september 2007 Archives

Sleep doesn't come down.

The hour of the wolf is that halfway time between midnight and dawn; it's a bad time, threatening to one's self-esteem, self-confidence and therefore, well-being. All that, but there's one thing worse: seeing the sun rise in an insomniac dawn.

Ever had a headache so bad that you couldn't sleep? Yeah? Well, imagine that having started in August. Of 2006.

Jiminy God!

I was hoping I'd be learning something interesting along the way, but so far it's just been tweaking and refreshing, tweaking and refreshing. God, I sound like someone rolling at a big gay dance club.

Don't look too closely. You'll see the seams—sometimes literally.

I hate the masthead graphic. Did anyone notice there are two pyramids? WTF?

Good thing that CSS lets you throw things against the wall to see what sticks. If I had to keep the whole of the layout and rules in my head, well, let's just say that there's a reason they call the internet a great echo chamber.

The reason I got into all this "trouble" with the blog layout is because Movable Type 4 (the collection of scripts from SixApart that I used to create and maintain this blog) was too smart. Too smart for my own good, really.

If I hadn't been poking around at CSS—in particular, the structural/layout aspects of it—I wouldn't have recovered anywhere near as fast as I did. And while it was much easier to get up and running than previous versions, there's still so much lacking in web apps that it sends me scurrying back to the comfort of native-application bliss (as always, I'm using ecto as my blogging editor).

I'm biased here, but that doesn't mean I can't objectively (and subjectively) justify myself when it comes to native applications. I avoid doing any form of creation within a web page if I can help it. Lots of people trundle along quite happily using LiveJournal (EL-JAY! ugh) or TypePad or Blogger or—eek!—MySpace, typing their blog entries into a web form and clicking that Submit button.

But all you have to do is click the wrong button once, or worse, go visit another website while you're in the midst of writing a blog entry totally forgetting that to leave the page often times means losing the contents of that page.

So here I sit on BART (the train, not the man) typing away. Yes, I have an internet connection, but I'm not sure I'll finish this entry (you know how I get) before it's time to disembark at Union City for my weekly visit to the Korean Herb Doctor. Yes, I could close the MacBook Pro and when I opened it later, the webpage would likely be there, but perhaps not. Perhaps Safari will try to connect to the web before I have a chance to reestablish an internet connection and its display of an error message will be enough to lose whatever I type. Probably not, but the best software is that which removes doubt from the proceedings and provides a sunny path to your goals.

Which brings me to Amazon MP3. Yuck.

I tried. I really did. I spent a half hour trudging through the site in search of my old standbys. I was fully prepared to shell out the $8.99 or whatever to repurchase an album I already had just to compare things.

Well, there's two million songs, and then there's two millions songs you'd bother with. In searches for "Billy Joel", I ended up with cover-band albums and tribute albums, and even some weird Asian group of tweens listed only by their Americanized first names. Among Kay and Bobby and Tom was a boy called "Billy Joel". The sad part is that it was better than most of the alternative listings which were primarily karaoke tracks. At least the kids were singing original material.

Searching for other well-established artists turned up similiar disappointments. I finally ended up with an older Sufjan Stevens album, "Illinoise", but not after downloading an ironic client application which was required for downloading an entire album at a time.

The client application was the best part of the experience, though. After downloading that and installing it—which required quitting Safari and relaunching it—the purchase started a download of a .amz file, which was the album's bundle of resources: artwork, songs encoded as MP3s, but at 256kbps and with no DRM.

iTunes Store songs are encoded as AACs (MPEG-4) at 128kbps. Don't go thinking that the Amazon downloads are twice as nice because they're encoded at a higher bit-rate because AAC is a much more efficient codec than MP3.

You also end up with a song file that's 60% larger than an iTunes song of a similar length. That means that if your iPod normally can hold 10,000 songs from iTunes (or your own CDs encoded with AAC), it can only hold 6,250 Amazon MP3 songs. If your iPod is a classic or "classic" iPod with a hard disk, that also means significantly poorer battery life because the hard disk has to spin up more often to access the larger song files.

But I saved a whole $1.00 and the music I have has no technical restrictions on copying as much as I want. But then, I have yet to bump my head against the technological restrictions of the FairPlay (iTunes) DRM, so that doesn't mean anything.

What a chore. I suppose they'll get better, but then so will iTunes. Yes, I'm once again biased, but my biases are out in the open.

At the end of the day, that half hour could have been better spent—on fixing the CSS & HTML of this blog, for instance—and I'll take the comfort of a ⌘S and a local file anyday.

Well, now I've done it.

Movable Type 4.0 and late-night & headachey foggy-head done done it.

Hopefully I'll have something reassembled soon enough. It's all about the content anyway, right? RIGHT?

When Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) first hit the scene just over a year ago, most people found “him” outrageous. That is, in the sense that FSJ was funny and entertaining and how-the-hell-does-he-get-away-with-it? While playing at “being” Steve Jobs, he used time-honored schtick to lampoon the public character of Steve Jobs.

