tomorrow's mission being accomplished. I wasn't even sure we should do it at all. We have one air conditioner now. It's being replaced. It works great unless it's really hot out. I'm hoping that the next one will even work on hot days, but I did feel kind of guilty about the whole thing. Air conditioning is not environmentally friendly. Probably we could learn to do without it. I go back far enough to remember when almost no one I knew had a home air conditioner. I thought long and hard about how we coped with the heat in the good old days. And then I remembered. We were really, really hot. Sometimes we had heart attacks, but only occasionally. We used fans. We still do. But if all you have is hot air, they mostly push the hot air around. Drug stores and other shops that were air conditioned let you know it with a door decal. The Kool cigarettes penguin announced, "Come in, it's Kool inside." Sometimes that's all you needed to see. People went to the movies a lot. By the time I was a kid most movies were air conditioned. The summer I was expecting my daughter, the movie theater the only place I got any sleep. My husband said the snoring was a problem, but it didn't bother me any.

So, we're going to be air conditioned again, assuming that the logistics ever get worked out.

The Sun has stirred things up by running an article headlined, Why we must close the net which confusingly carries the byline "Sir Elton John" even though it speaks of mainly entirely in the third person, employs quotes when using his words and is signed CAROLINE IGGULDEN. The article consists of somewhat related quotes strung together in semi-random fashion, so I'm not sure whether it conveys Sir Elton's sentiments accurately or not. This might be the part that got people talking about it:

“I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.

“There’s too much technology available.

“I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting than it is today.”

Thing is, we had that experiment. It was called "all the years before the internet was developed". Musical results were mixed.