As late as 1974, my paternal grandfather still had a black and white television. He told me that he thought color was bad for your eyes and he didn’t think anyone needed a color T.V. I remember thinking that he was stuck in his ways and old-fashioned. I felt he was just reluctant to move with the times, even when technology was much improved. I’m not sure that he every had a color T.V., but I didn’t visit my grandparents to watch television anyway. He was a kind and wonderful man who I loved and still miss to this day.
Fast forward to the present where I have inherited my grandfather’s attitude except that my stubbornness applies to cell phones. I have a land line which my husband and I forked over about $500 for the privilege of owning when we first came to Japan and it serves us quite sufficiently. While there are times when it seems it wouldn’t be bad to have a cell phone, it seems like a pointless luxury and an invitation to have our privacy invaded more frequently. Frankly, I don’t want to be accessible all the time.
One of the dubious benefits of age appears to be that you make the transition to wanting the best of what is currently available to being satisfied with what merely works at a level which meets you most basic needs. I’m not sure when this tends to occur for most people, but it hit me around 35 or so. I guess that the loss of desire to acquire new items for the sake of new functionality which you technically do not need but rather simply want is one of the reasons why the target demographic for most advertisers is so young.
Around the same time that I lost nearly all of my materialistic impulses, I also seem to have stopped enjoying upgrading my computer for the sake of having the newest thing with the shiniest operating system. I also stopped enjoying tweaking the interface and buying new software. If what I have installed is working, I’m content to leave well enough alone now. I used to actually look forward to backing up all my data, wiping out the hard drive and installing a nice, fresh, new system and apps any time I experienced some instability. Now, I approach the thought with dread over the time it’d take and having to dig out all my installation discs.
Because of this reluctance, I’ve avoided switching from using bookmarks for web sites to using RSS. For those who are even further behind than I (all 2 or 3 of you), I’ll mention that RSS is a way of tracking when sites update so that you don’t have to load a web page every day just in case they updated. An RSS reader will notify you when sites update and you can either read them in whole or part inside the reader or go to the site yourself.
In my case, I went with Google Reader because I’m too lazy to look anywhere else and my sister told me that’s what she used. It’s pretty easy to set up, but quite time consuming initially. Once you've subscribed to all the sites you want to track, you're set and it's going to end up saving you time. It's mainly useful for someone who reads sites which are sporadically updated rather than someone who reads big ticket sites that are updated faithfully every day. In other words, it's custom made for someone who follows a lot of personal blogs like me.
Some of you may have noticed that I rarely type Japanese characters in my blog posts. Some of you may assume that I can't enter Japanese text and that's why I don't include it. That assumption would be incorrect. I have copious amounts of experience entering Japanese text into the computer from my years of working laying out and writing (English) textbooks (with Japanese sections and translations) for the Japanese market.
I just don't use Japanese here for several reasons. The primary one is that my readers are obviously going to be English speakers. A lot of them are family and friends who don't have the ability to display foreign language special characters installed on their machines. Using Japanese in my posts results in gibberish for them. Beyond that though, I don't believe any useful purpose is really served in writing things like "食パン" instead of "shukupan" "shokupan" (white bread) aside from showing off my ability to type in Japanese. Any person who can read Japanese and wants to practice can go elsewhere for far better practice than my blog (which isn't intended to be a study page, a news page, or an authority on Japan and is just a record of my thoughts and experiences). And white bread isn't the sort of thing you need to reference the kanji of in order to recognize it in a store so you don't need to match the characters to the product to successfully purchase it.
I have a confession to make. I don't like it when people who are primary English speakers and who write content for a primarily English audience unnecessarily use Japanese words or writing in their blogs. I don't mind if they use the Japanese to explain something or make something clear so that folks know what the Japanese writing looks like. In such cases, it serves as a reference point for those who want to be able to pick out a particular item and need to match characters to objects in real life. I also don't mind if their blog is clearly directed at a bi-lingual or multi-lingual audience or if the blog is about their efforts to learn Japanese and including that content facilitates their learning. Before anyone gets their hackles up, I'm not referring to any specific person and certainly not to any of my regular commenters, but just to some overall trends I've noticed when perusing a great variety of web sites and forums.