As recently as three or four years ago, you couldn't read about Apple, Inc. (née Apple Computer, Inc.) without “beleaguered” prepended to each and every mention, but since its fortunes have changed (the iPod introduced many people to the real talent of Apple) the world has gone almost overnight to calling it a monopoly. It's not just people who've lost the knack of moderation, just as it's not just gay men who can be huge drama queens. Story for another day, though.

There was a hunt going on for a while to discover who exactly FSJ was. Reminding the world that the cheekily-named (the clever stops there) “Valleywag” is a one-trick pony, they searched for weeks and weeks and came up empty. It took Brad Stone, a New York Times reporter, about a second and a half to find out it was Daniel Lyons, a Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine. Gooooo, Valleywag.

Forbes is well-known for championing static inertia and the almighty dollar, but for a while it seemed that Dan Lyons—also well-known as anti-Open-Source, anti-blogger and overall a pro-Microsoft kinda guy—would keep playing at his parody without agenda: FSJ was a particular point of view, albeit one synthesized doubly-indirectly as a sort of WWSJD? kind of thing. Still, FSJ was funny, and biting and like all good parody, an entertaining—if often conflicting-with-reality—voice.

But more and more, FSJ is emerging as Dan Lyons. For real. The first smack of something going wrong was when Lyons started to trash OLPC (one laptop per child), Nicholas Negroponte's initiative to get computers into the hands of kids in third-world countries, something I consider admirable and admirably-long-term in its thinking. Yet Dan Lyons takes every effort to trash the whole thing. It's not funny stuff, it's just plain mean. Mean in the sense that he appears to make every effort not only to poo-poo it, but to bring it down.

Who the hell would attack a charitable effort? Who the hell wouldn't want to promote egalitarian ideals, to say nothing of the material benefits of third-world countries helping themselves? Oh yeah, a pro-money, pro-Microsoft guy who works for Forbes. All those countries are just “new markets” to a guy like Lyons, and OLPC is a threat.

Even with all that, it's still occasionally fun to read FSJ when he's going after other public figures—including Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jonathan Schwartz and “himself”—but as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to read as it gets more and more strident and ugly.

And that's not funny, that's just sad.

I honestly don't know if fatalism and nihilism go hand in hand for the average bear (spare the irony), but it seems so for me.

Ofttimes when I'm out in a crowd, there's a certain something that hits me and makes me want to turn tail and run. Run from? Maybe. Run to? Maybe. Yes, it's confusing for me, too. But I run nonetheless.

The introverted might identify with this, but I'm certainly no introvert. Some might choose to interpret this as a sea-change, but not me: the extrovert makes the startling self-discovery? I promise that it's nothing to do with that.

You're out with your friends in a crowd and you look about and you see various levels of commingling and some you find distasteful and some you find inappropriate. Still others you find ridiculous, which sometimes over time becomes just boring. And other times it refuses to become boring background and instead just digs at you. And when you find yourself wishing for less-interesting times, you know something's fucked.

You see the couplings, in various forms of prurience and undress—but never redress, I've noticed—and you wonder if this is really all there is. And you stop short of asking: “Is it?” because you can't fathom life after you get an answer to something like that.

This is the point where the weaker-souled turn to cosmic crutches. But for me? I'd rather lavage than be suborned. Short-term solutions to long-term problems and all that. That's the the flip-side of the existential-angst condition, the one that no one notices: the bird's eye view of the lack of meaning lends a meaning all its own. That same 10,000 ft view also lends distance, didn't you know?

And it's that faraway point of view that makes you feel like a man apart, wishing that there was that someone-other who knows how to span the distance, even if just to say hello.

Technorati Tags: existentialism, fatalism, god of biscuits, nihilism

“Nelson Mandela. He's dead.”

Thanks, President Bush. I'm sure Mr. Mandela will be thrilled to hear that.

Technorati Tags: george bush, god of biscuits, Nelson Mandela

Sometimes a thing happens that is so surprising and so meaningful and so genuine that it sends sarcasm, irony, cleverness and conceit scurrying under furniture and into dark corners. Dark places are where such belong when good will and honest candor rule the day.

It's the fault of everyone and no one that these wonderful and joyous qualities do not rise each morning with the sun.

Jerry Sanders, the Republican Mayor of San Diego, is my hero. Not because I have some personal stake in what he talked about; not because he's sticking it to the standard Republican party line; not because of anything other than the willingness to side with what is right instead of what the right says or what anyone says. For being a compassionate man, for being a good father. For being a fine human being at the end of the day.

My own writing here is in the way of something and someone eminently more....well, just more, so here he is. Click on the image to watch.

I have long found Camille Paglia utterly detestable. There's nothing charming about her, nothing convivial or even in vivo about her writing. She's a pedant. She's a hypocrite. She mainly uses the height of her pulpit to cast long shadows or to direct her self-appointed-cognoscenti (oh yes, I went there) lackeys on where to shove ponderous push-pins into her own map of the world. She could squeeze the final dribbles of moisture from a desert with her prose alone: there's a museum quality to any subject when she writes about it.

