It takes a lickin and keeps on tickin..

If you are old enough to remember the Timex ads from back in the day, that was their slogan. I remember one ad with sumo wrestlers doing some very wrong things to that poor watch.. and supposedly it still worked afterwards.

In this day and age, that kind of mentality is very rare. We have turned into a society that thrives on cheap and disposable. Gone are the days where it was worth spending that little bit extra for a quality made product. Most stuff today, even from the name brand manufacturers is mass produced, cheap, disposable junk. When was the last time that you actually had a VCR or DVD player that broke and you considered actually finding a repair shop and getting it looked at? Nowadays just having somone use an hour of labor to look at an item like that will run you 75-100 bucks before parts even come into it. Considering most people spend 100 or less on that kind of stuff these days, its just toss it and buy a new one.

Its something very hard as a parent to get through to your children these days. I remember growing up, having it ingrained that if you took care of things, they would last. Nowadays, it seems no matter how careful you are with somethings, they are just so cheaply made that there is still a good chance that they will break at random. So how do you explain that to your kids? Kids are rough on stuff as it is and when the stuff is cheaply made, it just can't withstand anyting but a delicate touch.

Nowadays, when I find an item that has been able to take a beating and keep on working, I have to praise it and the company responsible for it. So I present to you, the Motorola Razor cellular phone. I was looking for a phone with good signal and good battery life and I had a couple friends with them that reccomended them for meeting those requirements. So I picked one up and have been quite happy with it for some time now.

I carry it in my pocket.. with no case. I bang it around. Flip it open and let it snap shut. It survives all that with a few minor scratches on the case, but I have put it through some serious trauma as well. About 5 months ago, I was looking for my phone as I was heading out .. and couldn't find it. At the same time, I was wondering what the clunking noise was in the dryer. I figured the kids had left their keys in their pocket or something again. I go open the door to the dryer and out drops my cell phone. Yes, I had washed it.. for a full cycle with detergent and fabric softener and then put it in the dryer for about 20 minutes before I investigated the noise.

The phone was wet still.. but hot to the touch as I picked it up off the ground where it had tumbled out of the dryer after banging around in there for almost half an hour. I had no real expectations of it working ever again. Its electronics. The three worst things for electronics are: water, excessive heat and impact. I had pretty much given it a heavy dose of all 3. However, I decided I wasn't going to rush out and buy a new phone without at least trying to dry it out and see if by some miracle it would work still. So, I dismantled the phone, turned my big fan on high and let all the stuff dry for about 2 days. After which I put it back together, turned it on .. and to my amazement it worked! Everything was functioning fine. I had one key that was a bit 'sticky' and slow to respond, but other than that it was 100%!

So fast forward to this past Friday. My phone has been working fine for months. Lisa and I were doing a movie night and watching Definitely, Maybe. Which for the record is a great movie. Some of the lines the little girl has in there are priceless. But anyway, once we get a movie synced up, its a pain to pause and then restart it. So when my phone rang, I picked it up and caller ID said 'unknown call' That means its work 95% of the time and as I was not on call, I had no intention of interrupting my movie for a random call. So I went to set my phone back on the table and not really looking as I set it down, knocked it on the edge of my big 32oz cup of water and knocked it out of my hand and down it went. Right into the water. SONOFA ... /sigh

I was pissed. At myself of course, who else could I be pissed at? So I grab my phone back out of the water, shake it off best I can and pop the battery off so its not running with all the water in it. I do the same thing I did the first time, took it apart and let it dry. 12 hours later, I put it back together and turned it on. Only this time, despite the fact that it did power up, none of the keys were working and I could see there was still moisture behind the LCD screen. I decide to take it back apart and give it another long time in front of the fan. After another 20 or so hours with the fan, I assembled it again and lo and behold, it works perfectly again. In fact, the key that was sticking before is now working as it should again!

Here's to you Motorolo Razor designers, for restoring some faith in the fact that not everything made today is a cheap pile of trash that is designed to be used delicately until it falls apart on you and then thrown away and replaced. The fact that this phone even powers up at this point is a minor miracle, but the fact that it still functions just as it did the first time out of the box is nothing short of incredible. Kudos to you.

If you are into computers at all, you will see the same disposable trend getting worse and worse. If you are not into computers... well .. I am so deal. It used to be that you could buy a system and realistically it would remain at the upper end of performance, features, and compatibility for 2-3 years. Also, the way the components worked, you could generally upgrade your PC without replacing a majority of the parts. Processors used the same voltage and sockets. Memory was pretty much the same for years. Hard drives used the same interface and were largely unchanged other than capacity.

Today, the pace of change is rapid. Most product cycles for series of motherboards, processors, memory, video cards etc. is around 12-14 months .. tops. Upgrading is rarely done these days. Motherboards, processor sockets, memory interfaces, all change so rapidly that if you wait a year and a half and think "Hey, I should upgrade the memory and processor in here", it will most likely be cost prohibitive if even possible. So you end up getting a new system basically, maybe carrying over a few components like your optical drives and monitor.

Very few things retain any kind of upgradeability these days. I won't even get started on backwards compatibility. The one bright spot that has caught my attention lately is the coming of Rock Band 2. Not only will the instruments from RB1 work with the new game, all of the songs you downloaded for it will work in RB2 right out of the box. In addition to that, all new downloadable content will work on both platforms. Oh, and you can import all of the songs from the original RB disk into RB2 and play them there as well so you don't even have to swap disks to have access to both libraries of songs. Now that is a company that listens to their users and is going out of their way to support them and give them the best product they can.

I know this was long and rambling.. but hey. Thats what my blog is for. Based on the number of comments lately, I am not sure anyone reads it anyway :P

The best part of today.. is that its Tuesday.. and that means Lisa gets here tomorrow! I can't even describe how excited I am to see her. The weeks apart get long for sure, but evertime we are together I discover all over again how wonderful and amazing we are together. I am so lucky to have her in my life. She makes me so happy. See you tomorrow baby! <3