It gets to me when people use Japanese just to look or sound cool or appear authoritative. A grand example of this was on a forum I was perusing about cooking. The site is all in English and all about food. The topic at hand was whether or not people prefer light or dark chocolate. Not one person in the thread was Japanese but someone replied to a post with "(original poster's name)-san" and ended it with "yoroshiku." The poster was clearly a native speaker of English (this was clear from content in other posts he made) and the usage of Japanese terms was an attempt to show off a modicum of Japanese knowledge. It's incredibly pretentious to do this in such a forum and almost certainly was done to attract attention.
I don't have many pet peeves but people who go out of their way to show off is definitely one of them. There's a difference between offering esoteric knowledge or specific terms in an appropriate context and shoehorning them in just to impress people and the latter is an immature way of trying to demonstrate superiority.
Before I started blogging, I carefully considered a lot of aspects of the experience and purposefully set out to avoid certain behaviors which I felt would undermine my enjoyment. Keep in mind that I'm not looking to be a "successful" blogger, but a happy one. If you're blogging for personal fulfillment rather than financial success, you may find this list of tips helpful:
Don't put a counter on your page or monitor page views or access from unique IP addresses. Once you start thinking about who and how many people are reading, you will start to feel sorry for yourself if your audience isn't big enough or pressured to write even when you don't feel like it to maintain your audience.
Don't write everyday because you feel you have to have a steady track record of writing continuously. If you don't feel like you have anything to say, don't coerce yourself. If you pressure yourself to write, it'll feel like a job. Conversely, don't slack off entirely because you aren't on a daily schedule. When you have the thought, "that would be interesting to blog about," or think you've had an experience you'd like to remember, make sure you act on the impulse to blog about it.
Moderate your comments and don't post rude or offensive ones. It's fine if people disagree with you in a civilized way, but a great deal of disagreement on the Internet tends to be expressed with hostility and at times includes ad hominem attacks. If you are sensitive and find comments upsetting you or spoiling your blogging experience, disallow comments. If you really want comments and are sensitive to anonymous people writing you abusive messages, have someone you trust moderate them for you to shield you from them. Note that, in blogger, you can selectively allow or disallow comments to individual posts so you can decide not to accept feedback on certain types of posts.
Never belittle your subject matter or your thoughts. Don't write about something in your life and tell your readers that it's boring or mock yourself about how "exciting" your life is. If you want to talk about something and enjoy doing so, then that is all that matters.
Try to research the topics you write about which seem to reach a dead end or feel somehow incomplete. You'll find that learning more about a subject will help you flesh out your ideas and assist in building a more gratifying post.
Seek balance in your rants and learn more before carrying on about an issue. If you focus excessively on the negative, you will be dwelling on how angry or unhappy you are as your write. Seeking mainly to justify that anger as you write rather than trying to get past it may be cathartic, but it won't serve you well emotionally in the long run. It'll also invite people to disagree with you because it's much easier to take issue with a heavily-slanted viewpoint than a balanced one. If you try to take the time to research and consider the flip-side of an issue, you may find your anger dissipating and your understanding growing. You'll also write a better post.
If a topic interests you but you can't seem to get the ball rolling on talking about it, save it and go back to it later. If it feels flat when you look back on it 3 months later, abandon it. There's a good chance though that the impulse that inspired you to start writing about it initially will re-visit you and you'll get your momentum back.
Don't check search engines to see if you are showing up in them as a means of determining if readers can find you. Since you have no control over what shows up in search results, it will only make you feel disheartened, ignored, and powerless if your posts are on the 3rd page or later when searches are conducted.
The most positive way to increase your readership is to read other sites and post interesting or insightful comments and to link to your blog. A lot of my readers have found me through my comments on other sites. You not only bring readers who are already interested in what you specifically have to say, but you also make someone else happy by commenting to them.