Why am I taking time here and now to talk about this? Well, Ms. Camille, growing ever more glacially comfortable with being an out Lesbian, decided to spew a little dust onto the Larry Craig story. She finds the whole idea of two men hooking in up a restroom to be “a bit de trop”. Can you imagine? De trop, people! (that means, in her context, “icky”).

This from the woman who thinks male urination is some kind of sexually transcendent act, but for women pissing is just “[watering] the ground she stands on”. Or squats over, in this case, a position that suits quite well her relationship with her subject most times. She blames the “PC Squad” back in the day for being pissed off that she observed “the modern male homosexual has sought ecstasy in the squalor of public toilets, for women perhaps the least erotic place on earth.” It's all bananas and orchids, is it?

Ms. Paglia, it's a frickin' room that men happen congregate in for pissing (sorry, micturition), some of whom enjoy the attentions of another man or at least another hand or mouth. There's some privacy afforded, and it happens. Men aren't cruising toilets in search of “ecstasy”, they just want to get off. Men have no problem with sexual expediency, usually. Is that really so difficult to accept prima facie (rolling my eyes) instead of spinning a whole web of stuffy academic bullshit around it?

Later (two paragraphs later) in the Salon.com piece I linked to above, she insults the very over-intellectualized bullshit that she employs when she's trying to show you how much better she is than you are:

Too often defamed these days as racist, imperialist piracy, archaeology has more scholarly soul than, well, most of the Ivy League's humanities departments ensconced in their plush, airless tombs. [Ow! My sides from hypoxia!]

First, let's just gloss over the fact that she took exactly three sentences to segue from Larry Craig to Bronze Age Crete: she skewers the Ivory Tower while standing atop it.

It gets.....ummm, better? Her next stop: Absolutely Fabulous! But you've been punished enough so far. Moving on...

After a brief mention of a minor early 50s film, Never Wave at a WAC, she moves on to the movie Auntie Mame also starring Rosalind Russell. (Land, ho! A segue!). Now, after dropping trou and dribbling territorial pissings on Larry Craig, the Ivory Tower, the state of field archaeology, British satire and 50s American comedies, Ms. Paglia finally delivers the punch line:

Alert, all “Auntie Mame” fans! (That sparkling 1958 movie, starring Russell and based on Patrick Dennis' witty book, was one of the central, formative experiences of my youth -- a taste inexplicably shared with battalions of gay men worldwide.)

The emphasis is mine, because I'm just overwhelmed. Because I'm so underwhelmed.

The woman who believes she totally clinched the totality of bathroom cruising with...

It's not just furtive, closeted gay men who frequent toilets: Flamboyant pop star George Michael, who eats up stranger sex like a pastry cart of eclairs [cream-filled phalluses! bonk, bonk on the head! -Eds.] got nailed [double entendre alert, Ibid.] for soliciting a cop in a public john right across from his posh Los Angeles hotel. The sleaziness is a turn-on, probably inflamed by the hyper-distillation of testosterone smells.

...finds it “inexplicable” that gay men love the movie Auntie Mame????

She's an idiot. Plain and simple. Why do they still give her a pulpit?

•••

Extra credit: which one is cartoonier?

•••

Speaking of unworthy pulpiteers, Andrew Sullivan got married. For realz.

I read it from my friend Rex first, but then scooted over to Joe.My.God. (say it sassy and it feels like praying, or something like that) because Joe and I have this weird, unpredictable overlap when it comes to Andrew Sullivan and I still haven't found a good predictor for it yet.

After reading through a bazillion comments, after sort of agreeing with the people who hate him and sort of agreeing with the people who thought a high-profile same-sex marriage was a good thing, and after taking Rilke's (the poet) advice about use of irony, I just decided to lay my cards on the table and comment from the heart:

I'm absolutely the last person on earth who goes in for schadenfreude.

That said, I get a kind of icky feeling that someone so hypocritical and disingenuous in public is making a “commitment” to another human being who could get hurt.

Of course I wish them well and I hope I'm wrong. In the meantime, pass the pepto.

Where does this come from for me? Well, the one experience that I goes back to when I saw that Sullivan was getting married was a few years ago when I “dated” this guy Dave for about five and a half minutes, just long enough to meet a couple of his friends and realize how amazing they were. Dave, not so much, because he had strong “types” for men in his black and white and shallow world. Great looking man, but oy. A couple of years later, after Dave had been presented with a restraining order (nothing to do with me!) and moved to the South Bay and moved somewhere else and then to Southern California then somewhere else (itinerancy takes many forms), he was up here visiting with his “fiancé” (scare-quotes only because same-sex marriage was not legal then, nor is it at the moment). I walked into the bar where he was and he comes charging over to me and says, “I'm getting married. And he's white!” See, aside from me, Dave went in for the Latino types. Seriously. I could list the details (which he'd listed for me) of separate features of Latino men that were so important to him in a life-partner, but you can't cross a chasm in a hundred little steps, can you? So I'll spare you.

