Wild Goose Chase
While cycling home from work this evening I listened to “The Ihnatko Almanac”, a podcast on the 5by5 network, featuring Andy Ihnatko – the tech columnist for the Chicago Sun Times.
I discovered Andy years ago through the Macbreak Weekly podcast on the TWiT network – he was the “go to” guy to talk about anything and everything to do with Apple products. He was interesting, honest, likeable, and an unabashedly colossal nerd. The Ihnatko Almanac doesn't touch on technology at all (actually, that's a lie – sometimes it does) – it usually covers whatever is on Andy's mind on the day they record the show. He talks about writing, movies, video games, and quite often comics.
I'm not quite sure how I missed out on the whole “comic” thing growing up – because over the years I have totally fallen in love with comic artwork. While listening to Andy talk about the various comic writers on the way home this evening, some dark corner of my brain scribbled down “must install the comixology app on the tablet later”.
Here's where we get to the wild goose chase bit.
I installed the Comixology App, with high hopes of downloading a couple of comics to look at. No doubt I would end up in the same hell that I do when choosing movies (spending an hour browsing, and then not actually watching anything), but it would be fun.
Ok. What's my password? I'm sure I had an account in the app before. Oh. I have to visit the website to get it. Why isn't the website appearing in the Nexus tablet? Ok... I'll open the browser on the desktop computer over here. Hmmm... that's coming up blank. Is it just me? Can I ping it? No... Can I reach it through a proxy? Ah... 503 errors. That means their servers are down.
No doubt while writing this the servers will have re-appeared on the internet, but by then the urge to go and buy a comic will have passed – and I'll still be that guy that loves the artwork, but has never actually bought, and read a comic.