Done Is Good

Cash4Gold: Trying to Silence the Internet?

I don’t generally do PSAs, so I’ll keep this brief. If you’re considering using Cash4Gold or another Internet pawn site, I highly recommend you read through this investigative article on The Consumerist first:

Cash4Gold: The Article Cash4Gold Doesn’t Want You to Read

Besides the all-important primary content, the article is a great example of:

• The right way to respond to legal bullying. (Hint: giving in is not it.)
• The right way to conduct a fair investigation with sources and appropriate conclusions.
• Why “making stuff up” will always lose to solid journalism.

It’s great to see such good work on the often-fluffy Internet!

In Nomine Jobs, et Woz, et Spiritus Schiller

It’s impressive that Apple actually released this before their announced release date, but what if they had given third-party developers a leeeetle more time to work out the compatibility issues and saved users such as Merlin Mann (below) a whole aspirin bottle of headaches. Hmmmmm?

merlin:

Maybe it depends on the pew you’re sitting in.

To developers, uber-nerds, and sundry people I love and admire (Snell and Siracusa and Gruber and Neven and on and on and on), Snow Leopard must feel like a game-changer. Because it IS. It literally is.

In addition to adding lots of the infinitesimally small, near-non-existent tweaks that only hyper-nerds notice or care about (and which helps us Apple dorks each feel extra special for “noticing”), 10.6 introduces a handful of unbelievably useful things that will help smart people make the next generation of applications on the most promising OS platform that exists today. Taken as read. Done. Boom.

But there’s also the sad, sorry bastards like me. The laity. The “Power Users.”

I’ve lived on a Mac every day since January of nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, and I know how to make this thing do some shit that would curl your hair. But, I’m NOT a developer. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know an NSWhateverTheFuck from a Nib from a .plist from a .DS_Store. No idea. And THAT’s how I likes it.

For better or worse, I AM several other things.

For one, I’m a guy writing a book on deadline. Which guy dislikes it when his right hand crashes unexpectedly with a generic memory error for 2 or 3 days.

I’m also a ham and egg graphics guy who dislikes that (a supposedly up to date copy of) Photoshop CS 3 crashes on save. That one was hilarious.

I’m also a demi-nerd user of Quicksilver — an app that, I’ll stipulate, lives out its final days in palliative care, more dead than alive. Still. It’s responsible for a giant amount of how I do what I do and now it’s not working. It’s basically dead unless I upgrade and wipe the App Support folder whose 5 years of usage == what makes QS useful at all. And, YES! You are correct. I cannot, by any reasonable technologist’s point of view, blame that on Snow Leopard. And I don’t. But it’s true. It worked before, now it doesn’t, and the Lord giveth as the Lord taketh (my triggers) away. Dominy, dominy. Peace be with you.

Plus, I’m other things too. Including a 1-person IT staff who accepts that he has to stop doing real work for a day and a half in order to make sure that a new point-something OS upgrade is working properly on five (5) computers in two locations.

Nota bene: That is just so much more difficult than it sounds. Believe me. Taking into account Dot-Me, Back to My Mac, Dropbox, and on and on and on. It’s…nuts. The no-maintenance “cloud” is a myth that only holds up under the influence of the heady radon fumes in your Mom’s basement. Even when everything’s working flawlessly: safe, secure, AND dependable multi-box maintenance is crazy, quantum, fractal hard.

So.

I accept the catholic, mediated experience of being a Mac and OS X user with unapologetic gusto. Partly because all of this sect’s ecclesiastical asterisks are big and clear and printed in Myriad Pro 10,000 on a giant, wall-sized placard that everybody sees and understands:

• Here’s what this does
• Here’s what this doesn’t do
• There’s no catches or weasel words
• You pay us a little more for
  • impeccable design,
  • insanely great build quality, and
  • an assurance that you won’t find your iDick in a door on day zero

So, my problem right now is that my beloved church and I aren’t seeing eye to eye. They want me to see a big update that has ramifications beyond the “Yeah, yeah, something, something, press release” stuff like “Innovative Chinese Character Input.”

Whereas I want what I’ve always wanted: a computer that fucking works. Without asterisks. Or (and this was so okay with me in 10.5) I want a feature set that is so distractingly gorgeous and giant-nippled that I’m not noticing that every dot-something upgrade is precisely as enjoyable and carefree as inserting one-third of a Tic-Tac into a fresh anal fissure.

Also. Amendment: I want five computers that fucking work. Without asterisks. (Ibid re. fissures, etc.)

Thing is, when I try to mention how this latest little codicil of Vatican II has inserted some batshit insanity that’s so not working for me, I get the stink eye from all the big boys in the red robes and coney hats.