Anyway, Dave is who I thought of when I was figuring out my feelings towards Sullivan's nuptials. I don't know Andrew at all; I've never had direct contact with Andrew except for the reply I got after I Fedexed him a copy of Baby Be-Bop, the then-current installment of the Weetzie Bat series by Francesca Lia Block. It was three months after Allen had died and I thought the author of a book such as Virtually Normal needed some Weetzie Bat far more than I did.

I jokingly told Ronald that had I had only Sullivan and Paglia as “luminaries” guiding my path out of the Closet, I might have stayed in.

Seriously, people, how'd we end up with these two as front-runners when there are so many other, better voices out there?

It's been a while since I posted an entertaining google search that led to my page. This one is less entertaining than it is an opportunity to instruct.

The google search states “our son is being hit on by gay boys”.

This one's really really easy: do the same thing you'd do if straight boys were hitting on a daughter. Period. That's all there is to it. No polemics, no fundi-fucking the reality of it, just an age-appropriate, context-appropriate response.

Which I think should start with “no, thank you”, if in fact your son does not want their advances. However, you should allow for that contingency no matter what he's comfortable telling you. And you know, you can reassure him by making sure he understands that it's ok if he's gay. You can also support same-sex marriage so that kids growing up in the coming years will be less likely to assume a stigma to being gay in the first place. You can love your kids, like my parents love me.

You're welcome.

Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, gay, gay bashing

No, not that big orange fireball up in the sky, but rather, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

What was once one of the edgiest, geek-coolest companies on the planet is now on its knees servicing the giant prick that is Microsoft. Yes, Sun, maker of the infamous SPARCstations. Never heard of them? That's how cool they used to be!

I purchased two Sparc 2's when I ran the Computational Biology initiative at Allegheny Singer Research Institute, as well as two then-top-of-the-line Macintosh Quadra 950s. In the office that Rolo and I shared, we had the four machines. In that office, and for quite a bit less than $60,000, we had the equivalent of twice the computing power of the VAX crap that the Institute formally had (which cost more than three times that much per year, not including the costs of keeping an environmentally-isolated “computer room” that the horrid, horrid VMS-running VAXen required). Those Sun SPARCstations created a backlash against the hostage situation the IT doofusses kept if you wanted to do “real” computing. Soon there were SPARC IPXs cropping up everywhere, all running the UNIX-y goodness of Solaris and OpenWindows.

Nerdy, yes, but subversive at the time. It should be noted that the OpenWindows UI of 1990/91 was utterly clunky compared to the Mac OS, even at that time: one thing that Apple had understood for years was that the cursor is utterly owned by the user. That means the machine should never “warp” the cursor to a dialog box, should never bound the cursor when that dialog box is modal (meaning you must dismiss the dialog box before you can do anything else) and oh, dear god, should never move the cursor just to suit the UI.

If you look at the OpenWindows screenshot (click on the image to show full size) in the lower right-hand corner, you'll see a scrollbar “thumb”, affectionately known in those days as “the elevator”, you can see it has 3 parts: the up-arrow, the down-arrow and the dimpled box. If you clicked and held either of the arrows, of course the “thumb” would move up or down, but in order to keep tracking the elevator, the cursor moved along with the elevator. Again, nerdy, but this is a prime example of the psychology and simple “fit and finish” of a well-designed user experience and what not to do! User == God and God talks to machine via cursor. This is the kind of stuff that these days is sorely lacking almost everywhere but Mac OS X. And that, dear users, is why I still use a Mac. Not because I'm some kind of “Apple fanboi” but because there's nothing better out there. But it doesn't just “suck less”, it's actually still a joy to use—and that's something you never hear Windows people say. And it is something you always hear iPhone users say, no matter what side of the aisle their computing habits are.

So today, Sun announced the last nail in its coffin: it's now a Windows OEM. Jesus click-and-dragging Christ, what a mess.

I don't single out Sun only because they used to be cool, but because I'm always reminded that in its darkest hours, Apple was nearly acquired by Sun. “Snapple”, they called the notion. And had “Snapple” actually happened, if the Mac still even existed at all, today would have been the day that the Mac OS died and was replaced by Windows. -shudder-

So here I sit on BART, riding home from my acupuncture/acupressure/cupping/chinese-chiropractics treatments, typing away on my MacBook Pro and surfing the net via my Verizon ExpressCard modem, cobbling together bits of the past I remember fondly, still finding wonder in the ease and beauty with which the internet is presented, still appreciating the fact that my retinas aren't burned in with the garish and ill-chosen colors of the Windows UI.

And feeling a bit sad for the past officially having Passed.

