The Habits We Are

I was telling someone yesterday that my guess is that heaven and hell
are actually the same place, and the difference between them is only
in a person's orientation to the afterlife--we spend a lifetime making ourselves
what we will be ever afterward.

To those electronic retail clerks who insist on selling the latest technologically advanced (and correspondingly complicated) smart phone to people who really only want, need, and/or can only handle a basic cel phone, I say...

BOOT TO THE HEAD!

I've been saying "no" to fads for a while.

I said "no" to a TV in my bedroom years ago. For a while, I had no TV at all. Even now, I don't watch network TV, and only sometimes watch my roomies set when it's on.

I refused to get a MySpace account. It disgusted me. I only have a Farcebook account under protest, and seldom visit it. I block all of the stupid games like Mafia Wars and FarmVille. I don't play Twitter games either (yes, they have them, and they are really irritating to find in your stream.)

I refuse to buy an iPhone, I consider it a piece of yuppie crap, shoddily engineered and manufactured by near slave labor, which makes my technophile friends angry with me, and thinking I'm a luddite. I don't own an iPod, if I need an MP3 player, I'll buy an inexpensive one that plays ordinary MP3s without demanding iTunes. I tend to have the same view of the iPad, or pretty much most of Apple's consumer oriented offerings: overpriced consumer crap.

I tend to take a dim view of anything that is heavily "branded", because the more the brand is emphasized, the less quality I figure is really there, and the less useful the item really is.

I own a crackberry, for example, but I got it for free, as a refurb, and it and the cell plan actually saves our household money and time. Yeah, it's a smartphone, but it had a feature set I could actually make use of. Otherwise, I had a plain phone for 4 years, and had no need to upgrade until my roomie got her matching one run over in a parking lot.

The latest gadget? Just say No - the money you save will be your own.

When it comes to email communication, Crackberries reign supreme. I find the layout and operation of them to be a bit more intuitive than other smartphones as well.

I wouldn't want an iPhone. If I ever wanted a portable entertainment center, I MIGHT invest in an iPod Touch, but that's as far as I wander down the Apple path.

My main issue with all things Apple is that while they try to make things as idiot-proof as possible, they tuck away all the system related stuff so that trouble shooting becomes highly anti-intuitive and even the tech-savvy are forced to rely on an Apple or Mac expert to help them when something goes wrong.

Oh, and I did also go through a long period without TV whilst living in the UK as I refused to pay over a 100 pounds a year in TV tax just to watch the likes of Eastenders or Coronation Street. :p

Even now, I still don't have cable. I rent DVDs when I have the time to watch them.

My spouse has a cellphone he uses for business. I use it when at cons out of town. Otherwise, I have no need for it.

We were into simplifying our lives before simplifying was cool. By staying in our small house, I always say we've saved ourselves two major moves: into the big house and out of the big house.

:)