Never use (full) real names for yourself or others. If your blog is a business one or meant to generate money, it may be useful to use your full name, but using real names can introduce the threat of "discovery" by people who know you (and open you up to stalking). The chances that you'll feel anxiety related to blogging (or possibly even decide to delete the blog or posts in fear later) increase if you use real names. Remaining anonymous will allow you to talk about relationships that interest or trouble you as part of your blog should you like to do so.
If you don't have a digital camera, consider buying one so you can add pictures to your blog. Your posts will feel more interesting (even to you) and you'll have a visual record of the things in your life which were occupying your attention when you track your personal history through your posts. However, don't put up personal photos (same reason as the previous tip). If you want to put up a site or gallery to share with distant family members, make it a separate one from your serious blogging site so your writing can be free of the fear of "discovery".
When considering topic fodder for a blog, don't dwell only on "news" or experiences. You'll find writing about thoughts and opinions more fulfilling then simply being a news anchor to your life's events. Most people's inner lives are much richer than their outer ones. Using your posts as a means of exploring your internal processes can be very fulfilling and more enjoyable. It'll also reduce the chances that you'll find yourself having to follow tip #4.
Don't be competitive with other bloggers or think about how your writing, content, or readership stacks up to theirs. Focus on self-fulfillment and how your writing helps you grow personally and explore life.
Try not to be self-conscious and judgmental about speaking about your feelings. If you keep things anonymous, you can express any idea on any topic you want including what makes you incredibly happy or sad. While my blog is not "hidden" from family and friends, I'm probably about as uninhibited as a person can be about telling those around me who know me in real life about the things that make me happy or trouble me. Most people aren't that comfortable putting themselves out there in front of people who know them. If you wall off writing about your life in this personal way, you have to write around your life in an awkward and somewhat stifling way. This forces you to contort your content or gut it of its essential elements to sanitize if for the consumption of those who know you. This can feel like wearing a straight jacket and undermine your enjoyment of blogging.
Don't let your blog consume your life or define you in any way. It's an outlet for creativity, logging your personal experiences and developing ideas, not your real life.
A commenter asked me about RSS and I didn't realize it, but the ability to subscribe is built into blogspot blogs. This was kindly brought to my attention by Roy (who didn't even take the opportunity to make fun of my not knowing this fact about my own blog's front page - he's always a gentleman).
If you scroll all the way to the bottom of my front page, you'll see that you can subscribe via the link pictured above. I don't blame my readers for not finding this because I think this is easy to miss given how long my posts are and the fact that there are 5 articles on the front page at any given time. It's a long way down there and there's no reason to get to the bottom if you're regularly reading from the top. It's also pretty subtle.
As for me, I have no excuse. I just wasn't paying attention. :-) Thanks again, Roy!
The world computers live in is a different one from you and I. They speak a smaller language (though that doesn't keep it from being hard to master) and they're not nearly as lazy or stubborn as we are (at least not most of the time). They also abhor moisture (while we need it) and dust. While dust is a nuisance for us, computers can start to run poorly or even be damaged by excess dust. Even relatively small amounts of it can cause problems, particularly with laptops.
If your computer has ever just shut down only to miraculously recover and work just fine later, it may be overheating due to too much dust hindering the fan or blocking the vents. If you're lucky, the fan will start making noises before it reaches a sufficient state of inefficiency that your computer shuts off due to overheating. The sound of a fan struggling to cool a CPU despite a clog of fine dust is one I've grown to recognize pretty well and I'd been hearing it a lot lately from my husband's laptop over the past month. I told him I'd have to go in for some minor surgery and clean it up or he'd start experiencing shut-downs (or could damage the computers delicate parts).
You can pick up canned air in any electronics shop or order it from Amazon Japan for about 500 yen a can.