Technorati Tags: apple inc, god of biscuits, Mac OS X, MacBook Pro, OpenWIndows, SPARC, SPARCstation 2, Sun, Verizon 3G, Windows OEM

The first story after a two-week hiatus, of course, was about Larry Craig. It aired five hours ago and yet it's not on YouTube yet. Bummer. Well, when it is, I'll post it, but picture this...

The lights go down. Jon Stewart is front, camera left. Back behind him is a soul singer who's embellishing/responding to the blurbs that Stewart gets out, which are actually just portions of audio from Larry Craig himself.

They get through the now-famous bits like “our feet touched” and “I tend to spread my legs when I drop my pants (and how do they get down, then?)”, then:

• Jon Stewart: ...pled guilty to the crime...
• Singer: …technically a misdemeanor…
• Jon Stewart: …he said he regretted the plea…
• Singer: …he could have easily contested the charge of interference to privacy; it's Law School 101…
  […]
  
• Jon Stewart: …anyway, he still says he's not nor has he ever been gay!
• Singer: That's not how gay works.

Holy shit, that shit was funny. And blithely, cheerfully, simply true. Comedy really is a sublime form of communication, far surpassing spoken word and I might even say it surpasses music and lyrics as well.

Proof? How many times have I written about it? Enough. And how many tedious, homophobic bloviators—you know, like the misnamed barking moonbat and women who are reason enough to bring back quilting bees—are there out there repeating the same ill-formed, irrational abuses of logic and humanity? Far too many. So many in fact, that I'm thinking of starting a pool: when it finally becomes not-ok to treat homosexuals like a distant-second-class caste, what group will it be and when will that become prevalent enough to make the news? I feel bad for that next group, because, like all kinds of violent types, like standing armies without an external target, they'll turn on their own with a bitterness even worse that what we are enduring because folks like those can't be out-and-proud racists anymore.

All the liberal blogs and “liberal” media outlets out there tilting at big gay windmills (I know!) would have nothing gay (sorry, “homosexual”) to talk about if they finally just believed “that's not how gay works”.

Technorati Tags: larry craig, jon stewart, The Daily Show, god of biscuits, gay

Fake Steve Jobs wrote about a site he thinks Bill Gates is behind. That was bad grammar, I know, but it was fun to type “Bill Gates is behind.”

I'm pointing you at the site because I'm certain that the Mac can stand up to whatever bitter bitchiness they can foist on the world.

Of course, that doesn't mean I won't give my opinion on it. And keep in mind, you're entirely able to make comments to me, but not to the author of that site. You can go through the motions of making a comment there, but the site won't actually accept them. Or if it does and he/she's only moderating comments, then there's no feedback to that effect. All in all, just a trainwreck of a website.

Then there's the site's “favicon”. You know, that little icon that shows up in your browser to the left of the URL? Blown up to show “detail”:

What the hell is that? And how difficult is it to clean up 196 8-bit pixels? [UPDATE: The icon is from the Open Source project Joomla. Open source is great for code, but not so much for fit and finish. thanks to Nathan for the find.]

And the site's beautiful banner graphic:

Jesus. I'm no Photoshop expert, but c'mon. How are you NOT going to clean up what looks like water-spots? How did they get there in the first place?

And the coup de grace:

No shit.

Technorati Tags: fake steve jobs, FSJ, god of biscuits, joomla, themacsucks

Happy 28th Birthday to Sam!

I wish...a lot of things. For him. For me. For the past. But most importantly, for the future and the wide open Possible.

Technorati Tags: expurgate, god of biscuits, sam

I was browsing various tech sites, like I do, and discovered this pretty damned hot looking computer from HP (click the image to see more pics via cnet:

Not bad, right? In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's one of the most beautiful desktops I've seen—and it's not a Mac. Sadly, that's not so much a pro-Apple statement as an anti-beige statement. Seriously, that is what usually comes from caring about the oh-so-sacred “enterprise” market instead of caring about the people market. Did someone forget that corporate workers are, y'know, people, too?

It's huge (see the pictures in that gallery where the machine is next to human beings), but the styling makes it seem elegant, even lithe. I looked through a few different galleries, including one on HP's site. Interior? Extremely well laid out, and they use standard components instead of vendor specific gooses. Back panel? Efficent and tight. Front? beautifully minimal.

Yeah, you're waiting for the “but”...

BUT! Then they go and do something absolutely horrific like this:

Whyyyy, god, whyyyyy? A little poppy-uppy thingy to ruin the whole gestalt? So sad. They were doing so well! Like the Mac Pro, there are hard drive bays that are “slot loading”, meaning you don't need to hook up data and power wires to a drive: you just attach the bare drive to a tray (in the Mac Pro's case, it's just a slip of metal with a handle) and slide it in. Like a Mac Pro, there are advanced thermals. It only has 4 memory slots (total 8GB) compared to the Mac Pro's 8 memory slots (16GB), but most people won't have to worry about that. And it has 5 drive bays instead of 4, so you can get 5TB inside instead of 4TB max, so let's call it a wash.

