The only time I get bad reception on my cell phone is every single time I try to use it. #technology

No offense to the friends and family who fit in the following category, but I've noticed that the people who tend to say things like "You can't trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it" are the same people who send email forwards full of made-up facts and outright lies. #technology

The guy in the cubicle adjacent to mine likes to call people, put it on speakerphone, and then shout entire conversations because he thinks the people on the other end can't hear him since he's not speaking directly into the phone's microphone.  I'm pretty sure they can hear you, buddy.  Everyone can hear you. #technology

About a year ago I got a netbook, a little laptop that's lightweight, cheap, and has great battery life.  But because of its size, it has some less-than-impressive hardware.  It doesn't have much RAM, and it's not great at playing games or things like that.  But it's great for simple web searching and light computing, which is exactly why I bought it and exactly what I use it for.  For some reason, it came pre-installed with Windows 7.  Like any new software iteration, Windows 7 is a bigger, fatter, slower version of its previous incarnations, and as such, requires significant hardware to feed its neverending gluttony.  So obviously what I'm getting at is that Windows 7 is the absolute worst operating system you can possibly put on a netbook.  Yesterday I was finally able to coax my netbook into letting me install Windows XP from a USB drive (since it has no CD drive), and now it's amazing.  It's blazing fast and everything just works.  I can't believe I dealt with Windows 7 for an entire year. #technology

I'm not a car person, and I'm not a car stereo person, but I recently installed an auxiliary adapter in my car's stock radio, and it was surprisingly easy.  Once I figured out it was possible, I bought an adapter online and found a video that showed how to take apart my dashboard.  With a screwdriver, a socket wrench, a laptop, and about 10 minutes of free time, I modified my car stereo so it can easily interface with an iPod or any other portable music player.  I'm amazed at how awesome I am.  And at how awesome the internet is. #technology

Websites with information about alcohol, tobacco, or "other" often have an age verification system that asks the user to either confirm they're of legal age or input their birthday so the system can determine whether or not to allow access.  This is one of the stupider things on the internet.  Anyone with half a brain knows how to lie, and there's some doubt as to whether anyone has ever clicked "I Am Under 18".  At this point in my life, it's been a while since many things were illegal for me, so I take offense to being asked to verify I'm of legal age.  And as with any time I take offense at something, I lash out by entering the most unrealistic age or birthday possible, like "37.5" or "1/1/1200".  Some people think the system should be made easier so that people have less of an incentive to lie.  I think protecting people from accessing information by filtering out those who are unable or unwilling to lie is a flawed system. #technology

It occurred to me on one of my many trips to the car mechanic that certain physical components in mechanical systems routinely wear down and fail.  Such is the case with tires, brake pads, windshield wipers, engines, and really anything that makes physical contact with something else while moving.  It's not a design flaw or a mistake.  That's what's supposed to happen.  I guess the alternative would be to buy a new car every 5000 miles instead of simply getting an oil change. 

This is an especially helpful thing for me to remember, because I tend to think of car repairs as a penalty for driving a certain way or for owning a car for too long.  Needing new tires makes me feel like I did something wrong.  Needing new shocks and struts feels like punishment for driving too fast over speed bumps.  And while that may be true, it's also true that tires, shocks, and struts are some of the components that move and simply wear down over time.  They need to be replaced.  It's not my fault. 

Technically this idea can be carried over into house repairs as well.  Light switches, water pumps, valves, and fans are all mechanical devices.  They won't last forever.  Heck, even roofs, windows, and floors are technically in the same category, since they experience wear and need to be routinely replaced.  If I had known this before buying a house, maybe I wouldn't think home ownership sucks. #technology

The other day one of the pipes sticking out of the top of my water heater sprung a pinhole leak which pooled water directly on top of the water heater where the electrical panel is conveniently located, thus causing a situation that thankfully ended in loss of power but which could've easily ended in fiery death.  My first thought, after that of moving to a tent in the woods, was one of foolproofing:  Who in their right mind designed a water heater with piping and electronics located in such a way as to utterly ensure their eventual fatal interaction?  I can think of at least two ways to get around this specific scenario:  Don't put water pipes near electronics, and/or waterproof the electronics.  I have a hard time believing I'm the only water heater customer that's managed to get water to travel like four inches from the piping to the electrical panel. #technology

I borrow a lot of CDs and DVDs from the library, and I'm always amazed at how poorly people treat optical media.  Not just finger prints and smudges, but deep scratches and thorough abrasions.  What is it, exactly, that people do with these disks?  Give them to their dogs as chew toys?  Use them on their disk sanders to refinish their deck?  As an anal retentive perfectionist, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that those death metal CDs I bought 15 years ago when I was in high school are still in mint condition.  That's how I roll. 

I wonder whose idea it was to store important information in optical format with no sort of protective measures to prevent loss of optical quality.  Remember floppy disks?  They had that little metal door that slid over to reveal the disk when it was inserted in the computer.  Even audio tapes, which fully exposed their ribbon-like tape at the bottom, at least had a convenient plastic enclosure so your big fat fingers wouldn't mess up all the data.  I guess my point is this:  Let's just digitize everything so we can stop dealing with error-prone optical media. #technology

My iPod sorts podcasts in reverse chronological order, i.e. newest ones first.  This is a dumb system in my opinion, since many of the podcasts I listen to are news shows and other date-sensitive stuff that only makes sense when listened to chronologically.  But oh well.  There's no way to change this, so I'll move on to the next problem:  Changing the sort order of podcasts added from external sources (i.e. not iTunes).  I have several spoken word mp3s that I like to consider to be podcasts (one of which is an audio version of the Bible), but they weren't added through iTunes; they were ripped from CDs or downloaded from various websites.  When these mp3s were added to iTunes and classified as podcasts, they were sorted in some unintuitive, undocumented way.  And no, it's not based on file name, track number, date added or anything else.  After some digging, I found that it actually all depends on an iTunes-specific mp3 tag called "RELEASETIME".  The way to utilize this is to get a program like Mp3tag that can edit "Extended Tags," add the RELEASETIME tag in the form of "2000-01-01T12:00:00Z," and go from there.  For a chronological list of mp3s, change any part of the date (I changed the seconds) so that each successive mp3 has a chronologically different date.  But remember that since iPods sort the way they do, you should use the earliest date for the last file in the list, and go up the list from there.  Finally, in iTunes, right-click on each file you just modified and select "Get Info" so that iTunes realizes the file was changed. #technology