Voices in the Night; White Out; Losing the Signal

I know I keep saying that I'm not a big fan of short stories, but I did like Steven Millhauser's previous collection, "We Others", and I enjoyed his latest as well. There seemed to be a lot of stories about things going wrong in small towns, but there was a really good one about a son going to visit his mother, whom he hadn't seen in a long time. They were all pretty good.

"White Out" by Michael W. Clune is a memoir about his heroin addiction. It was interesting, although I would have preferred more details, like how exactly it started. I suppose sometimes it's hard to say, he seemed to be a normal middle class college student who just started doing heroin and got hooked. I'm glad he made it out of his addiction spiral and seems to be doing fine now, I know how hard it is for drug addicts, especially heroin users, to break that cycle. Evil stuff.

I loved my BlackBerry. I got my Storm 2 in October of 2009, the day it came out, and I was so excited, other than the LG Chocolate I had previously I'd never been excited for a phone before or since. I had that phone for almost 5 years, finally replacing it with an Android in 2014. It still worked pretty well, and I was sad to part with it, but what killed BlackBerry for me was the lack of apps. I was even willing to overlook the 3 days in 2011 when their servers went down and I lost my crackberry for the first time and I realized how addicted I was to the damn thing. "Losing the Signal" was a great story about the meteoric rise of an underdog little Canadian company, Research in Motion (RIM). How one tiny misstep led to their complete downfall. It was heartbreaking, truly. I'd love for BB to make a comeback and provide some much needed competition in the smartphone market. I don't like only having two different types to choose from, honestly (I don't count Windows phones, since they have such a small market share). I definitely don't want a phone like everyone else in the world has, either, which is why I won't own an iPhone. I'm afraid BB's time has come and gone.