5 Thoughts for March 17, 2015

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

1. Technology: I got my refurbished Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 12.2" tablet yesterday. It was weird to see old GUI artifacts from Samsung's Touch Wiz, after being well acquainted with Lollipop on my other devices. I changed out the loader to Google Now, but Samsung thought it desirable to prevent key widgets from installing in their tablets, including Google Keep, Evernote. The large tablet screen, as I suspected, was exactly the sort of screen size needed, in order to enjoy reading digital magazines and flipping through images as one would do it a presentation. With a 12" screen, the device definitely feels vulnerable, which is not what I feel about my smart phone or my 7" tablet. I'm most certainly getting a tablet case for this one. I admit that I have a device fetish though, with a desktop, a laptop, two tablets and a smart phone. Nonetheless I will never buy a smart watch, because it just seems dumb.
2. Home Improvement: I restarted my interior painting. I figured I had dragged my feet long enough, so I got off the sofa and moved the furniture around to make just enough room to paint the walls. Through the process, I tossed out most of the magazines that were older than 2010, that, though were great eye candy whenever opened, were too darn heavy and took up too much space. With the warmer temperatures, I can open up the window and let the paint dry without the fumes accumulating -- even though it qualifies under low-VOC rating, it contains glycol and it still smells.
3. Geopolitics: Israelis are going to the polls today to vote. Regardless of the outcome, we've learned one thing: Bibi is a liar and cannot be trusted. Two days ago, he admitted as much, when he announced that there would never be a two-state solution in Israel, so long as he was the PM. That's exactly the opposite he'd said years ago, before he started dragging his feet on the two-state solution, including allowing settlement expansion. Perpetual wars is a weird state of existence.
4. Real Estate / Finance: No, you don't "own your own home", if you've got a mortgage. I often see young people boast about this, but it just shows how naive most people are about finance and real estate. It only hits them in the face when they're about to face foreclosure, that they realize that they really don't own their homes. I bring this up because I'm listening to an ebook from 2012, Pound Foolish, on "loan" from the library, and author Helaine Olen covered people who bought into the myth of housing prices that would continue to go up, and saw real estate as pie-in-the-sky investment vehicles.
5. Common Core: I have no idea what's inside Common Core's testing questions, but I found it laughable that politicians are complaining that the questions are too hard, such that parents are finding them too difficult to help out their children. The answer, inevitably, is to go back to lower standards. As I recall, the bar was so low in high school, I could have graduated a year early if I wanted to. The only reason why I didn't: I really wanted to enjoy being a senior, including prom(s), dances, and socializing.