Tag: technology

lol MARTA, #896

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR – when queried to what MARTA stood for, Google’s response was the politically incorrect acronym

Ironic hilarity ensued.

Known by many, spoken aloud by none; except among closed trusted company.  When I came across this story, my jaw kind of did a quarter-drop; it was one of those stories that was tailor-made for the MARTA criticism that I love to spotlight like it were sport.  If not for the simple fact that I’ve been slammed at work and only came across it during the few minutes I afford myself to surf the internet while I’m eating at my desk, I probably would have vomited out a ton of words in knee-jerk reaction to it, prefaced with a hundred lols or rofls, but such time could not have been spared at that moment.

But really, this is kind of the epitome of the perpetual failure of MARTA; I’ll be the first to admit that former CEO Keith Parker did a fantastic job of improving the infrastructure of the company a considerable amount, and actually managed to get their finances into the black, but the one thing that even he couldn’t really overcome was the sheer perception of the agency as a whole.  And as we all are firmly aware of, perception is reality, and if the perception of MARTA couldn’t be changed, it’s hard to say that that much improvement had actually really occurred.

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Too distracted to enforce the distracted

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC

That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.  Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities.  One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.

And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?

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Some more freaky Black Mirror shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let’s just go ahead and say it, the end of the world will likely begin somewhere in the New England area.  Regardless of who came first in the weird chicken and egg argument on whether Black Mirror stories were inspired by tech, or if tech was inspired by Black Mirror, all that really exists is that a lot of familiarly freaky shit all seems to be taking shape in various labs out in Massachusetts.

Whether it’s Metalhead-like robot dogs now being capable of opening doors and actively working together with one another, to some rogue iRobot robots that can basically do moonsaults now, now we’ve got some eggheads up north tinkering around with the idea of being able to digitize human brains so that the people who choose to do this, can essentially live forever.

Basically, kind of like the oft-used Black Mirror concept of digitizing human consciousness and uploading them into other people, tech or inanimate objects; the human vessels might be dead or comatose, but the consciousness still remains, capable of feeling stimulus or having memories.

Yeah, some nerds out in some incubator (man, I hate that phrase, what are we, chickens?) in Massachusetts have come up with this concept of preserving the human brain so that it can be basically accessible and for lack of a better term, backed up, so that it could theoretically live beyond the limits of the human body.

There’s one tiny little caveat though:

The product is “100 percent fatal,”

In order to do this, you will die.  There’s no ifs, there’s no gray area.  In order to become a thinking vegetable, YOU. WILL. DIE.

Hell of a sales pitch there.  Explain the benefits of digitizing your brain, etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah, oh yeah, but you have to volunteer to, y’know, end your life in order to do so.  Seems real appealing doesn’t it?

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Growing Up Type-R

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know I touched on this subject before in the past at some point, but seeing as how the car has been green lit very similarly to the initial concepts, it doesn’t hurt to revisit this.  Sure, cars rarely change dramatically from their concept stages, and I wasn’t expecting the Civic Type-Riceboy to go from Gran Turismo Edit B pocket rocket to a sleek sophisticated sleeper, but we all can wish, right?

Anyway, upon seeing the updated photos of the release model, the first thought that popped into my head was the immediate comparison to the Homer Simpson car that tanked his half-brother’s original fortune, that’s how clown-y it looked, with its giant spoiler that I’m sure will be described as “aggressive” and face that looks like a smashed down Stormtrooper helmet.

And that’s just the superficial details that aren’t to the standard that I once held the vaunted Civic Type-R when I was still 19.

Mechanically, it’s definitely the strongest Civic, and one of the strongest Hondas in general off the factory line in history, but there too, it seems to have lost all the cool shit that made Hondas back in the late 90s.  An alleged 306 horsepower is advertised, but it’s coming from a turbocharged 2.0 liter with a redline of “just” 6,500 rpm.

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Instant Pot for the Greater Good

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I joined a cult.

I purchased an Instant Pot.

A little while ago, I stumbled across this particular page, and I was immediately intrigued by the effective photography showing a French dip sandwich, and a hearty looking Italian soup.  As I read through the page, I discovered the existence of this seeming Jesus-level appliance known as an Instant Pot, that was a capable of pressure cooking a wide variety of delicious looking foods in fractions of the times they would normally take if cooked traditionally.

Whole chickens and pot roasts and corned beef in less than an hour?  Just throw shit into the pot, press a few buttons and wait like 15 minutes for the food to cook?  Color me interested.

Anyway, the saturation of Instant Pot on social media and the rest of the internet was no help at resisting the allure of possibly getting one, but the final straw snapped when I just so happened to be out and about bouncing around antique stores, and then I came across this one indy store and I found out that they had actual Instant Pots at reduced costs.

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Livestreaming media will never succeed at this rate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During New Year’s Eve, a friend of mine and myself spent an inordinately long time trying to figure out how we could get a livestream of the Dick Clark Rockin’ New Year’s Eve or whatever it’s called special, on ABC.  Apparently, it’s not as simple as going to ABC’s website and clicking a button that says “LIVE” on it anymore.  Far from it.

Even entering in valid credentials for a cable subscription results in no progress on the ABC app, or on the ABC website.  A little bit of research revealed that Atlanta is one of countless major markets in the continental United States that have yet to be authorized live feed permissions, and that there are maybe fewer than twenty cities that actually do.  How an American network as large as ABC can justify being available to so few markets over the vast and global world wide web is completely beyond me, but the fact of the matter was that we were striking out fast on being able to get the Dick Clark NYE, because this particular friend, like many, have cut the cord and does not rely on cable or network television.

We even tried IP cloning, to make it look like we were pinging from some of the authorized markets, like Chicago or New York, but apparently, ABC is smarter than we gave them credit for, and seemed to be able to detect something was amiss by constantly erroring us as trying to access from outside the country.

Needless to say, Dick Clark’s NYE wasn’t going to happen, and the girls who demanded it would be denied seeing the supposed live performance by BTS.

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Pokemon Go Fuck the Rules

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Admittedly, one of the things I was really looking forward to on my trip to Seoul was that I would have the opportunity to catch a Farfetch’d in Pokemon Go.  Why am I even still playing this game? is this notable?  Because Farfetch’d is a regional exclusive Pokemon that’s exclusive to Asia, and Pokemon Go wasn’t even allowed in South Korea until literally like two weeks after I had left the fucking country last year.

So the only people who had Farfetch’ds were those who lived in Asian Pokemon Go countries, those who cheated and spoofed their IPs to look like they were in Asian Pokemon Go countries, or tryhards like me that traveled to other countries and actually tried to capitalize on the local Pikachus, wanting to fill their coffers with Pikachus with geostamps listing the places of the world they’ve been to while playing a kids game.

Anyway, during my first morning in Seoul, I went out on a walk because according to the Seoul Pokemon Go Map, I noticed that there was a Farfetch’d within a reasonable walking distance from where I was.  I needed to catch this motherfucker because I really wanted to knock this task off of my list as soon as possible, because I didn’t really want to be the asshole not seeing the world around him, because my face was buried in my phone; the irony of this statement is not lost on me, considering at any given time, 80% of the South Korean population has their faces buried in their phones.

So I get to the location where the Farfetch’d was noted to have spawned, and sure enough it spawned on my phone.  Through bated breath, I unloaded the full arsenal of raspberries and Ultra Pokeballs and hoped that I could catch it and it wouldn’t break free and run away.  It took three tries, but I secured the catch, and then I felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction at getting to be the ultimate tryhard that had just secured a regional exclusive in North America, Europe, and now Asia.

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