november 2007 Archives

Have you ever seen the film Seven Years in Tibet?

Well, you should.

The first time I watched it, I took away from it many things, but the one line from it that kept my feel­ings col­lec­ted was spoken by Kundun, the Dalai Lama (ཏཱ་ལའི་བླ་མ་), as a fourteen-year-old. He was watching a Newsreel to learn about the world, already aware that the Chinese military had breached Tibetan soil:

Do you think one day people will see Tibet on the movie screen and wonder what happened to us?

Sad and powerful, and tragic given the global ennui towards the Tibetan occupation, but perhaps that's a subject for another day. I watched the movie again last night and the line that stood out for me this time around comes from one of the Chinese generals who had just ruined a mandala that was being prepared especially to welcome them, who ignored and overrode every cultural imperative of Tibetan culture and religion. As he walked out of the room where he'd just insulted every level of Tibetan life he muttered, “Religion is poison.” He said this to a Tibetan governor without missing a step.

Personally, I find most world religions contemptible human institutions. Put a bureaucracy around and behind an axiom/dogma and you always end up with a weapon. Always. But Buddhism seems impervious to weaponization and I found myself finding the Communist General contemptible. To disrespect others without provocation, to insult a heritage, to remove the right of individuals to practice their own religions (and that includes, especially, religions which seek to override and insult and disrespect other religions) is the true poison here. I'd call it irony that a true-believer Communist would look down upon the entire notion of religion, but that pattern is repeated so often that the intellectual aspect of it is gone and all we're left with is disdain, sorrow, tragedy.

I know very little about Tibet. In fact, the first things to pop into my head when I hear or see the word “Tibet” include Richard Gere and those seemingly ubiquitous “FREE TIBET” bumper stickers. Yeah, I guess I've been part of the “we” in “ennui”, I have to admit.

But some of the tutorials and samples of the professional photography application Aperture include Tibetan landscapes. The film shows the peaceful and vibrant Lhasa and the lands of Tibet, the Himalayan landscape, a people who respect life and the earth. A people ruled by the human vessel of the reincarnation of Avalokiteśvara not with hand or fist or weapon, but by the choice of autonomous individuals whose mainstay is that of respect, happiness and wisdom.

Of course Tibet is not the sole province of these qualities, but it does provide the stark contrast between a religion that reinforces itself from within and a religion which weaponizes itself: two different means of self-preservation; two very different outcomes.

I have of late been interested in typography, searching for fonts that might suit a redesign of these pages. Historical fonts speak as expected, modern ones hold the zeitgeist of their own eras, novelty fonts know their place is a spare one.

Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard, has increased its one-world-ness to include two Tibetan fonts. And as fonts are speaking to me lately, so speaks the Tibetan font, brazen and pliant. A sample:

If you are on a Leopard machine and want to see more of the glyphs from these fonts (the one above is called “Kailasa”, click here. The Font Book application will launch and you'll see the font sample. Hit ⌘2 and you'll be able to see all the glyphs from the font. Most are simply beautiful and taken as an alphabet they speak a certain something about those who employ them. As would be any alphabet, I suppose.

If you want to learn more about the Dalai Lama, click here. (Again, if you're using Leopard, it will open the Dictionary.app and display information from many sources all at once).

There is nothing worse than Empire: countless persons, customs, cultures, wisdoms lost forever, paved over by a uniformity that breeds nothing but contempt, creates nothing at all and holds little of value.

Will we ever mature past Empire? I like to think that the Dalai Lama, even after all that loss, still hopes or even expects so.

My emotions run the gamut when I look at this page.

I wish I could speak every language in the world.

Have you never witnessed an en­ter­tain­ment acted out upon a stage, across a screen or within a box that so captivated you that you gasped aloud, covering the mouth before you could halt the sound or the hand?

When the story refuses to pander, the pleasing shape and space provide remove, where's There and then's Now, having drawn you out of you, having dissevered you at your faults, apportioned into its players.

We break ourselves apart thus for the purpose of turning back to examine our other fractions from a distance: more than a mirror, less than necropsy. So exceptional those moments today, haply to avoid lardering discomfort in the heart of a paying spectator, but more likely more simply that salt is the easier seasoning.

To remove ourselves from ourselves whole, not to participate, not to dismantle or disassemble, but to simply to narcotize, our entertainments racing towards extremes, surpassing to surpassed. We are stolen away to distance unmarked: we are escaped.