But oh, that nasty popup thing. Way to ruin the lines of the machine. It makes the inexplicable circles-and-tangents nonsense on the side panel look “cool”.

Would you spend $5600 on this machine? Imagine the scenario: bring it home. Slowly unbox to savor the moments. Set it up. Plug all the plugs in. Power it up. “Welcome to Windows.” Oh GOD.

Technorati Tags: blackbird, god of biscuits, hp, mac pro, Microsoft

This is hilarious! But it's also scary that it would have become absurd so much earlier than it does today. Content providers suck.

Technorati Tags: DRM, god of biscuits, RIAA, youtube

I'm one of those liberals, remember. Seriously liberal. But I don't suffer the blindness of those at the fringey extremes, the ones whose doctrinaire qualities are clear evidence that they've lost any knack of moderation. I'm certainly not a Capitalist, but we live in a capitalist society, with a set currency. The word “currency” doesn't really mean what it used to. For a long time, it's only meant money. There was a more personal coloring to it when barter was in place. But I'm wandering.

I updated the post about iPhone early adopters whining baselessly about the price drop in iPhones, the gist being that they spent “too much”, now that the price was $200 less. There were far far more people complaining than were simply accepting of market conditions and the fact that we purchasers weren't held at gunpoint in the first place.

Steve Jobs isn't stupid. In fact, I'd offer to say that his intelligence, savvy and overall cleverness, combined with the fact that he helms creative, technical, corporate and zeitgeist powers, he's in a position more than almost anyone to be wise as well as smart, possessing of bravery as well as moxie, and perhaps most importantly, he acts in addition to thinking.

So in being presented in this game called life with a piece that couldn't be moved he didn't just work around a limitation, he changed the nature of the game: every early adopter of the iPhone will be getting a $100 rebate, most likely in the form of a store credit. For those of you who haven't done the math yet, even without knowing how many phones were sold it's reasonable to estimate that well over $50M in charges will result from this overture.

On top of all that, Steve Jobs apologized. I don't stress that to imply that it's a surprise that he's possessing of such humility, but rather to stress that no other powers in high tech would do such a thing.

I googled “Steve Ballmer apologizes” and “Bill Gates apologizes”, and came up with nothing of significance, unless you're willing to count Ballmer apologizing for accusing every iPod owner of being a thief. Think of all the things that Microsoft should apologize for: lost productivity, forced mediocrity, blue screens of death, red rings of death. I could go on and on. I could have also included the Zune, but like the situation with the iPhone, people aren't locked into the Zune, an obvious fact given their sales numbers.

Everyone was surprised that Steve Jobs apologized and reversed his statements in a day. I'm not. Not really. If there's one consistency in Apple's behavior, to my way of thinking, it's this: best products, best user experience, maximized user satisfaction. In other words, in the absence of mitigating factors like a monopoly or elevation of the corporate over the personal, people will optimize for happiness, including how they spend their money.

From that perspective, while an apology was surprising, it wasn't out of character. And in a larger context, it's only when a corporation is nothing more than a response mechanism through its own policies that people suffer. When humanity is permitted a say, that's when good things can happen.

So the $100 store credit, to me, is a bonus. A very welcome bonus, but still more of a gift than anything else.

2007.09.09 UPDATE: From a poll on powerpage.org, a Mac and iPod news site:

Technorati Tags: apple, apple inc, god of biscuits, iPhone, iPhone rebate, steve jobs

Thanks to Feministing.com

Now, [Ho]Mo Rocca probably stacked the deck because it's obviously heavily edited for comic effect, but seriously, I wasn't at all surprised.

Technorati Tags: bionic penis, bionic woman, dogpoet, Feministing, god of biscuits, Mo Rocca

UPDATE: Apple is going to give all earlier iPhone purchasers a $100 store credit, with details to be worked out. What will you buy with your $100?

I haven't seen so many Whiny McWhiners since I showed up at the Lone Star with a clean-shaven face.

If you haven't heard, Apple dropped the price of the iPhone a whopping $200 today. The price of iPhonery is now $399. And boy, you'd think Apple pissed in the Cheerios of somewhere very North of 300,000 iPhowners.

They're also complaining that the iPod touch doesn't have a hard drive. And that WiFi isn't everywhere. And that the new iPod nano isn't svelte enough. And that the new green too Seafoam and not enough Magritte. And that the iPod family doesn't counteract gravity. And before you ask, no, they don't cure cancer, either.

So the legions of people who decided that the most impressive electronics device EVAR was actually worth $600 to themselves and did so anywhere from June 29 up until 14 days ago have suddenly let Steve Jobs invalidate their choices. Their decisions. Their behavior.

Yeah, and the first memory upgrade I ever bought for any computer was back in 1979 and I paid $99 for 16KB of memory. 16 kilobytes. For the record, the last memory upgrade I bought was about $40 for 512MB of memory. 512 megabytes. Should I extrapolate out and say that in 1979+RAM units, that 512MB would have cost me 32,768 x $99, or $3,244,032. Damn, I got ripped off!