Unfortunately, we didn't have the requisite surgical equipment on hand as I'd used up all our canned air last time I cleaned out a computer. In Japan, cans of air are often called "air duster" (エアダスター). The one we got was called "dust blower" but they're really all the same thing. If you've never used one of these, the can gets very cold when you shake it and the air sometimes comes out with frost if you get too close to the target with the nozzle.
This is where we remove part of the patient to access its guts.
The first step in dealing with my husband's laptop when its fan starts to cough and wheeze in the dust bowl it's currently residing in is to remove the back. This is not all that hard if the screws aren't too tight and, thankfully, last time I put the backing plate on I didn't over-tighten them. Sometimes you have to use special small screwdrivers. Fortunately, a set of them can be purchased at 100 yen shops in Japan. Unfortunately, most of the sets have really bad handles that are hard to get a grip on. If your screws are really tight, you'll need to invest in better tools.
Click to see the larger version for a better view of the crud inside.
Once the back is off, you should touch something metal to make sure you don't have any static charge (or you should be wearing an anti-static wristband, but I personally don't have one). This should stop you from accidentally frying any neighboring components with static. I also have to remove a covering plate from the fan. The cover has Lilliputian screws which I tend to drop into the the cavity next to it, especially when I'm trying to put the cover back on. This is about the time that I wish my cheap 100-yen-shop-tool set had magnetized heads.
Once I get the fan revealed, I blow the dust out into the sink using the canned air and some fairly good balancing skills (lest I drop the machine into the sink). Unfortunately, the canned air was so cold that it left frost around the edges and I had to wait for it to thaw and dry out before doing more. I guess I must have blasted too close to the machine. Once the air had done all it could, I took a Q-tip to the fan. Careful and gentle swabbing showed it was pretty dirty between the blades.
Even more unfortunately, so much dust had caked up in the vents that the air alone could not dislodge it. I had to go in with a toothpick and try to loosen it up and dig it out then re-blast with the air again to clear it again. That might seem like a little dust to us but it's quite a big glob for a laptop computer which has tiny little vents.
Once I was satisfied with the fan, I removed the plate over the RAM modules and CPU (which have a ventilation grill over them). I blew out the dust around them and inside the heat sink though those were not nearly as dusty. I also decided to give the rest of my husband's laptop a good clean as he's not very interested in how it looks and often lets it get pretty cruddy.
Sparkling clean but marks on the display can't be cleaned off. Fortunately, the marks can't be seen when the computer is in use.
The hard part about cleaning laptops is dealing with the screen because you can do a lot to screw it up if you use the wrong fluid or even leave water on it. Usually, I use a special lint-free cloth designed for computer screens. I dampen it with warm water and wipe off the dust. I then dry it off and buff out any dried water marks using the sort of non-abrasive, ultra-soft cloth designed for camera lenses. In the case of my husband's dusty machine, I also cleaned the entire case. I can't exactly say it looks like new because he's scratched up the case pretty well from tossing it into his backpack and the screen has picked up some imprinting from the keyboard but it certainly looks better and the fan is breathing freely again.
One of the things I learned a long time ago was that optical drives, CD, DVD, and MO, go wonky much more quickly than any other component of your computer or audio/video system. On every Mac I've owned the CD-ROM drive has developed difficulty reading discs within two years. This usually starts with the disc whirring and repeatedly rotating until it either mounts the disc, stops attempting to try to read it, or spits it out.
At my former office, we used magnetic-optical discs for back-up and one of our MO drives was crapping out. A programmer who temporarily worked at our office and who claimed to know a bit about the mechanisms in optical drives told us that this sort of failure is inevitable and that most of them weren't going to go the distance because the optical mechanism wore out rather quickly. He said that it was almost certainly going to start experiencing problems after 4 years and often has issues sooner than that.
I don't know if this fellow knew what he was on about but the information he gave me certainly fits in with my experiences. Knowing this, I've made it a habit to replace failed internal DVD and CD drives on computers with the cheapest possible solution. The same goes for the DVD player we connect to the television. Getting a high-end solution seems pretty pointless when there's a decent chance it'll crap out in 3 years or so. Of course, there are people who are dead certain that the DVD media is dead and have already concluded that CDs are ancient technology. Nonetheless, I still continue to need mine and to find that software is distributed on them.
