The Blog

Over the past few years I’ve written about supposed tech innovations that range from the solution-in-search-of-a-problem kind to the head-scratchingly useless. But here’s one that makes me go full-on scooby-doo head-tilt: A phone app that delays your ability to view photos that you just took. Apparently, people are longing for the good old days when you dropped your film off at the drug store and picked up the pictures a few days later only to see that your thumb has obscured everything.

I have been watching several seasons of “House of Cards” on Netflix. The show details the Machiavellian machinations (wow, what an alliteration if I do say so myself) of a fictional US Senator from South Carolina and his wife as they navigate the political quagmire of Washington DC by being the two biggest ‘gators in the swamp. My wife and I started watching it a few years ago but then stopped when Kevin Spacey was accused of some horrendous personal behavior and Netflix paused the series while it cut ties with Spacey.

One of my speech class students chose an interesting topic for her persuasive speech: Communism versus Capitalism. Normally students would choose the “go ‘merica” capitalism side. But this student didn’t. She chose to, carefully, illustrate that communism isn’t the all-out failure that we think it is. As a caveat, this student told us that, for the purposes of her speech, she would be using communism and socialism interchangeably. With this strategy, she could lump Cuba, Burkina Faso and the Scandinavian countries together as examples of successful communism.

I’ve been binge-watching a show about the wild west days of personal computers and the birth of the internet…….the early to mid-eighties through the early nineties. Halt and Catch Fire, an original series on the AMC cable network beginning in 2014 is now available on Netflix. The show ran for four years and follows a motley bunch from their first success – designing and programming a portable computer that weighs less than 15 pounds – to their move to Silicon Valley where earthquakes weren’t the only thing shaking the world.

….cancelled by the disruption of the pandemic. Stay with me here.

Well, since last fall, we have had Zoom political conventions, dueling town hall meetings in place of a second Presidential debate, a lot of excitement and concern over voting, a multitude of failed court challenges to elections results, and then an actual insurrection with intent to perhaps apprehend and execute some of the people in direct line of succession to the President.  Then came the Biden/Harris inauguration, where President Biden asked us all to embrace unity.  Unity.