Choose instead to stay and be our own examiners.

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions

Technorati Tags: Design, kindle

Here's a little secret. I “borrowed” my color palette from the iPod shuffle line. Literally. On that page you'll find this graphic:

Shameless, I know. But karma stepped in and made it unworkable. I'm more toward parchment than pastel and earth than metal, least in this regard.

And someone stop me from iambic pentametering already!

Technorati Tags: Broadsheet, iambic pentameter, iPod shuffle

Today was an unexpectedly wonderful day. Not because I didn't think I'd have a grand time: I was spending it with my friend Stork, whom I've known for over twenty years. That part was a given. As was having Sam around up at Stork's house for a huge meal.

It was a day that invented itself. And how often does that happen? Or maybe better said, how often do you realize that the Good of a good day emerges all on its own? Oh, you can plan, you can stage, but after all the conscious attempts, all you can do is hope that your clunky throw had good aim.

There's nothing I can call out from the day to corroborate my story, no anecdotes to prop up a storied stage. I'm just left with a mellow and infusion of positivity and a comfort in the acute pacing of my days of late.

Technorati Tags: thanksgiving

Everybody's heard about the new eBook Reader (redundant switcheroony nomenclature I'll get to later). It's from Amazon. Go read the front page and like doing a techie nerdy form of a Highlights magazine, see if you can spot the Apple-inspired marketeering. The English language is a whore and there are many johns in marketing.

Has it occurred to anyone that the name itself, “Kindle”, seems threatening, ominous, dare I say Bible-Belt/Nazi? Within context, of course.

Anyhoo, Amazon is falling all over themselves to get it just right, and perhaps with good reason: they're not introducing a product, they're trying to disrupt with technology. Just like Apple is attempting with the tie-ins to Starbucks.

But there are a few things to note about the ability of this platform/pattern before everyone starts shouting from the rooftops that a New Way has emerged.

I'm not bitter, because I rather enjoyed my time at Nuvomedia, Inc. They're the ones that made the Rocket eBook (ReB), a reading device which shipped in 1998 or 1999, I forget. See, it wasn't a ReB Reader, the device was the eBook, and you loaded electronic works onto it. That was the lingo back then.

So the first beef about Kindle is aesthetics. C'mon, look at the thing? Nearly no flat surfaces, all white, sort of flat-paint looking. The QWERTY keyboard isn't really a QWERTY keyboard, it's just a grid of perpendiculars with a QWERTY layout. Why couldn't they just make it a QWERTY layout? There's plenty of space down there. Speaking of down there, they should have put the main screen at the bottom and the keyboard on top, because unless you lay it flat, even a 10+ ounce device packs a moment-arm that's gonna give you pain over the long haul. And before you ask, you know you're gonna be typing with thumbs, so your view of the screen won't be unduly obscured if the keyboard were on top. So, on looks? Fugly. Ergonomics: it'll do, but “good enough” is a cuss word—well, cuss phrase—for UE.

Second, its positioning as a disruptive supply-chain. Nuvomedia pioneered getting endpoint to endpoint technology in place in order for the book publishing houses (far more draconian and backward and conservative than the RIAA, and you see what they're really like) to go for it. The houses demanded a closed hardware device, so that content could be linked to a hardware serial number *AND* a standard Rocket login username/password so that the purchased content could be viewed solely on that one reader. The only new thing that Amazon is doing is providing the Kindle-exclusive-EVDO access for free. But Apple did the same type of thing already with the tie-in to iTunes and iPhones/iPod Touches. Not a new trail, but maybe better pavement.

With the ReB, you went to barnesandnoble.com or powells.com and you could filter on eBook formatted title availability. You purchased that title and when you got to the eCommerce “congratulations and thanks you page” instead of giving you shipping dates and tracking numbers, you got a URL. Click it and it downloads to your PC or Mac. I don't know exactly what the workflow was for Windows, but on the Mac you clicked the URL and after it downloaded, the RocketLibrarian™ (with RocketWriter™!!!) launched automatically.

Now this is where I have to give special nod to Nuvomedia, Inc., beating Apple by a good two years in championing the “Digital Hub” concept. The ReB was a peripheral. Period. Just like iPod is now, just like iPhone is now. Just like Zune is now (except that the ReB actually worked).

