You’ve got to be kidding me.

First, I voted.

Then, I thought the gaggle of high school kids at the train station might have been heading into the city for some sort of damnfool desperate Ron Paul rally.

And then more crowds joined them at succeeding stations, wearing hats and Giants jerseys and cheering, and I finally achieved Duh.

And then I saw even more of them at my connecting train in Newark, cheering each other, tossing empties onto the tracks. The pride is back.

There’s a bunch of noise outside my office window, down near The Pit. Will there be this many people lined up to cheer for the guy who discovers the cancer cure?

A fucking ticker-tape parade. On Primary Day.

…

Please, all you sports morons… At some time between the second six-pack and your stumble home… go vote. Please. You’re all depressing the shit out of me.

Hey Mo, did you watch that thing last night?

I owe a lot to my iPod. Ever since I got the little blue thing in 2004 (having stoically waited until the features/price balance made enough sense to justify a purchase), it has become indispensable. Somewhere on the sidebar of this journal will eventually be a list of information sources I regularly avail myself of, most of them audio podcasts. Most of those are converted radio and television, made available for free, as an incentive to both buy the hardware and peruse the offerings of paid content on the iTunes store.

We got rid of cable tv in our apartment back during W’s first usurped term in office, as a direct consequence of economic need. Times got tough for a couple attempting to stay out of debt, and cable was an easier habit to break than protein. Over-the-air television sufficed to bring us the few shows we could rabbit-ear into viewable reception.

The results: NPR’s Science Friday, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, This American Life, and Radio Lab. PRI’s The Sound of Young America. PBS’s Bill Moyers’ Journal, I Cringely, and NOW. Escape Pod, The Tech Guy, MacBreak Weekly, The Onion Radio News, Scientific American’s Science Talk, Gruber & Benjamin’s The Talk Show, Your Mac Life, and Magnatune’s Sitar Podcast.

Most of these are informational, keeping me in touch with the world through my chosen conduit of science and technology. A few cover the cultural and entertainment categories, and I’m loathe to admit to some of the ones I’m leaving off this list. Still more will follow once I replace my 4gb iPod mini with one of the new touch models, because There Will Be Video, as well. So what will I have to give up to make room for the new stuff?

So fuck you, Verizon, Time-Warner, and Comcast, for not allowing me to subscribe to the cable stations I actually want without appending a huge, costly “package” of crap I’ll never need. No interest in modifying your customer-service software for true á là carte shopping? Fuck you all.

I’ll happily suffer the mild disdain of the high-renter thirty-year-olds I work with when I tell them about how relatively simple it was to rig up an over-the-air antenna for the inevitable digital video signal changeover. I don’t need to be reminded how ADD-illiterate network drama or local tv news has become, as long as I can still receive the two or three public television stations within my range.

Call me a snob, but I just don’t need that much noise in my life. And that’s all you purveyors of crap are to me, until one or more of you can prove me wrong with a consistent lineup of better product. I’ll abstain from premium cable if it means not paying real money for the likes of American Idol.

Another rite-of-passage milestone has been reached

I’m so proud. I’ve been called a “douchebag” no less than twice in the less-than-erudite comment thread on a very popular technology-satire blog. Yet another commenter chose to describe my suggestion to keep the satire focused upon facts (rather than stock-price-manipulative industry gossip) as “gay-ass.” 

Digg children, the online world is indeed your oyster. Please continue to attack anyone with vocabulary you’re too lazy to learn. 

I am so happy to be part of a culture which celebrates this level of discourse. Is anyone selling relocation-to-Canada-package services for disaffected faux intellectuals, or are there degree requirements for repatriation? 

I guess it’s a good thing the equally-illiterate baby Trekkies I normally converse with are so relatively polite. All they do is pout and passively digress entire discussion threads into a mewling rat-hole.

As for the satirical blogger… he’s lost a bit of focus since he became famous. Possibly since he found that the hits go way up when he posts about easy targets that his comment mob can dogpile upon. Smart commentary about the business world has taken a back seat to “let’s add a caption to this image of someone we hate” contests.

Nice work if you can get it. 

My neighborhood

Six years ago, on the promise of a highly pleasurable afterlife and the approval of a series of bearded, well-connected authority figures, several childish fools exerted a great deal of effort and successfully destroyed two large buildings right next to where I now make my living. Whereupon all Americans reaped the results of decades of short-sighted foreign policy, regulatory blunders, a directed disenfranchisement of our middle class, and an infantilized disconnection from the consequences of any of a dozen easily-ignored problems.

Twenty months ago, my employer moved my company’s division into a building adjoining this site, which, having long since been excavated of debris, continued to occupy the attention of a great many well-connected authority figures. Deals were made, plans drawn up, political battles fought, and money exchanged hands… all to no apparent effect, apart from providing a continuing supply of slack-jawed tourists with (among other things) a shrine at which they could recommit to their paranoia, a background for their bored kids’ solemn snapshot portraits, and a pulpit upon which to reinforce their ignorance once back home.

My morning commute takes me from under that pit where all that debris came from, up several flights of steps and escalators from the train. Midway through this ascent, I reach the pit’s interior level, where construction workers generate noise (and apparently little else) most of the day. Twenty floors of vertical distance reduce the cacophony of jackhammers and explosives to a minor reminder of the industrial purgatory below. It rarely stops, possibly because of this location’s enormous natural unsuitability for heavy construction.

