Crashing Clockwise #550: ‘Strap In and Forget My Email’
The tech podcast that just had its gears oiled!
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Mikah Sargent: What is one of the first delightful things you remember doing on the World Wide Web?
Tinkering with, breaking, and eventually fixing my iServ webmail. Turns out email has always been my love language.
It’s actually quite difficult to remember how I got started with the internet and doing what, but I sure do have that dial-up tone burned into my brain!
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Christina Warren: What was your worst or most disappointing tech product that you’ve ever owned or reviewed?
The one that’s sprung to mind is a recent disappointment. My wife and I received a Roomba as a Christmas gift, which I was pretty psyched for because, in a house with a long-haired dog, cat, and wife, the floors are difficult to keep clean. But between the layout of our furniture and a few rugs, the Roomba just couldn’t handle our home. On every test, it would get stuck. And when I dislodged it, it could never find its own way back home to the charger. Way more trouble than it was worth, so now it’s sat unused for months in a corner of our dining room.
(I will say, although my experience hasn’t been as bad as it sounds like Mike’s has been, I’ve been disappointed by the clarity and comfort issues of the Apple Vision Pro.)
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Dan Moren: How much time do you spend trying to get a tech product to work or troubleshooting a product you have before you throw up your hands?
I’m like a dog with a bone when it comes to troubleshooting. Partly due to a general dislike of dealing with support chats/calls, and partly because I like to be self-sufficient. It always seems like the next little thing will solve all my issues, and I can follow that rabbit hole for a long time before I give up.
For example, I months without cellular capabilities on my Apple Watch because I was sure resetting this or that, restoring, turning the device off and on, or some combination of them would eventually lead to success.
If I get to the point where I do call tech support, I’ve mostly given up and assume the thing will never work again.
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Jason Howell: What’s the oldest piece of working technology that you still use regularly, or semi-regularly, and how did you acquire it?
I don’t have a go-to answer on this one. I guess I don’t hang onto old tech for very long. One thing that comes to mind is a HyperDrive USB-hub/Qi charging gadget that I backed on Kickstarter back in the day. It used to be pretty key to my computing life when I rocked the 12-inch, one-port MacBook. It’s how I plugged in my display, charged the laptop, and connected any peripherals. Nowadays, it’s a sometimes resting zone for my AirPods to charge and very occasionally how I more easily plug in a thumb drive to my Mac mini.
Or maybe my Quip toothbrush. That’s got to have been going for close to a decade now.
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Bonus Topic: What’s your least favorite song by one of your favorite artists?
I’m sure there are better (worse?) examples, but I vividly remember deleting the song “Mama” from my iTunes copy of the seminal The Black Parade album by My Chemical Romance. I just couldn’t handle the sharp-and-dark-yet-polka-like motif in the middle of an otherwise outstanding record.
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Overtime Topic: Are you a regular user or dabbler with emulators?
Pretty much zero, zilch, nada experience with game emulation specifically or other emulation generally. The closest I got was freshman year in college when I brought back my GameBoy Advanced from home after Christmas break so that my roommate and I could play Pokémon together. But that was an original game cartridge played on its original hardware, so…yeah, I don’t think that counts.
I did download Delta from the App Store just so I would have a copy in case it gets taken down, but I don’t have any games to play on it. If I come across those old GameBoy cartridges, I might try to download the ROMs so I could pick up my old Pokémon games yet again, but I doubt I’ll ever get around to it.
It’s been a minute since I’ve been “on the show”. For some reason, I told myself that I would do a post for every single show, so when I got behind and they started piling up, I lost motivation. But this is my blog and I don’t owe anyone anything with it. So I’ll just write these as I can — hopefully often! — and not put so much pressure on keeping up. 🙂 But good to be back.