The ReB device that Nuvomedia shipped, then VAR'd out to Franklin then sold outright to Gemstar was twice as heavy with a much smaller screen, but it was nine years ago, so adjustments need to be made for that. The screen was beautiful, what was called “half VGA” in those days, meaning 320 x 480 pixel screen. I don't remember if it was monochrome (like the original iPods) or if it could do 4-level gray scale, but it was an enjoyable experience to use.

Now this is where I tell you that I was hired to design and develop the Mac version of the RocketLibrarian. I also ended up QA'ing and instructing the marketing person on the workings and expectations of the Mac community. She once asked me if she could have a current development copy of RocketLibrarian for Macintosh so she could test it out on her PC. I had to remind her that she had a PC. Then she remembered that she had a MacPlus in her closet at home and “would that work?”. Jebus.

So anyway, I found a partial screenshot of the app I wrote (the Windows version had several engineers, QA people and a team of marketers behind it, natch):

Doesn't the name of Amazon's “iPod of Books” bother you? I mean in that sort of insidious way that digs under the sensibilities and kind of deforms things. Kindle. Kindling. Something that burns. Books.

What did they suppose they'd get out of naming a book device something like that? It feels menacing!

Couldn't they have taken the tack that they're actually improving on the book rather than killing than nominal, historial original? It gives me the willies—even moreso than the hideous design. And the free EVDO access is called Whispernet! Like it's keeping a secret or something.

And there's a bigger question here: is the idea of “digital” to provide nothing more than convenience (less weight, more readily obtained, a boon to the vision-impaired) and its value-adds are nothing more than the original round of eBook devices: bookmarks, permamence in access to the content when it's not on the device, changeable font sizes. Hell, the ReB (through the RocketLibrarian software) could display the text in any font you had on your Mac or PC. This may seem like a shallow conceit, a feature whose value is mostly in adding a bullet point to a feature list, but having tried out various fonts on the ReB, I discovered that Georgia was far more appealing a read on that screen than any Times variant. Gruber doesn't agree with me, but it's actually pretty awesome when smart and learned folks can disagree and argue points.

Where's the people aspect? Do you really think anyone's going to own this thing and say “I love my Kindle!” or “I can't stop touching it!” People get attached to their books. As objects. Involved reading is not only a visual and cognitive thing, but a haptic one: the feel of a cover, the dog-eared pages, the broken spine of that favorite book that you've read over and over. And there's something about turning pages. And looking at where the bookmark (a thin piece of cardboard) is automatically gives you some affordance of how far you've read and how far you've got to go. Pacing is important, as much for story as for reading a story.

That's something that eBook devices won't ever do. The first round of eBook devices eight years ago attempted to compensate for all those things, but the consumers weren't going for it back then.

They may now, with the more digital-age sensibilities, but no matter, it still has to be an object you want to touch, want to use, want to own. Need to become attached to.

So many others have known this, and for so long.

Sam and I are watching Edward Scissorhands. I got it from Netflix on Blu-ray, high-definition being the primary reason I queued it up on my list in the first place.

I'd forgotten—or lacked the ability to appreciate—the stark contrasts that Tim Burton put in place, a cinematic device to set the tone(s) for the rest of the film: even less than 45 minutes into the film, Edward is least alien and most normal of the whole lot of them. After all this time no one can argue the xenological, A Wrinkle in Time-ish qualities of American suburbia.

Even so, Tim Bur­ton dials the suburban colors towards pastels—houses, clothing and people. Edward, as you probably recall, lives a black and white (and in one scene, lavender) existence and nothing appears real until Dianne Wiest walks into the yard of the “castle up on the hill”.

The only character that has withstood the test of time is Esmeralda, because she's a fire and brimstone creature spouting ugly Christian doom and gloom within a Brimstone and Treacle story. You could lift her out of this 1990 (!!!) movie and put her in almost any drama today and not have to change a single syllable. And that's just sad.

All affected they are, except for Edward (and a very vul­ner­able Vincent Price as The Inventor)—and not because he's alien to suburbia but rather alien to personal conceit and politesse.

I googled the movie to get the list of characters and actors, then clicked on “O-Lan Jones” and from there, found out that she was married to Sam Shepard for fifteen years. From there, I looked at his biographical data. Several quotes are attributed to him, but the one that stood out for me was this:

Personality is everything that's false in a human, everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

It was this quote in retrograde that inspired me to write this entry, a happy serendipity. You have to appreciate both Shepard's economy of words and Burton's gamboling imagery equally, don't you?