---

“Reeeeeeeeallllllllly?”

“Yeah. A lot of stuff is suddenly broken for me.”

“Did you know how much time and effort was put into making this OS innovative and subtly enhanced?”

“Yes. I read about that. But my apps keep crashing. Like, a lot.”

“What apps, Mr. Mann?”

“Lots of them. Ones I use a lot. Almost seems like the developers of some super-popular apps were testing against a different build. It’s weird.”

“Reeeeeeeeallllllllly?”

“Yes. Totally. Crashy crash crash crash. It’s bananas.”

“Did you know how much innovation and subtle refinement this new release represents?”

“Like I say, yeah. It’s fast. It’s efficient. It’s slightly prettier.”

“Sliiiiiiiightly?”

“Yeah. Very slightly. It’s fine. But a bunch of my shit is broken (on 5 machines) so now I’m blowing time trying to track down updates (on 5 machines) plus miming through all the usual dot-something kabuki of re-entering serials (on 5 machines) and re-okaying launchd preferences (on 5 machines) and re-approving firewall permissions (on 5 machines). It’s a tremendous amount of hassle given that I’m mostly doing it just to stay up to date (on 5 machines).”

“Reeeeeeeeallllllllly?”

“Yes. Really.”

“Have you tried rebuilding the Desktop and trashing your MacTCP prefs?”

“Why are you fucking with me, Cardinal Cupertino?”

“Reeeeeeeeallllllllly?”

---

I’m glad the OS X platform is thriving. I’m thrilled that many of the most talented developers have flocked toward a tree that used to feel utterly leafless and lonesome (As late as 1999: “What? Print from your ‘MacinToy?’ Here? In an adult’s office? Hippie, are you fucking high?”).

I’m dazed and delighted every day to see millions and millions of people using products by a company that nobody I knew but me used to patronize.

That’s all swell. So swell.

What’s not swell is being hazed into agreeing that this has been a smooth release that benefits end-users as thoroughly as developers and nerds. That’s fucked up.

Stuff is broken. And companies are still scrambling to push out half-finished updates to help their users keep the lights on. Is no one else but me seeing this? (Reeeeeeeeallllllllly?)

As I’ve said, I hate arguing about software, But, I also hate being shouted down for having the temerity to say something that doesn’t happen to benefit my friends whose living turns on Apple’s public reputation and success. That’s not a slam, but it is a warning shot, and I’ll tell you why.

Because when you start ignoring the boring, positively eye-rolling problems of dumb users in favor of supporting a party line about “Enhanced Features,” you move a little bit closer to the tone of a company outside Seattle that a lot of us love to rag for employing exactly the same kind of scalable nonsense. (“Did you install the Service Pack then reinstall all your applications then circumcise a newborn ram on the registry? WELL? Well, there’s your problem. Asshole.”)

Yes, I will update my apps on five computers. Yes, I will buy or borrow as many rubber chickens as I need to return all my preferences that have magically albeit subtly disappeared. Yes, the new Dock is pretty. Yes, I can’t wait to see all the cool apps people build using the extra gigawatts afforded by the 64-bit flux capacitor.

But, fucking A, guys. I realize you’re having a big, beardy lemon party about all these homeopathically non-obvious new features, but come on.

Don’t wag your finger at people like me for pointing out shit that shipped empirically broken. Let’s not conduct an auto de fe on the heretics who pose sensible, relevant, and acceptably reverent questions about whether parallelization is literally the body of Christ. Even when the screen hangs for 40 seconds for no Godly reason.

Cardinal, sir: your communion has bugs in it. And while that doesn’t mean I won’t eat it, you damn sure better not put all the rosaries on my penance. That’s just…not Christian.

Overthinking is like overeating

(In response to a friend’s Facebook status)

Nara Garber is thinking. And should maybe think about doing this more often.

Charles Starrett: I’ve often thought that myself, but then I thought, who is thinking? I mean if the thinking part of myself is thinking I should think more often, isn’t that like the gluttonous part of myself thinking I should eat more often? So I had a cookie.

Conversation book

Merlin Mann’s post Making the Clackity Noise inspired me to just, you know, write SOMETHING to jump-start my blog. It actually only took me a moment to remember this story:

Back when I was in my mid-twenties, my whole family traveled to Neustift, Austria for my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. We stayed together for a week, which was fun, but what I was really looking forward to was the two weeks I would have after that by myself riding the rails and doing some solo exploring.

