The Devil’s Dishwasher Redux (2, 3, 4).  Sigh. My Beautiful Wife’s cynicism was well-founded. The second time I ran the Samsung dishwahser after Sunday’s tear-down… the control panel freaked out (Bing-bong-bing-bong-buh-BING!) and it threw the control board error code again. The new control board set me back $121 with shipping. I should have invested that money in a new unit, but noooooo. I was a cheap Scottish bastard.

For inexplicable reasons, you can get the low-down on every Samsung dishwasher error code online… Except Samsung error code 6e2.  There’s like an omerta on what this error code actually represents. INTERWEBS: “Call a tech. Call a tech. Call a tech.”  I can only gather that the 6e2 error code is remotely triggered by a local Samsung repairman who needs to make a tuition payment for his kid.  Fuck you, Samsung. I am SO done with you. [spits on ground in disgust]

If you turn the 6e2 error code upside down, it looks very much like the Kanakangi character representing “Don’t Buy a Samsung Next Time, Dumbass.”  Lesson learned. And learned. And learned.

Quallies.  I’m a big fan of engineering, inventions, and processes that make an average person’s quality of life better. The Cloud. How cool is The Cloud? Remember the 90s? Remember trying to get a file from a 2 MB hard drive to a soft floppy to a hard floppy to your new 6 MB hard drive? Remember that shit? And now it’s BOOM! Up! “And just stay right effing there until I tell you to come down, Lintel Gazpacho recipe!”

Or the ease with which I can swap electronic calendars with My Beautiful Wife these days?  “Where the heck is she? She’s late! Oh, look. That’s right. Tonight she had her Rotarian meeting. She told me and I forgot. It’s right there. ‘Rotarian meeting.’  Right before ‘Tryst with Gary from club @ Red Roof Inn.’  Hey, wait a minute…”

Or how about the screw heads you can use with both standard and Phillips head screwdrivers? That man or woman was a genius. We, as a society, owe them a debt of gratitude.

Conversely, there are those asstards who use their engineering degree for evil. The public toilet paper roll spinners that only give you two squares before locking up and forcing a rip?

How about the jackwagon at Microsoft who made the default folder for saving mail attachments something with a randomized name like “OLK193kdfjB9” and made it a non-searchable folder without expanding your search settings? Like a fucking black hole for the very shit you specifically downloaded to retrieve later?

To this end, I propose a yearly award for both of these categories that affect our quality of life. The Quallies. Send me your nominees for either category. Let’s have some fun with this.

The Leftovers. HBO adapts Tom Perrotta’s novel into serial television format. Anybody else see the pilot?  I admit, I’m slightly more enamored of the TV show than I was of the book. I found the book tedious, but that was largely because the tone of the book was kind of impossible to get a bead on. I couldn’t figure out if it was a weepy or a snarky send up of Rapture Culture.  The show runners definitely opted for straight-up creepy. If I have a bitch, it’s my frequent bitch that the overbearing music swells as the camera pushes in on a soap opera close-up are manipulative and unnecessary.

Also, Justin Theroux’s likeness to Hugh Jackman is nothing short of unnerving. He even sounds like a poor man’s Hugh Jackman. Weird.

Anybody else? Weigh in.