Personality can only exist among compatriot creatures; everything else it kills.

Before he came down here it never snowed. And afterwards, it did! If he weren't up there now, I don't think it would be snowing. Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it. — Kim Boggs, in her latter years

Nothing strips away personality like the power in a poignant memory.

Technorati Tags: Dianne Wiest, Edward Scissorhands, god of biscuits, O-Lane Jones, sam shepard, Tim Burton, Vincent Price

No, not really. Not slipping under, but I do have this strange discreteness in the muscle tension in several muscle groups in my neck and shoulders.

Finally, after all the health insurance bullshit and runaround these past months, the doctor's office located a pharma-corp (ironically only a few blocks from where I used to live in Pittsburgh) who supplied the Botox™ that's been medically needed all along. The combination of my pain management doctor's legwork, along with the industrial-sized pharmacy corporation's escrow-ish services and also along with the fact that I long ago surpassed my considerable out-of-pocket expense deductibles resulted in 100% coverage for the injections.

Dr. Anderson kept saying “Wow” and “is this normal for you?” as he assessed the muscle tension in my traps and other muscles (whose names escape me at the moment). I think it says something significant if a doctor who sees these kinds of things every day takes exception at anything like this.

Dr. Anderson is the kind of doctor who likes to explain everything, and that's about the highest compliment I can pay a healthcare professional. I'll even take it one step further and credit him with tailoring his explanations to the audience—that being me: he knows I know enough biology to be dangerous in healthcare concerns and as he hooked me (and the botox needle) up to an EMG sensor running on a ThinkPad, he let me “listen” to my muscles reacting to the penetration of the needle. All that EMG equipment is there to help properly locate muscle bundles before the injection of the botox actually occurs.

There's a name for the phenomenon in my neck and shoulders, and I fit the description thereof just perfectly. So why did the !#$!@#$ disability middlemen—along with the fucking quack of a doctor who determined there wasn't anything really wrong with me—miss it? Fuck if I know, as they say. But hey, pleading ignorance does save money when bureaucratic machinery stands in the way.

So what I have endured for well over a year now is called Cervical Dystonia. A brief description:

• Cervical dystonia is also known as spasmodic torticollis.
• Cervical dystonia is a focal dystonia that affects the neck and sometimes the shoulders.
• Symptoms include involuntary contracting of the neck muscles, causing abnormal movements and awkward posture of the head and neck.
• The movements may be sustained (“tonic”), jerky (“clonic”), or a combination.
• Cervical dystonia may result in considerable pain and discomfort.
• Treatments may include oral medications, botulinum toxin injections, surgery, and complementary therapies.
• Cervical dystonia may be primary or secondary.

To add insult to real injury, just look at a short summary:

Symptoms

In cervical dystonia, the neck muscles contract involuntarily. If the contractions are sustained, they may cause abnormal posture of the head and neck. If the spasms are periodic or patterned, they may produce jerky head movements. The severity of cervical dystonia varies from mild to severe. Movements are often partially relieved by a “sensory trick” (also known as geste antagoniste) such as gently touching the chin, other areas of the face, or back of the head.

Cervical dystonia may begin in the neck and spread into the shoulders, but the symptoms usually plateau and remain stable within five years of onset. This form of focal dystonia is unlikely to spread beyond the neck and shoulders or become generalized dystonia. Occasionally, people with cervical dystonia develop other focal dystonias.

I could go on (and on and on and on), but I'd rather just breathe. And let the treatment continue on its way hopefully helping me feel better.

And before you ask, no, I didn't ask for the last remaining drops of the botox be injected into my forehead. And no, my cervix isn't dystonic.

Technorati Tags: quack doctors, disability insurance, god of biscuits, cervical dystonia, botox, spasmodic torticollis, healthcare, disability benefits

Recently they finally released Kenneth Branaugh's full-text Hamlet on DVD. I'm wishing, of course, that it was Blu-Ray for how beautiful the cinematography, as well as the staging, the keen use of mirrored hallways and heavy tapestries to provide inspired replacements for classic stage props. Too often the fewer limits in cinema are nothing compared to the magic of the theater (except when Broadway uses spectacle—helicopters, cadillacs and entire mansion walls—to replace the magic of one's own imagination), but Branaugh somehow bridged that gap by cleverly discovering or creating cinematic analogs.

