email or text updates to SSJ

Being a Luddite, I can't do the latter but if one checks the dashboard page, apparently there are ways to do that now.

Do It Now!

As the last guy on the planet without a cell phone but also as one who is up at 6:00 a.m. checking my news and op-ed sites, I have to agree with Kathleen Parker this morning and wonder how much this technology has been driving our national “do something and do it now” mentality:

The phrase "too much information," a now-cliched talk-to-the-hand deflection, isn't just a gentle whack at someone who tells you more than you want to know about his Cialis experience. It's a toxic asset that exhausts our cognitive resources while making the nonsensical seem significant.

In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

How can CJR possibly track that?

New-fangled casinos

Have you been to a casino lately? I visited one several weeks ago for the first time in fifteen or twenty years.  They've made some substantial changes over the years.  I wasn't ever very fond of casinos, so I'm not the best judge, but these changes didn't seem like an improvement to me:

• the slot machines no longer have handles to pull; instead, you push a button and the results are a digital display (i.e. there's nothing mechanical that spins around before stopping);
  
• the slot machines don't take coins or coin-like tokens; you swipe a paper card (mag stripe); I don't know what happens if you win, but obviously, no outpouring of coins;
• the roulette "wheel" doesn't turn; instead, lights just move around the wheel and come to a stop.

How is a gambler (excuse me, "gamer") supposed to have any confidence that the games are legit? Outcomes are obviously digitally determined and odds can be affected with a couple key strokes.  

There is still plenty of SMOKING.  So we didn't stay long enough to check out blackjack and craps tables.  I wonder if they still have humans dealing paper cards/rolling dice.