#techrant

Look, it’s 2025 — my phone unlocks my face in the dark 😐, translates Mandarin off street signs, tells me how bad I slept 😴…

…but Ticketmaster and TIFF can’t manage a damn “Add to Calendar” button??

They already HAVE the info!

📅 Date? Yup.

⏰ Time? Got it.

🎬 Movie length? Obviously.

📍 Location? They LITERALLY map it for me.

And instead of just exporting a tiny calendar file — a technology from the Clinton administration — they go:

“Hey bud, wanna add this to your Wallet?”

OH GREAT 😑 — the place where tickets go to quietly die.

Yeah, I’ll just trust my schedule to Reminder Roulette™ like I’m waiting for the subway.

Wallet doesn’t create events.

Doesn’t block time.

Doesn’t stop double-booking.

It just sends a little whisper later like:

“Heyyy… don’t forget… maybe… if you feel like it… 😬”

So now I’ve gotta open my calendar and manually type:

North by Northwest – 6:30 – TIFF Lightbox

Like I’m firing up Outlook 2003 from a beige cubicle with a dying CRT monitor 💾

One typo and I show up a DAY early looking like an idiot in the lobby:

“Oh yeah, I just REALLY love Hitchcock.”

And don’t tell me this is a tech problem.

They already handle payments, DRM, seat maps, dynamic barcodes, notifications, geolocation, and mobile passes — but the moment you say “.ics export” they’re like:

“Whoa whoa whoa, Einstein 🧠 — slow down!”

This isn’t innovation.

This is two pieces of 20-year-old software refusing to shake hands. 🤝

They can encrypt my ticket like it’s the Pentagon —

but can’t add a movie to my calendar like it’s basic adult scheduling 😤

Wallet is not a calendar.

Reminders are not events.

And “just remember to type it yourself” is not a UX plan — it’s technological negligence.

🔹 Lights: Alexa-only 🔹 Locks: Google-compatible (but only on Tuesdays?) 🔹 Thermostat: Requires a blood sacrifice

I've been running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my Asus EEE PC T91MT, in part because it was getting more and more sluggish on Windows 7. There's a lot to like about it (the new Task Manager is wonderful), and since I started using an application launcher (Executor, though Launchy's nice, too), the lack of a normal start menu doesn't bother me much. It's got a few bugs, as you'd expect from an early release - the most significant, for me, is that if I get my cursor too close to the hot corners on the right-hand side of the screen (say, if I want to open the time and date info or close my current application window), it wants to open the Charms Bar, and sometimes it doesn't want to close it again. Oh, and I currently have no way to search my file system, though the Googles suggest that's not a common problem.

Anyway, the thing that irritated me enough this morning that I thought I'd say something about it is that Windows 8 isn't just optimized for a screen size of 1024*768 or more, there are things that won't even work at a smaller resolution. The T91MT runs at 1024*600 natively, and at 1024*768, the screen is unpleasantly stretched.

Like this.

It looks fine in that screenshot, doesn't it? Trust me, it's awful. And because it is awful, and because I rarely need the functions that require that resolution, I leave the display at 1024*600 and only bounce it up when Windows demands a higher res. This morning, it insisted it needed more space to open the Windows SmartScreen, which "can help keep your PC safer by warning you before running an unrecognized app from the Internet." Since it wouldn't allow me to open the installer, I changed my resolution, installed the app (minus any warnings from SmartScreen - apparently it didn't have anything to say to me, it just wanted to stretch its legs), and turned off SmartScreen (which the Action Center yelled at me about).