Anyway, I come here to praise Hamlet, not deconstruct its production.

If this all seems familiar, well, I've talked about it before. And recently (pardon the masturblogging).

I've been reading Hamlet and marking each and every relevant passage—and by 'relevant', I mean personally so. To get an idea of how much Hamlet resonates with me, just take a look at the picture of my own copy of the book, using little Post-It thingies (yes, that's the scientific term). Sometimes I want to remember a term because it's just particularly beautiful. More often, though, Shakespeare expresses sentiments that I haven't ever seen written down by anyone else—and let's face it, that's just sad for how much information is out there these days, to have to go back a few centuries to find a particular nuance of verbiage.

Whenever I read (or watch) Shakespeare, I find myself dropping into iambic pentameter in speech and in written word. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to begin to think with cadence, and even more surprised at where your mind takes you when when there's a rhythm to your own thoughts. Trochees (the accented opposite of an iamb) just don't seem to feel as right as iambs, and as science has since shown, a line of just a handful of words is the most comfortable for the human mind to follow and absorb.

Shakespeare breaks the laws of physics—and the precepts of many philosophies—in demonstrating an infinitude of wisdom in a finite body of work. It is said that something cannot arise from nothing, that that which has a beginning must therefore have an ending, but Shakespeare's works effortlessly ignore time and tide, culture and creed, and beg at eternity's door.

Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, Hamlet, iambic pentameter, Kenneth Branaugh, Polonius, Shakespeare, tag, trochee

I'm sitting here in Sam's hospital room. After 30 minutes of trying to jury-rig an Internet connection through my MacBook Pro's Bluetooth radio to Sam's powerbook which is able to connect to the Internet (as my MacBook Pro obviously is not) to no avail (my Mac can see the Bluetooth PAN, get a vended IP address and DNS info, but nothing further), I'm typing a blog entry with my iPhone.

Even though I've clocked in at over 35 wpm with one-finger typing on a virtual keyboard, it is a lot easier to use 9 digits on a full-sized keyboard at 100 wpm or so.

But I just canceled my EV-DO service with Verizon, and so at least I'm able to post something.

Hospitals are a comforting place for me. I'm not a hypochondriac, I just mean that I feel at ease in them, but yesterday when I was here, I experienced a very strange and somewhat scary set of symptoms—my hearing dropped to about a quarter of normal and there was a very loud ringing, there were strange artifacts in my vision, and every time I stood up, I had to sit right back down for fear of fainting.

Eventually I could stand and them felt confident enough to get down to the cafeteria. It was closed, so my only recourse was the vending machines. I loaded up with coffees and candy bars, and eventually everything was back to normal.

I still don't know what the hell was going on, and I'm only mostly certain it was dehydration and/or low blood sugar. But again, not 100% sure, and that's the most frightening bit.

It's been a fairly consistent thing, having no appetite because of the chronic pain, but it appears I've reached the point where I have to force myself to remember to eat.

What a ridiculous thing to add to iCal on this phone.

Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, mac os x, hospital, networking

Sometimes I think the closest we'll ever come—certainly the closest we have come thus far—to a non-human having something even slightly recognizable as intelligence is the Bureaucracy.

Which Bureaucracy? Well, any bureaucracy which emerges out of a sufficiently large organization, really. Once enough “policy” is put in place, once those policies are manned by (ahem) Human “Resource” organizations, middle management and others who defer to the Bureaucracy who possess even a trivial latitude of discretion with respect to the organizational policies, the only human power over such a beast can only be trivial. Well, trivial and/or petty.

Think about it. Humans in such an organization are slaves to the machine, and those above individual-contributor level are coxswain at best and a form of clergy at worst. The reality lives too close to the “at worst” side of things.

Passing the buck is the first step in opening up enough space to exercise one's own discretionary powers and clearly marks the passer as having given up fundamental initiative. Passing the buck to another human is deplorable enough, but when one passes the buck to a set of bureaucratic policies, the quality of it moves beyond—or rather, below—humanity in its description. And I'm torn between finding this irony laughable or reprehensible.

When you add to the policy-laden bureaucratic beast the fact that a hierarchical organization is required to keep the beast's vitals within acceptable parameters, you're left with everyone not at the top of the hierarchy impotent in every applicable way to “superiors”, leaving each to aim downward in order to shore up his or her own sense of worth. In rare times, this results in a kind of power-with unit-cohesiveness created by a common misery. More common (and “common”) cases involved a power-over kind of move in order to maintain the illusion that the “superior” isn't entirely toothless.

