Equipment Change Proposal: Cameras, cell phones, and other electronic junk

This post is rage against the electronic machine, and it probably ain't gonna be pretty.

My bane in life is that nothing electronic lasts around me, and that shit is for real. I'm waiting for the CIA to knock on my door with a one-way ticket to China for a new job sitting in an office across the street from the servers for their intelligence agency. If you want connectivity problems in a building, around office computers, or around people with cell phones, just sit my happy ass twelve feet away and it will happen. Mrs. CTone has commented that I have a magnet in my head.

Now that that is out of the way, whomever designs cameras, cell phones, and other electronic doodads can go blow a goat. Tonight the fam and I were decorating the ol' Christmas tree, you know, something that only happens once a year, and the only working camera in the house ironically was the one in my brand new but barely functioning cell phone; my seventh in two years. OK, technically my sixth as one of them - a BlackBerry - was slain dead by a 33" tire on my XTerra due to the shitty engineering of the bastards at Maxpedition.

Why yes, bitterness IS my middle name. How did you know?

Flashback to yesterday: I picked up the not-quite-two-year-old Sony A300 DSLR camera to take some pictures of the little ones, and when I turned the thing on it made this "Brrrrrraaaaaaaaappppppp" sound that emanated from the lens. Did the same thing when I turned it off. I went to reach for it tonight as it was a picture taking moment, with the kids hanging ornaments on the tree and all, and remembered that the Sony happened to not be capable of doing its designed duty due to suckage. My old standby is my shitty Canon PowerShit SD750 that had to be sent back to the factory brand new, right out of the package. . . . . .twice. Well, that camera sucks too! Turning it on gave me a white screen. It still makes a flash, and you can zoom in and out, but no picture takey takey.

My relationship with the PowerShit is not a nice one; the first time I used it was on a trip to Germany, and out of almost a thousand pictures taken, about a hundred of them you could make out what they were.

Mr. Goat, I am pleased to introduce you to the folks at Canon.

My new cell phone is a Samsung Captivate with Android operating system, and it randomly gets so hot sitting idle on my desk at work that it warns me to turn it off or it will burn up. Also, it turns itself off about once a week for no reason at all that I can establish. WTF?

I don't know much about low voltage electronics other than they are unreliable as hell. Laptops are a perfect example; anything with Windows in it only lasts about three months for me. That's not a lie. The only reason -- Only. Reason. -- that I no longer do Movie Guns anymore is because out of the three laptops that I own, and two desktops that I did own, none of them stay functioning long enough for me to do a post. Either the CD/DVD drive burns the fuck up the first time I use it, or Windows Media Player shits the bed (every time; I was burning the second CD I ever attempted in my new work laptop the day before yesterday and WMP took an unrecoverable dive. It does not work anymore), or the operating system crashes (often), or an update installs a driver that doesn't work and the computer won't boot.

I can't tell you how much moolah I would drop down for some tickets to watch a pride of syphilis afflicted lions tear apart the whole Microsoft staff in one horrific bloody massacre. I'd even spend the ten bucks for some stale popcorn.

I may need a custom made tinfoil hat to shield my magnet from my electronics, or the folks making em' need to figure this shit out and make them not suck. It's true that I may be a mutant - I have DVD players that don't work, cell phones that don't work; I've seen every register at my local Wal-Mart reboot simultaneously at the very moment I swiped my bank card . . . .twice (once while the Mrs. and I were dating and, no shit, I was right then telling her about how I have some sort of issue around electronics).

The chances though that it's really me are slim, while the chances of mankind making mother boards and microchips so small that the copper running through them grow from the heat and short out are startlingly high. It speaks volumes though, to me anyways, that there are so many things that we humans use day-to-day that are just not built to last. If they were, then I wouldn't have so much to bitch about, now would I? What has to be done or not done for some people to build useful stuff that doesn't fail when you need it? Why is it that products used nowadays that has low amounts of voltage running through it barely seem to make it through the year? Is it because technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that it's better to just buy a new phone every year than update it?

I will make it my Christmas wish to have one electronic gizmo last the full 2011 year, or the fuckers that build the stuff will again hear my wrath!