I’m in the midst of a long string of bad luck with the devices I’ve been buying. In the last couple of months:

• My mid-range sony receiver stopped listening to its remote control.
• the wireless router I bought broke. Well, more accurately, it never really worked right to begin with. After literally months of haggling with the company that manufactures it I finally am issued a new working unit. Which doesn’t really work right, actually…the wireless networking stops working at random intervals until I cycle the power. And a month or so after they issue me a sort-of working unit, the manufacturer goes out of business.
• I buy a brand new graphics card, a top of the line Radeon 8500. It works for about 48 hours and then simply dies.
• I build a new linux box that among other things hosts the website you’re looking at. 4 times now the thing has suffered some sort of hardware issue that locks the machine and renders it unable to boot. Problem is, I can’t identify what the issue is, despite hours of troubleshooting.

So what’s the scoop? Was I meant to be a luddite? Is the proximity of a power company uplink station to my house causing my electronics to fry? Is the quality of manufactured goods declining? Or do I just have really shitty luck? I have no idea. I do have a router to sell if you’re interested though 😉