The latter is the environment in which “making an example of” thrives. This is the environment in which personality conflicts between non-piers truly does make the subordinate entirely powerless: the “superior” always wins because there's no recourse. You see, the policies that created the needed hierarchy will always favor the maintenance of that hierarchy and, like you might clean your body to rid it of dirt, filth and a few million epidermal cells in a five-minute shower, the beast-entire has little thought to any one individual, a quantity directly proportional not to talent, not to humanity, not to fairness, not to decency, but entirely to “rank”. The lower you are in the political hierarchy, the less it matters. No matter what, it[']s rank.

No wonder then that more people play at politics the more aware they are of the beast's true needs. Those are the ones who make the connections, pay attention to “networking” and find devious or clever—but always non-duty-related—ways to close off subordinates and promote self-promotion—or at least tangle themselves enough across nodes in the hierarchy such that no one other person can completely decide their fate and no one level can form a consensus.

All effort that could be better spent doing real work, but hey, the Bureaucracy only expends effort for self-maintenance—a non-human form of the will to live—and generates valuable output solely in the service of keeping itself in existence among other hierarchies (competitors) and outside influences (pestilent—from the perspective of the Bureaucracy—swarms of humans, for example).

So I dared claim that bureaucracies possess organizational-level intelligence, but now that I think about it, most forms of organizational intelligence are not those easily recognizable by a human being. There are edge cases, of course, and some of those do present themselves as bits of intelligent behavior but those are rare and effete, no more than sinister grace notes that do nothing but season the larger march (or dirge, depending on perspective).

Is there a particular event that provided the impetus for painting such a picture? The only worthwhile answer that can be offered is this: it genuinely does not matter.

Not to the beast.

Technorati Tags: bureaucracy, human resources, middle managers, policy, politics

My alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University won the “DARPA Urban Challenge”. A quick description from CMU's own story:

A self-driving SUV called Boss made history by driving swiftly and safely while sharing the road with human drivers and other robots. The feat earned Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing first place in the DARPA Urban Challenge.

The team, “Tartan Racing” also has its own site with some pretty cool images of “Boss”, the robotic Chevy Tahow which won the race.

I was a biology geek back then, and far removed from CMU's Robotics Insistute, but I did attend an ethics of computer science kind of meeting there, and Red Whittaker, team lead for Tartan Racing gave a talk and I was just blown away by the vision he had. He didn't offer abstract and grand visions of the future, but specifics of what the future of CS and robotics would bring, and damned if he isn't just following through on everything I can remember.

Nice job, guys.

Technorati Tags: god of biscuits, DARPA Urban Challenge, carnegie mellon, red whittaker, cmu robotics institute

I can't recall anyone ever asking me that question. I remember asking Perri Nejib back in Junior High School why she loved her Apple II when I was busy Z-80ing it with a TRS-80.

Point being, no one ever asked me. Oh, they tell me why, or quietly assume why (which chaps my ass even more), but never do they ask because they “already know”. Well, someone else answered it, and I'm certain he speaks for quite a few (perhaps in the millions).

This from Stephen Fry in his first column for The Guardian, a UK publication:

So you can guess that I certainly do think design is important. But it doesn’t have to come from Apple. In fact, I wish to goodness it came from everywhere. I hope you’ll believe I’m not an unthinking slave to Cupertino. Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It’s true of cars and cookers, and it’s true of computers. It’s true of office blocks and houses, and it’s true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus — these are the enemy.

I couldn't have described my own point of view better. (Nod to Daring Fireball for the reference.)

It's interesting that the idea of “Apple fan” went to “Apple cultist” to a supposedly redundant “Apple elitist” all the way back to a sexist and ageist “Apple fanboi”. The names changed through the years but the meaning behind them didn't. Ironically, since the world seems to have landed on “Apple fanboi”, the word has stayed but the meaning has changed when it comes to so-called crow eaters Switchers, where an “Apple fanboi” == “anyone who championed a Mac before I bought one”.

Egotism leads to reason; I love it

Technorati Tags: daring fireball, apple, user experience, user interface, design, perri nejib, Switcher, Macintosh, The Guardian, Apple fanboi, god of biscuits, Stephen Fry