My husband uses his notebook PC (an Acer) in his English lessons with his students for a variety of purposes. One of the things he does sometimes is watch DVDs that his students want to discuss the contents of in class. This actually allows him to teach the types of classes that other teachers envy, but it also means he needs a PC with a functioning DVD drive as PCs are not part of the standard classroom equipment. When his DVD drive started having difficulty reading one of his student's DVDs, we knew it'd have to be replaced.
While I was researching replacements, I discovered that the model used in his Acer was troublesome for many users of that particular drive. I also discovered that it cost around $200 to buy a new one and the known issues with it meant that a replacement wouldn't necessarily work any better than his currently faulty one. Given these problems, we decided to go for a portable external DVD drive to replace my husband's ailing internal mechanism. As always, I check Amazon in the U.S. first for a baseline price for various models then check Amazon Japan for the same models if they are available to see how much more expensive they are here. If the price difference is too great, we have family ship a U.S. model to us. If it's a reasonable gap, we just buy one here.
The baseline model for me was a nice portable Sony dual layer DVD burner/player for about $96. It was compact, had a USB2 connection, and could burn and read almost any type of disc. The price was also quite reasonable. Unfortunately, Amazon Japan didn't carry it and most comparable models were about $180.
Fortunately, continued poking around in the electronics section at Amazon Japan turned up a Buffalo model which had everything the Sony had for only about $20 more. Buffalo in Japan seems to be the low cost model for almost anything you want as a peripheral for a computer. I'm guessing it might be regarded as a relatively undesirable brand but I've had pretty good luck with all the Buffalo items I've purchased among which there have been two high capacity hard drives, a Firewire PCI card, and a PC slot LAN card. None of these items have ever failed though I did drop and destroy one of the hard drives though I can hardly blame Buffalo for my clumsiness.
The drive is only slightly larger than a CD jewel case and brings to mind the old IBM external floppy drive mechanisms I used to see people using at work as companions to their ThinkPads ages ago. It has an AC adapter but also runs off of USB bus power. I tested it out on my Mac Mini (which cannot power anything which runs off the bus except thumb drives and required the AC adapter) and on my PC (which did run it off the bus only) and it was instantly recognized and worked fine on both without any driver installation.
Since my husband is very hard on his hardware and he'll be tossing this drive into his backpack when he goes to work, I decided to track down a case for it. I've found that the Daiso 100 yen shop has a wide variety of such things and sifting through the copious number of cases yielded one which was not only a perfect fit but also has a zippered pocket on the outside for the USB cable.
Word is that the next super small models of Macs will come without a DVD drive and I'm thinking that something like this should be very handy to have around should that time come and should I take the plunge on a new Mac. In fact, given my problems with internal drives, I find this a preferable option.
A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law asked me if I wanted to purchase into a family pack for Mac OS 10.5 (aka Leopard). Family packs cost a little less than twice as much as two standard versions of an OS but offer you 5 licenses. I hadn't really considered upgrading before this as I wasn't sure if my Mini would run it adequately, and, being a lapsed Mac fanatic, I wasn't exactly itching to taste the newest OS. I had also been reading some reviews on MacWorld and, while positive, they weren't raving about it.
The lack of over-the-top talk on MacWorld is actually a good thing and a direct reflection of the fact that the Mac as a platform is much stronger than it was about a decade ago. When times were lean, MacWorld was more inclined to slant all articles about Apple hardware and software in the most positive fashion. Now, they can be a bit more even-handed because the platform to which they tether their continued existence looks secure and they no longer need to relentlessly convince everyone that the Mac is superior in every regard.