Never mind that that extra 16KB let me explore modes of programming that taught me an enormous number of things at the time. Never mind that eventually the computer that contained that memory was sold, enabling me to buy a Macintosh in 1984, which tripped one dependency after another and led me to having the Mac that I spend $40 upgrading.

Was I wrong that an iPhone in early July was worth $599? No, of course not. Hell, I've already gotten that much value out of having one, that much pleasure out of using one, that much entertaining distraction in learning about one.

I'm not claiming to be immune from the legendary Reality Distortion Field. I also know that large corporations are uncaring, unfeeling, unfair when it comes to actual human beings. And Apple is a large corporation. Draw the conclusion.

Apple dropping the price on a luxury item that you yourself chose to buy does not make them evil. It makes them self-interested. Just like you are.

Technorati Tags: iPhone rebate, iPod touch, god of biscuits, iPod, iPhone

I still maintain that Larry Craig did nothing criminal. In bad taste, maybe. As a U.S. Senator, stupid definitely. But I say it just goes to show you all the significance of the need to physically connect with another human being, regardless of what else is important in your own life. Sure, Bible thumpers will pervert this into a perversion (or for you old-school types, an inversion), but screw 'em. Ew, or not.

Through Fosco (Fosco Lives! so he claims), I found the end-results of labors of lurrrve by some enterprising and brilliant Photoshoppers. Here's my favorite, but go look at all 22.

Is anyone here starting to think that the Conservative Big Tent is actually something to do with trousers?

Coming soon (again, ew), Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham!

Technorati Tags: downwithtyrrany, blogactive, Lindsey Graham, photoshop, Lindsey Graham, god of biscuits, Mitch McConnell, fosco!, armistead maupin, wonkette

I seen patterns in things. Maybe that's just how my brain is wired, or maybe the course of my education (academic and post-) makes this kind of thing inevitable, but there it is. I was always taught to remain the generalist for as long as possible. To some this might seem like a lack of intellectual commitment, and it is, but there's work required above the intellectual heavy-lifting, an effort in keeping any one train of thought (inferential, deductive, whatever) from dominating the processs until the time is right.

And when is that “right time”? That, friends, is an art form. I have yet a consistent mechanical or numeric or even emotional model that might predict that moment, but isn't the beauty (and curse) of a moment that it's a thing until itself, separate from the otherwise smooth continuity of time?

This overall mental pose has served me quite well over the years. Over the past year, however, I'm either intermittently debilitated or there's a low-grade pain, muscle twitching and spurious neural events that keep me from fully entering the zone needed to make all of this work. There are also the far-too-infrequent times when I'm functional. When there's this respite, I either exploit it or just enjoy it. When there's pain, there are meds, but more effectively, there's distraction.

Like now, sorta. (sorta less pain, sorta vicodin, sorta muscle relaxant kinda sorta)

So, a Moment. Sure sometimes I jump the gun on the moment and find myself standing within a conclusion waiting for the reasoning to bring up the rear. Embarrassing at the very least when you're left with your backside exposed. But more of the time, I must admit, I still find myself keeping many possibilities open. As few conclusions as possible. Close no door that holds any amount of future.

To a third party, this may seem like dithering. It is and it isn't. Being decisive just hasn't arrived yet when I'm like that. It may seem like I'm afraid to leap and stake my intellectual claim. Yes, I am exactly doing that. Why? Because I've seen this pattern too many times before. Someone or something finds a strategy that works. He/she/it made some decisions or lucked into some contexts where they enjoyed significant success. Don't fix what's not broken, right? Trouble is, when you cruise along at a pace that others consider successful, you tend to gather mass about you as you accelerate. It makes you insulated. Majestic, maybe, but even a zeppelin takes its own sweet time enacting at turn. It takes you from being a competitor in your own space into being the most dominant feature of your own space.

Look at all the old businesses. The publishing industry: I worked for a company that made the Rocket eBook reading device. Why? Because the publishing industry was paranoid about pirating and wanted an end-point device (the reader) that was a closed piece of hardware. They actually believed that that was a guarantee. Look at the music business. We all see how they're collapsing. The answers are so easy because most of us live on the side where most of the change happens and most of it is for the better. They try to stand still and hope that the future snaps back to their past and settles itself down.

Microsoft is yet another. Their only tack in anything: Put Windows on it and then see what can be done. PCs, mobile phones, the XBox, XBox 360. They're all just PCs with Windows on them. Nothing new under the sun for anything there. Why haven't they developed something new? Zune isn't new. In fact, it's a blatant betrayal of its music hardware partners followed by a closing of the ol' kimono: their stuff doensn't work with “PlaysForSure”, ironically.

People follow the same pattern. Mostly old, white, politically-straight men, because those are the only ones who generally have a history long enough for them to become ensnared ensconced in and inured insured by.