The first stop on my solo adventure was Bonn, Germany. I found a little guest house to stay at and got well settled down for my few days I had allotted and then headed out to look for dinner. My challenge was that after having a week of Austrian food, I was ready for something very, very different. Also, my German was, well, horrible but I had just finished a year of Korean so naturally that was, well, awful as well. Be that as it may, Korean food was exactly what I felt like so when I saw a group of Korean tourists, I screwed up my courage and somehow managed to communicate to them that I was looking for a Korean restaurant. We all ended up going there together and the long and the short of it was that I hit it off with one of the girls in the group, we went to some museums together over the next few days and then promised to write to each other.

Well, even though I was in my mid-twenties, I was rather naïve. I imagined quite the romantic relationship between us even though I honestly can’t recall now if we ever even kissed. (I’m sure if we did, nothing beyond that happened. I’m sure I’d remember that.) I diligently wrote letters to her spending long hours with my English-Korean dictionary trying to convey to her what my days were like and how long the nights were without her. When I was at the shore in my native Massachusetts I gazed across the water imagining that this same water could conceivably be touching her island of Chejudo and I would send my love out to her. She wrote back very articulate letters telling me of her days and assuring me of her love. It couldn’t have been more romantic.

This went on for quite a few months and became an important part of my life, considering the amount of time it took me to write just one letter, and the time it took for the round-trip airmail. One day, I mentioned my correspondence to one of my Korean classmates. My friend nodded and said, “Oh, yeah, she’s using a conversation book.”

“A what?” I replied.

“A conversation book. They have all sorts of different paragraphs written out depending on what you want to say. They’re made for learning English and for sending to penpals.”

Now, to this day I have no reason to believe that my “girlfriend” was insincere in her expressions, but it certainly dampened my passions to know that while I was struggling to express myself in Korean, she was transcribing stock copy out of a book. When, a short time later I met someone who I could actually date in the flesh, I didn’t hesitate to send a Dear Jane letter saying that this long distance thing just wasn’t working out.

Although I was a little hurt at the time, in retrospect, I don’t regret the experience. The imaginary romance was fun, no harm came to me, and she appeared to take the breakup well. If anything it was a great lesson for this Internet Age, where the “friends” you meet over the screen may or may not be who they seem. Like my “girlfriend,” there’s nothing wrong with an internet friend who is part fantasy, as long as you don’t deceive yourself into thinking the person really is who you think they are. If nothing else, they can help you with your conversation skills.

Netbook for photos

I’ve been hearing more-and-more people talk about turning their Dell Mini 9s into Hackintoshes. We’re planning a two-week trip back East, and it occurred to me that for not too much cash, I could put together a hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 to sort and store photos along with a refurbished Airport Express for wireless surfing, email, etc.

Now that I’ve blown a couple of hours researching this, I’d better get my notes down here so I can close out the tabs and get to what I was intending to do today…

1. Buy the cheapest refurbished Mini 9 the Dell Outlet has.
2. Upgrade the memory to 2 GB, and the SSD to something bigger (32-64 gig).
3. Buy two USB keys for the install process. (TBD: How large do they need to be?)
4. Install Mac OS 10.5.
5. Buy a refurbished Airport Express.
6. Profit!

Any more Mini 9 tidbits I come along will be cataloged in my delicious links.

Books, books, books

Today I was asked by a friend to recommend one book for her to read to get her away from the TV. I found this more difficult that I would’ve thought. It’s not that I don’t read; I read plenty! My problem that I start and don’t finish…

So, I ran around the house and picked out eleven books, whittled that down to eight, and then remembered all the eBooks that I’ve read. (Most of my fiction is in eBook form so I can read them on my Palm before falling asleep without bothering my wife…) Oh, and I know some of these border on “youth books” but, well, what can I say. This is about as “grown up” as I plan on becoming. ;-)

Here’s my “one” book, depending on what you feel like, of course…

• Historical Fiction: Dogland by Will Shetterly.

• History (through comics): Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman and any of the Cartoon History of the Universe books by Larry Gonick.

• Poetry: Selected Poems by Charles Olson, ed. Robert Creeley. (I grew up near where Olson lived and wrote so I don’t know if the imagery works as well for others…)

• SciFi: Hoo boy! This list could go on and on, but I’ve limited myself to two I read recently that really made me think: Darrell Bain’s A Strange Valley and its sequel, Prion Promises.

• Non-fiction: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire by Rafe Esquith.

• Finally, the book I’ve read more than any other, yet have struggled the most to live out: Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure by C.W. Metcalf and Roma Felible

Happy Reading!

Haiku for the new iMacs

Harddrives imprisoned.

The new iMacs are still sealed.

Not for me, thank you.