Bad Scene » culture

goodbye, 2011

Administrator — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:58:27 +0000

To the year of Occupy Wall Street and of SOPA/PIPA I say a shaky farewell.

what bugs me about Apple?

datn — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:33:19 +0000

This whole Max iPad hype phenomenon is nothing new. After all, MacWorld is nothing new, and it’s been killing the Twitters practically since there were the Twitters. I was working a block from MacWorld 2008, and people in my office, not to mention on the street, went kind of nuts after they announced the then-mesmerizing MacBook Air, which time has revealed to be more like a thin silver turd, but with worse battery life.

The MacWorld keynote always makes a big splash. You can set your watch by it, not to mention the stock market. And even the MacWorld-uninitiated have been dealing with iPhone hype every summer since 2007.

This is all to say that if Apple was going to annoy me, they’ve had ample opportunity well before this iPad thing. But for me, Apple’s hype machine remained a faint noise in the background until my new job in 2007 assigned me a MacBook Pro as a work laptop. Since I’m a longtime Linux user, the Mac OS took some getting used to, but soon I actually started enjoying it. And when I drunkenly dunked my precious Nokia N95 in the anti-hangover water by my bedstand in June of ’08, I ended up replacing it with a 3G iPhone, which I used for over a year.

I enjoyed it. I got myself a bunch of apps just like everyone else. But about six months ago, the Apple/Google rivalry began over the Google Voice iPhone app.

That did me in. I couldn’t help feeling that Apple was abusing its power as a market influencer, once again moving us away from openness and interoperability. Nobody said this better than Fake Steve Jobs. I got really mad and cancelled my iPhone contract (and my AT&T landline), sold the 3G on Craigslist, sold my MacBook Pro, sold my Apple stock.

It felt really good.

But while I’d realized what annoyed me about Apple’s product policies, I still hadn’t put my finger on why Apple’s hype machine bugged me so much. After all, it’s just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It doesn’t move me or the people I respect to buy their products.

But with today’s iPad keynote, I finally realized why. After all, tablets are nothing new. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad is hardly a market breakthrough. Tablets? E-book readers? That’s so three years ago. Movies on the go? Wait, doesn’t everybody’s laptop do that now? Last time I was on a plane, it sure seemed like it.

No, what bugs me about Apple is that they’ve figured out how to cater to that particular thing I hate about Americans: tell them [this is good] in the right way, and it becomes true. In the last couple of years, Apple has transformed itself from an innovator of never-before-seen hardware and groundbreaking UIs into a gently smiling, well-connected uncle you see at the family reunion who explains that the groundbreaking tech of the last year is now mainstream enough to buy.

I’m hardly an HP or Amazon apologist. But I hate it when true innovators don’t get their due. I even feel bad for Larry Ellison and his premature invention of the NC. Apple knocked it out of the parck when they invented the iPhone. But what have they done for us lately? Right now, it seems we’re doing a lot more for them.

wireless sick-urity

datn — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:07:19 +0000

Combine the wireless cheerleader defense with a well-funded piggyback freenet (that isn’t really free) and what do you get? Private business butting up against the law again, at the expense of the middleman.

I got me one of them free wireless things so I could take it apart. I felt bad for about three seconds that I wasn’t going to hook it up to my DSL. Now that I see that people are getting charged to use the wireless I’m supposed to hook up to my broadband, it’s out with the scissors and screwdriver.

lazy

datn — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 20:45:53 +0000

I love the song “Lazy” by Love and Rockets. They used to play it fairly often on the old Alex Bennett show on Live 105, back when that station was halfway cool. Good old Bob “Harg Marglin” Rubin used to wait till the end with the repeating guitar riff, and between repetitions he would sing, “Flippy Tommy the tie-dye sock puppet!” which fit into the space perfectly. I think of that every time I hear the song, even 15 years later.

ed’s redeeming qualities then and now

datn — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 22:00:12 +0000

I was pleased to find other active Ed’s Redeeming Qualities fans out on the net. I have been a big fan for well over a decade, and lately I’ve had another flap of listening to the albums I have. Big Grapefruit Cleanup Job is a tour de force of the excellence that was Ed’s.

A month or three ago I went to the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco to see what may be the last Ed’s Remaining Qualities reunion show ever! There were lots of die-hard fans in the audience, and I was embarrassed that I barely knew any of the words anymore, unlike most of those present.

I recently discovered the Dom Leone tribute album Guess Who This Is, and it’s on the way from CD Baby. Can’t wait! Since Ed’s broke up, I have been quelling my desires for more by religiously following the career of Carrie Bradley, whose excellent band 100 Watt Smile I managed to catch many times in the late ’90s. Both of their albums are high on my listening rotation, and they even did one of the tracks on the tribute album.

The latest Ed’s-related experience I can report is having seen Carrie performing with Bernie Jungle as The Great Auk, two acoustic guitars and intimate singing & songwriting — a nice counterpoint to the bold power-folk that was 100 Watt Smile. I hope to hear and see more of them soon! Keep your ears and eyes open as I will.