Former Dealer;

Dude, you screwed up and it bit you in the ass. It's that simple. You lied to your girlfriend and, even though it was a little lie in your eyes, she wasn't cool with that. Give it a miss and move on.

You may think you were an all-star pot dealer because you didn't get caught going through school, but you weren't. You couldn't handle the personal angle of that kind of business and you hid from it and lied to someone close to you. That's the same as anyone who can't handle their job's responsibilities and allows them to disrupt personal relationships.

This isn't about the snooping girlfriend or the morality of selling weed.

Do a better job of setting up your business networks (legal or illegal) in ways that work with your personal relationships and go find someone else you can share your life with.

I looked forward to the Fix every day, despite the fact that I didn't even know who most of the celebrities were.

You see, Salon was doing me a great service by giving me this scintillating column that made me follow links and search the IMDB until I knew exactly whom was doing what to who- and what movie they were just about to release. Without the Fix I would be culturally crippled in conversations about celebrities and entertainment news.

I guess the time has finally come where I, a hopelessly out-of-touch classical musician, can no longer fake knowing who these people are, or why in hell they are important.

But I wish you'd reconsider.

It’s amazing to me that DKR is as bad as it is, and so disproportionately bad compared with the beauty of Dakar and the relative prosperity of Senegal. I would have expected Ouagadougou’s airport (which is eerily close to downtown) to be a catastrophe, but it’s great. Since most of Bamako looks like a bombed out ruin of a city, you’d think its airport would be worse than scenic Dakar’s. Somehow, Dakar beat out two of the poorest nations on the planet for worst airport ever.

If it weren’t enough to be fearing for your possessions as you repeatedly fend off the scores of bandits in DRK, the airport’s security makes you fear for you life. When traveling with my brother and father in 2002, we took a wrong turn and opened a door out onto the runway. We hadn’t even passed through security or presented a ticket. One could conceivably walk from the curb outside to the runway with no problem- other than the scores of bandits.

That broken ATM was great surprise as well when we were told we had to pay some sort of airport tax on our arrival and didn’t have enough cash to cover the bill. Luckily, someone found and woke up the sleeping currency exchange attendant before too much trouble started.

After a horrendous wait of several hours (with no place to sit), my father actually thought he made a clean get away when he was allowed to board his AirFrance flight. Boy was he wrong. As soon as he sat down, they cleared the plane to get rid of the rats and he was forced to do another 2 hours of penance in the terminal.

Needless to say, he would have preferred flying with the rats onboard.

When I traveled from Cape Verde back to Los Angeles via Dakar, Paris, and Montreal I got a real treat as I got to see security measures improve as I got closer to the US. In Cape Verde, the x-ray machine was under a blanket: presumably they didn’t risk wearing it out on such unimportant guests.

At the Dakar airport, I made all the x-ray machine lights and buzzers go off. I was allowed to pass through after telling them that though all the lights went off, I really didn’t have anything dangerous and should be let go rather than inconvenienced by further search. It didn’t take much effort to convince them not to expend any more effort than they had to. Just telling them you belonged on the plane and weren’t dangerous was enough to move right through.

Maybe that’s how the rats got onboard.

Mr. Manjoo;

I don't get it. As a tech writer some of your responsibility is to be the early adopter type who helps us all realize how new technology, with all it's bugs, affects and changes our lives.

You bailed on a very important story that will have substantial effects on how we relate to personal technology and the portable web/phone/etc device. Indeed the very bugs that you think make the iPhone inadequate are part of the story. You even recognized this when you interviewed the hackers who are looking to fix and change the phone, and rightly so.

I think your complaints about the iPhone don't sufficiently explain why, as a tech writer and not just a one of the masses, you would give up on the device.

I won't say that I'll never read your column again or that it makes you an idiot to give such a lame excuse for giving up on a story that you are responsible for covering. I think a lot of readers here are getting overly excited about this.

I will say that the character you present with this post undermines your credibility as a tech journalist. Your reasons for returning the iPhone simply do not resonate with an audience that looks to you for insight on technology and its effect on our culture.