30.8.05

I just gotta say, in spite of how callous it might sound: the flooding in New Orleans? Don't care. There might be much gnashing of teeth and lamenting going on, but most people don't care. It speaks volumes when the focus is on New Orleans when Mississippi got hit harder. I especially don't care about New Orleans because it's a city built in a swamp, below sea level, on a floodplain, at the mouth of a major river, in an area that gets hit by a major hurricane at least once a year. That's just asking for trouble.

posted by Eric @ 2:16 PM 1 comments

24.8.05

As I look back on what I used to write about, the best posts were the ones where I was bitching about something. This requires me to get worked up about something. For example, I could get worked up about the fact that a very visible Christian leader called for the assasination of the president of Venezuela? Sure, he's now retracted the statement, but the fact remains that it was said. The thing is, though, I can't bring myself to care.

Apathy is my new default state. I recently made fun of a coworker, saying that she didn't care about the starving kids in Africa. Upon the retort of "neither do you," I wholeheartedly agreed. And it's true. I don't care. I won't pretend to give a damn, because I don't. I don't care about the starving people in the US, China, Japan, Russia, whatever. Why would I care about them in Africa? Frankly, most people don't care about much of anything outside of their own little bubble. I know I don't. Maybe it's just me, but I highly doubt that most people care if someone gets shot on the other side of the world. Even if it's our own soldiers getting shot in Iraq when we arguably shouldn't even be there, people just don't care enough to do a damn thing about it.

That guy that just got hit by a car in some country? I don't care. The kid that just got kidnapped? I want to say I care, but I don't. In the end, it's all false sympathy and empty platitudes said to make us feel better about not giving a rat's ass, but it doesn't mean much. Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and there are only a few out there that back up their words with actions. The best I can do is be honest about it to myself.

Hell, you likely don't care about all the stuff I've just written, but it's ok, because I don't really care about your opinion either.

Sarcasm is hard to convey in text form.

posted by Eric @ 10:55 PM 1 comments

14.8.05

The venerable CRT has served us well, but at larger sizes, it becomes unwieldy. At roughly 150 pounds for a 22" screen, going large has dire consequences for portability. Sure, you aren't carrying around one all day, but just moving it to a different room becomes an adventure when you have 36" of CRT. Enter the LCD. It is slim, light, and quite impressive to behold. Oh, but look, all of a sudden color reproduction sucks, and black levels are terrible. Can't have everything, I guess.

Oh wait, but we can! Sure, this technology isn't ready for primetime, but once it's ready, it should even show up plasma as the most impressive of display technologies. SED, or Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, keeps all the good things about CRTs, like their color reproduction and blacks, but does away with the weight that makes LCDs attractive. Hopefully they will keep the other advantage that LCDs have - the fact that they are always geometrically perfect and you never have to worry about convergence.

If that's not enough for you, imagine a rollable display, powered by OLED technology. That is, Organic Light-Emitting Diode. If there's anything more impressive than a display that has the best of the CRT and LCD worlds, it's a display that is about as thick as a piece of good paper. You can literally put these just about anywhere, and the possibilities are endless. Isn't technology grand?

posted by Eric @ 3:33 PM 0 comments