Well, I just thought of one exception: Leona Helmsley. An entire batallion of walking PR-violators all in one trussed up, lifted, sucked out, death-becomes-her body. A minor example for what I'm talking about, but everyone knows how she considered herself above any law they might throw at her: “We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

There are no fewer than three major figure who assume they have the same frictionless inertia moving in whatever direction they please:

Tucker Carlson: He happily spoke on camera to literally hundreds of people (hey, it's MSNBC), smiling and good-naturedly regaling the other panelists with a cheeky story of how he was hit on by a guy in a restroom, how he waited for 25 minutes for his friend to show up and then the two of them proceeded to bash the guy's head into a wall. He was smiling, as if talking about a Junior High school sports victory. He had no qualms about admitting what he did because he considered it a noble act. These are the kinds that try so hard to look like they're not trying very hard. That's generally a productive way to focus your gaydar and suss out at least a partial story. I've chatted to another blogger who claims to have sucked off Carlson and didn't get bashed. Now, this guy's a cheeky bastard, so I emailed him to ask if he was just making fun or if it really happened. His response: “I don't have any DNA to prove it but if you don't know a mo' when you see one, you might want to take that gaydar in for a tune up.” Like I said, cheeky bastard. Hearsay? Sure. But I for one do not think it's a bad thing to be gay. Therefore, I am not insulting him to insinuate it. If challenged, I think I'd want a rather good explanation of why he had such an outsized reaction to being hit on by a man.

Then there's Mitt Romney. The most photogenic bastard in the race. And yes, they're all bastards. This is what happens when you put yourself into the “good” company of all those other straight white men who ran for President under the Republican ticket: pile on whatever Entitlement you can. Of course you have to start by ignoring that your own party fucks over poor people by painting them as lazy people who think they're entitled to assistance. Then you have to assume that whatever qualities you possessed that made you in any way human, can be utterly and without consequence discarded in favor of an alabaster shell: totally white, reflecting everything away from you. You can directly contradict yourself about things like same-sex marriage, being sure to always call it “gay marriage” instead because that makes it seem alien and paints it as a “special right”. You can go further and turn your back on the most profound science humanity has come up with, but here you have to practice in a mirror first. I bet you're very much at home in front of a mirror, Mitt. You have to make sure that when you speak what you know to be an untruth, that your face betrays no tic of nervousness, no eye movements that would give you away. All that in place, you can move on to more bombastic tactics: find a social phenomenon that's both harmless and popular, and find a way to gay-bait the whole country. Mitt said, of High School Musical 2. When I first heard this, I couldn't believe something like this could possibly be true. But it is. High School Musical 2 is a huge hit. Huge among youngsters and teens. Like Harry Potter, it's clean, bright entertainment. It eschews sex and violence in favor of Musicals. Mitt Romney said of this TV movie:

We must take a stand against Hollywood’s attempt to sissify our nation’s youth through singing, dancing, and other blatant homosexual values.

Like Musical Theater hasn't been gay as a maypole since the beginning! Does he really think that the War in Iraq is good for teen boys and girls but a movie about musicals is a national threat? What mindset must he inhabit for him to be so literal and blunt about a friggin' kids movie? You know, on second thought, I'm still not sure this one is real. How can a presidential candidate say something like this? If a Democrat made a tongue-in-cheek joke along these lines, you bet your ass the conservative press would grab the out-of-context soundbite and report it as rude and petty.

Now, take John McCain. Please.

Stalwart motherfucker. POW. Before he was a presidential candidate, he had classic libertarian (lower-case 'L') views about just about everything. He was as affable to liberals as a Republican could be, because above everything else you just had to respect a strong person offering his/her own strong opinions even if you didn't agree with them. June 2004, McCain—not yet a candidate—breaks with the Bushies about the federal marriage protection stupidity: “The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”

Now? When that judge ruled that the Iowa statute banning same-sex marriages was a violation of human rights, McCain offers: “a loss for the traditional family” and that he supports “the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.”

Well now there then! This is how John McCain “respects” marriage:

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, “aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich.” McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money.

It's better in video. This is about a state prop in Arizona:

Why shouldn't this asshat defend traditional marriage? He had two of them, because he realized that marriage could be exploited enjoyed both for procreation and political ascendancy! Way to go, John! And a 43 year old man taking up with a 25 yr old woman.

Jebus, I have to stop. It's not easy to remain inside someone else's POV, even when you agree with it. But these folks. No shame. None. They do what they do because they know that once Religion overlaps with Government, you don't need to address real issues, you merely need to use sin as a tool to instill xenophobia. You don't address complex problems, you issue strongly-worded bumpersticker messages.

All this will likely end only in a complete crash. And you can thank Jesus and his followers for that.

Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, John McCain, larry craig, Leona Helmsley, Microsoft, Mitt Romney, Nuvomedia, Rocket eBook, same-sex marriage, Tucker Carlson