Pit level has remained constant through the years during which it has graduated from disaster site to eyesore. Temporary structures have risen, then made way for the annual ceremonies commemorating our intelligence agencies’ spectacular success in ignoring or burying vital information about people we’d trained, funded, and encouraged to hate us. Nothing significant has risen above this pit for over six years except noise, jingoistic speeches, billable hours for construction or police personnel, and commuters from New Jersey.

Perhaps this is because, until recently, the consortium charged with the site’s redevelopment had not yet finished revealing itself as a funnel for patronage and influence-peddling money transfers before a sufficient amount of public outrage could be coordinated to object to its naked mendacity.

When I first began using this route, I had noticed that, amidst the bustling, noisy activity of construction crews and police—all accomplishing nothing—one could see vegetation growing up through the gaps between the concrete and the temporary structures built to simulate the appearance of progress. Life was returning to a place which had been lifeless for hundreds of years. As the weather warmed, I began to spot specific foliage, struggling to grow into bona fide shrubs, making their way up from the depressing mess.

These bits of green looked great, and they cheered me up on mornings when I’d skipped breakfast or felt particularly dismal about having lived to see a time where citizens are matter-of-factly treated like criminals wherever they travel within the land of their birth. One tiny not-tree in particular became my brief companion twice a day. I would look forward to seeing it and even got a picture or two.

And then it was cut down, perhaps because the temporary staircase it grew within supported too many users who’d objected to the obstruction of their view. I saw it, or another shrub, struggle to grow back before its area was reconfigured to make way for more elaborate structures. A shame. It made me think about how quickly the natural world could take Manhattan back from our concrete if we were to allow such a thing to happen.

Pit level has risen. Dirt and framework have been piled in configurations which suggest something more than a ramp to allow access to heavy machinery. It’s still not high enough to obstruct my view from the commuter train.

I’m told construction has actually begun upon a project to replace the former World Trade Center. Another monument to excess and arrogance. Yay.

I look forward to living and working far away from this place someday soon.

Nuggets of Contrition

Leo Laporte apologizes for having whined. Reason and fact largely prevail in an excellent MacBreak Weekly, wherein actual information is assessed, and the manifold opinions of the mobile phone user community are placed in context within a far-ranging meta-conversation between Leo and his guests Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Chris Breen, and Merlin Mann.

Seems that the available evidence of recent post-update iPhone dysfunction includes non-hacked phones as well as those which were tinkered upon. And had Apple truly meant to punish heretics, they probably would’ve done a more precise job of it.

Whew. Now if only George Ou would go back to dancing.

My oversight.

Add to that short list of relatively sane sources of Mac-related tech information, at least insofar as iPhone Madness is concerned: Shawn King.

There must be something in the water. Has the Joker escaped from Arkham?

Two of the last places I look for rationalism and accuracy in the Mac tech community have succumbed to what I can only interpret as some form of viral Britneyism, conveyed in the form of creeping self-entitlement, and expressed as godawful, presumptuous whining. Someone has tainted the water supply. Activate the Bat-signal!

Both Leo Laporte and the editors of Macworld/Playlist magazines, individuals I’d normally rely upon for sober and factual discourse, have recently posted podcasts full of anger and churlish pouting over the results of Apple’s recent software update to the iPhone.

All of these gentlemen, individuals I’ve normally associated with factual analysis of—and dispassionate objectivity to—Apple products, seem to have suddenly turned into representatives of the whiner population. You know those folks… the ones who sue a fast-food restaurant chain after spilling coffee on themselves. The people who paid full retail for a new consumer electronics gizmo, and then bleated like sheared sheep when its price dropped, even though they’d very likely already gotten their early-adopter bragging time.

Now some of these odd ducks are squealing because, after having tinkered with this device, they’ve found it no longer works properly, because one in a series of promised software updates has disabled it.

Whether it turns out that Apple could have been less aggressive with their update’s “reset,” I have a few questions for the most vocal of these people… specifically Rob Griffiths and Leo Laporte… because I’m baffled by their anger over this issue.

Where in the feature list or tech specs for the iPhone did it ever say you were at liberty to modify the functionality of the device to add unsanctioned applications?

Did your overview of the consumer technology space somehow empower you to presume that anything with a chip in it is infinitely subject to hobbyist tinkering, without consequence?

Did you find it impossible to wait until Apple had acquired more than a few months’ experience in a new consumer category, maintaining their side of iPhone functionality, before taking matters into your own hands?

Is the practice of conflating separate issues (lack of “third-party” apps, limitations on ringtone licensing, single-provider availability, read-only Notes, etc.) too tempting to overlook as you echo-chamber the “Apple is the new MS” slogan?

Does calling the iPhone a “platform” make it one, despite the fact that it’s not yet available to you as such?

It’s alarming to narrow my sources of sane information on this topic down to John Welch, John Gruber, and the Macalope. Late-adopters like me need more primary sources than that.

Disclosure: I’m an Apple shareholder.

What was I thinking?

Herewith, a place for me to post opinions and overview about topics which continue to occupy my enthusiasm and attention. Individuals concerned with propriety and G-rated behavior should not read this journal.

The design will change once I learn how to do so, and muster up the patience to bother. Until then, I’ll rotate through existing templates until I find one that offers more clean functionality than the rest. Because I design better work for other people than for myself.