Funking Star Trek
My creeping malaise continues to expand. Sleep is starting to appeal to me more than wakefulness; at least when I’m asleep I don’t think about the future and I don’t feel the pain. Dreams, foolish vignettes about nothing keep me active when I sleep. I suspect that I toss and turn some. When I waken I hurt a little more than usual for a little while. I wake to spend the day sitting here in my room with my television to keep me company and my robots to watch over me. A robot isn’t a very good watcher; they see everything but don’t do anything to help. They don’t know how. Neither does anyone else, so I guess I can’t be too harsh with the robots.
I just got a new robot. I was hoping the addition of a 3pi from Trossen Robotics might lift my spirit. But the $120 device worked for a few minutes and then gave up the ghost. I’m asking them to replace it, but I don’t expect much. The Trossen website screws up the checkout, telling customers their payment failed and tells them to make the payment again. Except that the payment does go through, so if you do as they ask you will pay for your purchase twice. When I reported it, they tried to blame it on PayPal, but since I use the PayPal system and know how it works, it was easy to catch them in their lie. So I’m not expecting them to replace the robot they tried to make me pay twice for. The company appears to like things as they are.
Trossen and eBay are conspiring to get me to stop buying online. Being handicapped, online purchases are right up my alley for convenience and ease of shopping. But I’m getting ripped off too often. It’s that caveat emptor thing again. I’m giving serious consideration to shooting the next person that tries to hide their dishonesty with that phrase. Fraud is fraud and I’m tired of the bullshit. Being further victimized doesn’t set well with me, I have enough crap in my life.
Actually, it’s a cute little robot, the 3pi (three – pie). But the manual, available online and not shipped with the device, is actually cryptic and badly written. It assumes you already know everything it says, and so it more gives little reminders rather than instructions. I don’t expect them to cover additions and modifications to the robot, but simple “how to properly connect it to the computer and how to set up the computer to program it” would be nice. Instead, they want us to use the Force or extra sensory perception to learn the robots workings. For what they charge for the robot, they should send someone over to the house to demonstrate how to work it.
There was an episode of Star Trek I saw ages ago where reality for the starship Enterprise was shrinking. They created some sort of quantum bubble with their warp engines that replaced the universe the ship was in. Then it started shrinking. In the end, it left the June Cleaver-ish Dr. Crusher alone on the bridge with the bubble getting smaller and smaller. At the last second, her son Wesley McGuyvered a quick fix and they pulled Dr. Mom through the breach just before the universe ate her.
I feel like it’s my turn to sit on the bridge of a ship that’s going nowhere, as the universe contracts and stalks me. Like Dr. Crusher, there are things I can do to while away the hours, but in the end they’re kind of pointless. With no one around much, I don’t have a Wesley to pull me out at the last minute.
I wonder what the new unverse will be like.
