Tag: Cords

Am I the only person who thinks coaxial cable connectors suck?

It’s no secret that I hate cords. In fact, one of my earliest blog entries, dating all the way back to April 2002, covered the topic. That’s how much I hate them.

But what I really hate, even more than cords themselves, is the craptastic connectors on coaxial cable (i.e. the kind of cable used for cable TV). They suck! They are utterly terrible! The push-on kind are at least somewhat easy to use, but they can slide loose very easily. The screw-on kind, the much more common kind, are just plain absolutely terrible. If the cable isn’t lined up precisely, you can turn it and turn it and it won’t screw on. Other times, the moving screw-on tip doesn’t move freely enough, and when you try to turn it — if you can at all — it causes the entire cable to turn with it. Worthless!

I’m just in the process of mounting a flat-panel TV on the bedroom wall and moving our cable modem to a new room, hence the need to deal with these stupid cables and, as usual, piss and moan about how much they suck. But now, the whole world can know that I hate them! Am I the only one???

Science explains my madness, at last

If anyone has been bothering to read my rants for the past five-plus years, you may recall that one of my earliest blog posts was a tirade against the evils of cords.

Finally, while it may not be much solace, science as at least touched upon an explanation for why cords suck.

It’s kind of funny now, looking back at what I wrote in 2002. I was speaking in awed and reverent tones of the mystical wonders that awaited us in the future, these things called “AirPort” (I’m not even sure the term “Wi-Fi” was in use yet back then), and “Bluetooth” — things so new and wondrous that I put them in quotes when I referred to them, without a trace of irony.

Now I am pretty much taking for granted the fact that I’m sitting on my bed typing this on my laptop, connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi link to the router downstairs, and I’m controlling the cursor with a Bluetooth wireless mouse. Frankly, I’m more surprised by the fact that as of last Sunday my Mac is now set up in a triple boot configuration, with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Linux.

Damn Cords!

I love technology. Someone could call me a technophile and I would accept it as a compliment. But despite my love for all varieties of electronic gadgetry, you may be surprised to discover that I hate cords! In fact, I DESPISE them. They are always getting in the way, they always get tangled together, and if you leave a cord to its own devices (ha ha), it will, I guarantee, find a way to tie itself in a knot.

Not just any ordinary kind of knot, mind you, but a knot of such terrible complexity as to make the Gordian knot unravel itself in fear of a competing knot of such incomprehensible madness.

Solutions are on the way. The technology Apple markets as “AirPort” (and Apple’s name for it is all I care about) promises wireless networking anywhere in the home, and the new “Bluetooth” technology promises to allow us one day soon to connect peripheral devices to a computer merely by placing them in its vicinity.

That’s all well and good, but at the moment I still sit at my desk nervously, wondering if today is the day that the mad cord monster will animate and eat my legs. Today I still have several hundred feet worth of Cat-5 Ethernet cable strung all around my house, tucked into corners as neatly as it will tolerate, aggressively making its presence known in my living room, bedroom and basement.

DO YOU HEAR ME, CORDOSAURUS?! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!!!