Samsung and the O-Ring

I headed back to Toronto after my brief visit to Ottawa on Wednesday. Before I left, I struggled to fix my Mom's Android tablet. Long story short, you should look for the simplest failure first. In this case, the charging cable had cracked so the battery was drained could not recharge. Various Google results led me to: attempting to remove the tablet's back case in order to reset some internal cables (unsuccessful with bruised fingers), causing it to enter into an error state through too many reboots, trying to use Samsung's SmartSwitch to recover (an useless app), downloading a tablet image through the free tool Frija, and finally installing a new Samsung image with another tool called Odin. Unlike other tech-help sites, the articles at The Custom Droid were detailed and helpful.

The final step caused a factory reset which forced me to reconfigure the tablet and reinstall all the apps that my Mom used. The upside was a clean device free of all the accumulated cruft. One of the biggest headaches was using these tools on Windows. Both Frija and SmartSwitch needed Windows components (called redistributables) that weren't part of a regular Windows computer. So you have to find the right versions to download. These extra hoops can be excused for a free software like Frija. But for software giants like Samsung and Microsoft to create a system and application in which things do not work out-of-the-box was mind-boggling.

On my train ride, some passengers were amazed by the Toronto skyline as we made our way through the downtown core into Union Station. I realized I haven't been to the "Manhattan" portion of Toronto in awhile; my neighbourhood is more like Brooklyn. So on Friday, I headed to Yonge-Dundas to catch the new movie Shang-Chi on an Imax screen. While there, I took in all the new buildings (and plenty of businesses) that have sprouted everywhere. It was pretty impressive even if I do prefer the few pre-gentrified areas that remain in the city. There's not one part of Ottawa that can compare.

As for the movie, I appreciated that Shang-Chi had a mostly Asian cast. Though as with Crouching Tiger and various movies in the early aughts, will this representation be permanent or yet another brief blip of supposed inclusion? The fight scenes were the best of all the Marvel movies but the still liberal use of jump cuts mean that they weren't at the level of the classic Hong-Kong movies that Shang-Chi was paying homage to.

My one concern was that both the hero (and the actor Simu Liu) was a 1st generation immigrant. Ditto for Awkwafina's character Katy and her family. A multi-generational Chinese family living in a walk-up in San Francisco's Chinatown is applicable to less than 0.1% of Asian-Americans, even those living in that city. To me, this narrative reinforced the "perpetual foreigner" status of Asians. "They're hard-working and add to the fabric of America, but you have to admit, they haven't been here that long." Well, Chinese workers have lived in North America since the 1860s. That's 160 years or 8-10 generations. That old man may not have gotten off the boat recently. In fact, his father was probably born here. And his grandfather was a contemporary of American Civil War soldiers.