Geoffrey Morrison

One of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, had a form letter he sent to fans. To save time, it had all the possible options for correspondence, and he’d check the applicable boxes.

Being considerably less talented — and marginally less grumpy (arguable) — I figured this would be a fantastic way to deal with the 100+ emails I get each day.

So for all my tech journalist friends/colleagues/enemies, and for all my future fans/haters/curious minds, here is the eminently useful, infinitely adaptable, largely offensive, Form Letter for Tech Correspondence.

It started with Guild Wars 2: Random crashes, seemingly unconnected. Then it spread to other games. After a few hours with Black Mesa, a crash to the desktop. Occasionally, the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

No amount of driver updates fixed the issue. On the GW 2 tech forums the problem seemed widespread. When an Arena Net employee would bother to respond to one of the many threads about the same issue, they always just said, “Check your RAM.”

Yeah, right. In 20 years of fixing and building computers, not once had I ever had a problem with RAM.

So what could it be?

I’m a big fan of the Kindle Fire. So much so, I actually bought one. In article after article, I’ve extolled its virtues. There’s no question the iPad is the best tablet, but the Fire isn’t a tablet per se. It’s a content enjoyment device (CED?).

Surprising absolutely no one, Amazon has released an updated version with a higher resolution screen, some tweaks, and a bit more polish than the original Fire.

Worth an upgrade? Or at least a look?