Olympus Gets Me In The End

No matter haw much I've complained, I never though Olympus would get the last laugh on me.  Last week I finally decided to sell the E510, so I put it on eBay.  I only got a fraction of what paid for it but I was glad to see the thing go and to finally move on.  However, only two days after sending it off to its new owner, Olympus issues new software that corrects most of the problems I complained about.  How could I end up so unlucky?  Well, this is the last entry in this "I Hate Olympus" story.  If you own an E510 you may have lucked out and are now the happy owner of the camera Olympus promised when they first sold it.  I guess it was just my fate to get mixed up with Olympus.  Every time I zigged they zagged.  I never got satisfaction from their camera or from their service.  Every time they said they cared, I got screwed.  Some things just aren't meant to be I guess.  I hate you fucking Olympus!

Still No Blogger

I still can't access my Blogger account, except to post via LiveWriter.  Sometimes I can view my post after publishing here, sometimes not, but none of the buttons work, so it's a read only thing.  I am going to try again tomorrow (Saturday, 9-22-07).  If I can't get in by then, I'll be forced to return to Yahoo 360 -- they've fixed many of their bugs anyway.

More Blogger Trouble

I decided to do a Blogger Search on the blog I created yesterday, but it can't find the account or entry.  It found the entry previous to this one (about Worker to Investor) in this blog, so it's hard to make sense of what's happening.  It's getting pretty hard to hang with Google. 

Wow!  This is an edit of the above.  Now I can't even see my post from LiveView in Blogger.

No Access to Blogger

I am so tired of things not working!  Yesterday, I had trouble accessing my Blogger account and finally got entry by setting up a new blog.  Then I was able to access everything.  Today, I cannot access my Blogger account again.  At least I can make posts via LiveWriter.  I quit Yahoo 360 and came to Blogger because they wouldn't/couldn't fix their problems.  Now it seems that Blogger has its own problems.  I'll give Blogger a few days before I try somewhere else, after all they don't post any ads in my blog, or anywhere else in Blogger.  Even Gmail is ad free, though I've found it impossible to use that feature either -- I can't link it to my Yahoo email account.  I like Picazza but I can't embed those photos in some forums.  I really like Google's ad free concept, but things simply don't work very well here.

Worker to Investor

While unemployment is very low at this point (2007), most industrial jobs have been handed over to machines, robots.  The result is that you must go back to school and retrain, settle for a low paying service job, or embrace illegal activities.  There are, however, a few who manage to stow enough away to become investors, instead of workers.  Proponents of this strategy suggest that everyone should start investing early in life in hopes that we can eliminate the need for the traditional job.  This raises an interesting question: What happens if most everyone becomes an investor and most jobs are done by computer/robots?  Could we construct a society where we never worked again?  Our economy has always depended upon full employment to complete the growth cycle.  Since a great portion of our economy is already robotized, the transition may only be a matter of changing our mind set, thinking about life differently.  We would become a nation of leisure investors.  This would eliminate the threat from job elimination by emerging countries like China, India, and Mexico.

Perhaps the government needs to step into the role of investment supervisor.  Currently, the money collected for taxes is simply spent on government programs.  What would happen if the majority of that tax money was invested for you, and that you received a regular return on that investment?  At this time, it is estimated that a child who starts investing with as little as $1000 can reach retirement in his/her mid 30s.  This happens without any infusion of cash along the way, it simply follows what is called "The time value of money," where basic growth follows the inflation rate, and then a smaller investment return assures a solid growth rate.  We could become a nation of investors, deriving income from the efforts of mechanized industry and overseas labor.

Would we become a nation of dummies, where education was irrelevant, where we were taken care of by the government?  Or, would we become a true leisure class nation, where the American dream is a reality for everyone? 

Blogger trouble

I just went through a lot of trouble getting into my Blogger account. I could not log in directly. I was able to make posts using LiveWriter, and I was able to view the post immediately after it was published; but then, I couldn't view my post either. When I tried logging in, my password was seen as invalid. When I tried to get a new one, it failed. Finally, the only option left was to start a new account. I made a brief post to the new account, but when I tried editing it, it would not post. However, I could log into Blogger directly now, and when I logged in, my other two accounts were available too. Strangely, I could not access my new account, however; not that I wanted to use it while my old accounts were available. So I'll post this to my main Blogger account, from LiveWriter, and see what happens next.

Well, when left Blogger and went back to Google, and then came back to Blogger, all three accounts were available. This time I could access the new account ( which I will probably delete), and everything else. This is an edit of the above post, so lets see if it posts ok.

Olympus -- NOT

I just got off the phone, and Olympus refused to exchange my camera for a new one.  As a result, I've decided not to honor my promise to Olympus, that I would keep quiet about my dissatisfaction of their E510 camera.  It is one of the highest rated cameras of the year (2007) in the prosumer DSLR market.  The camera simply sucks.  I'm hate the damn thing!  I hate Olympus service!  I regret the money I've wasted on Olympus products, and I think people who like the E510 are living in la la land.  If ever I can afford another camera again, it will be a Nikon.  Not that all models of Nikon are to my liking, but they produce far better images than Olympus, for the most part.  I guess what bothers me the most is that dpreview produced sample images that were equal to the Nikon D50 and D70, but in reality the camera isn't capable of producing those images.  I don't know if dpreview is padding their samples, or what.  I should have paid more attention to the samples on the Olympus web site, which are pretty horrible.  I'm not lining up behind Nikon, since I don't own one, but so far the D50 (and to some degree the D70s) images seem the best.  I don't like Canon's CMOS butter-cream images either.  I've seen some pretty sharp images Canon with top of the line lenses, but in general, EOS cameras are marginal.  So, the bottom line is that I am irrationally going to continue my tyrate (word I made up) against Olympus when ever the opportunity arises.