On the Contrary

As I try to fill my idle hours ignoring my aching knee, my mind turns to a stream of random thoughts about things in general.  Remember the movie, Night Shift, where Michael Keaton was a morgue technician who would brainstorm into his tape recorder, “If we feed tuna mayonnaise, we could harvest tuna salad”?  Well that is the general idea.  So here is some of the stuff that is going through my mind.

When I got home from hospital, the power was out.  Perfect.  I am woozy, on crutches, need to ice the surgery on my knee, and the power is out. Up here that is a common occurrence.  We get a storm, and then the power is out.  Could be for several days.  I think that says something about the reliability of our systems in the greatest nation in the world, but I will save that for another day.  Or maybe I won’t.  I am wondering why PG&E can’t build more reliable power girds that are not susceptible to even minor wind and rain.  Then I get to thinking about maybe a young family that can barely get by.  They go to Costco and buy in bulk to save money and then their freezer goes out with the power and they loose everything.  Where is the penalty for PG&E as a young family is wiped out through no fault of their own?  Then I think, “Why not charge them a tariff  for days the power is shut off?  Not only do they lose income while the meters aren’t spinning, but they spin in reverse.  You think that would be enough incentive for them to build more reliable systems?

In the same line of thinking on the power, I decided enough is enough and that I would provide the house with a backup generator for the critical systems (freezer, refrigerator, some lights, blower on the fireplace, TV/internet).  Now once again, wouldn’t you think that we should design our power systems so that it is easy to add an external power system?  You need a place to plug your generator into your house electrical system, and isolate the gird and the systems you are not powering.  This would have been fairly simple when one was building the house, but retrofitting is a bitch.  So once again I have to ask myself, in the greatest country on earth, why are our designs so penny wise and dollar stupid?

Then there is my favorite.  If you have a satellite radio or a GPS that wants to talk to you through your car stereo, you are probably using an FM tuner that sends the signals to your car stereo over an unused frequency.  The trouble is an unused frequency in one part of your driving region is not an unused frequency in another part of your driving region.  Why oh why do not all car audio systems come with a standard audio input that is hard wired to simplify our lives and improve the quality of the audio?  An Ipod interface should be standard.  Why is this so hard to figure out?

Then I could launch on cell phone reception.  Why is it that every important call gets dropped or the reception is poor even if you are in downtown San Francisco?  Can’t we do better than that?  The fact that we have come to expect and accept such poor performance is amazing to me.  Then there is my internet connection.  I live in the boonies so no high speed options other than satellite and they are quickly alienating me.  They have what they call a “Fair Access Policy” so that if you download files too big, they throttle you back to the speed of a dial up modem.  That would seem fair, but since most automatic updates of your computer operating system exceed these measly capacities, you are always operating in a slow down mode.  This is service?  This is high speed access?  This is crap and we are starting to think it is normal.

News yesterday was exceptional.  The major media outlets chased around a balloon all day while important stories were ignored.  Of course as John Stewart so ably reported, the major media outlets don’t have time to fact check moron statements by Republicans while they fact checked SNL’s Obama humor.  We are in great shape aren’t we?  Oh did I mention they are having a beg-a-thon on NPR today.  Help, Help, Help.  I am going crazy.