Author Archives: AdaptiveCurmudgeon

It makes me cringe. It’s dour propaganda from behind the iron curtain in 1978. The ad appeals to our patriotic duty to buy it and imposes guilt and obligation. It implies we must buy a Volt or poor people in a little town in Michigan won’t have jobs. As if you might make little Timmy starve in his crib if you happen to buy a Ford Focus. Continue reading →

Well you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. At least the government (or the President) has learned from the fact that unsubsidised auto makers are eating the Volt’s lunch? Whoops, maybe not. Looks like a double down on rainbow cars and a complete inability to look at a mistake and say “lets stop doing that thing which doesn’t work so well”. Color me surprised: Continue reading →

This really happened: I stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.  I pulled off the road and had to choose which pumps to go to.  Instead of heading for the two pumps up front (the land of … Continue reading →

Being semi-off grid I occasionally stumble onto a rift in the iDevice/Google/Microsoft continuum. The technological equivalent of a society which is simultaneously bitchin’ cool and too clueless to survive. Today was such a day. Continue reading →

…my computer has decided that I’m British. The reason I know this is that my spell check keeps telling me that “color” is “colour”. I’ve been living without spell check for a couple of months and that’s fine. However I’m getting sick of it yelling at me for using redneck America spelling; which is perfectly cromulent for an American redneck like myself. Continue reading →

An optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds.  A pessimist fears that it’s true.  Adaptive Curmudgeons like to focus on the little things that make life better.  The following things are modern miracles which we should … Continue reading →