Despite the fact that I knew it wasn't going to be an awe-inspiring upgrade, I decided to take the reduced-rate plunge, though not without reservations and taking precautions. Since some of my previous OS X upgrades have resulted in some disastrous losses, I decided to clone my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. This creates a disk image of whatever drive you tell it to copy. For my 100 GB drive with about 38 GB of occupied space, this took about 3 hours to create a "read-only" (non-compressed) image. It took another hour for me to copy this image over to a networked back-up hard drive due to the shortcomings of my LAN set-up. If Leopard really didn't run well or hosed my computer, it was my hope that I'd be able to completely restore the previous version of my OS from this image.
My Mini's internal DVD drive was rather sensitive to the installation disc and, in fact, spit it out in disgust a few times so I decided to try to install it off of an external double layer burner that was attached via Firewire. In the past, I couldn't persuade my Mac to let me install from an external drive so I was pleasantly surprised that permission was granted this time. The disc read slower than molasses in January but it went smoothly enough. Installation took about an hour and a half.
Most tech folks recommend a clean install rather than an upgrade but I couldn't be bothered to go to that trouble so the first test was going to be whether or not the contents of my drive remained intact after the installation. I'm pleased to say that, aside from my printer driver which disappeared (though I did successfully reinstall it), everything seems to be there. Well, OS 9 vanished but I expected that since Apple decided to no longer support its former OS. If I need to run anything in OS 9 in order to access legacy files, I'll run it on my old orange iBook.
The new dock. Click to see a bigger version.
My first visual impression of OS 10.5 is that everything was smaller and fuzzier. The dock was refashioned to give the appearance of icons sitting on a reflecting glass surface in a faux 3D fashion. The indication that an application is open is far more subtle now. It used to have a black triangle under an open application. Now, there's a reflective little blue droplet. This is the sort of visual tweaking that Apple excels at and why their OS always looks more stunning and beautiful than others though it doesn't do anything extra for functionality.
My next test was to see if anything that used to work stopped working or ran badly. I haven't tried everything but all the commonly-used applications (Photoshop, InDesign, Filemaker Pro, Toast, Mail, Skype, Adium, Excel, Word, iCal, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction) were fine though launch times seemed a bit slower. Oddly enough, some of these applications, once launched, actually seem to run a little faster, particularly Diablo II. However, I can't say the programs have been put through their paces as I just did a quick launch, type a bit, click around a bit and quit test. The only exception to applications running faster or at the same speed has been Firefox which was rather noticeably kludgy until I updated it.
Running multiple applications has gotten slower when I have more than 3 running (or one of them is a memory pig) but this isn't too shocking since, with 1 GB of RAM, my Mini isn't exactly overloaded with free memory nor is it a speed demon at 1.42 Ghz. However, it is decently over the minimum requirement of 512 MB of RAM and 867 Mhz (G4 or Intel processor) for Leopard. I think Leopard is the last meaningful upgrade I can install on this particular machine unless I want to appreciably sacrifice performance on the altar of Apple's ever-demanding eye candy.
The visual differences which I have found unappealing include the miniaturization of certain Finder elements. The names and icons on the side bar are much smaller than before (see the screen shot a few paragraphs down to see to what I'm referring). This is very likely a means of accommodating more items in the list such as the "search for" portion at the bottom. Also, the blurry font smoothing in its default setting just about drove me crazy and I had to change it to "standard" (which I believe means it is actually "off" but Apple didn't make that clear by their wording in the System Preferences panel as there is no "off" option). Keeping smoothing on made the font in my blog look about 3-feet thick and made me wonder how others see my site's lettering with font-smoothing on.
The big gun in Leopard is the backup utility named "Time Machine". Unfortunately, my hard disk is not partitioned and I don't have an external drive directly connected to my Mac so I can't use it. I do have a networked hard drive which is currently tethered to my PC via USB 2 but that drive is not recognized by Time Machine and I cannot use it for backing up unless I do so by dragging things to the drive myself (the Mac does recognize the drive, only Time Machine does not). For the moment, I can't really take advantage of the most impressive feature so I'll have to continue to do manual backups until I'm willing to fork over some money for a dedicated external drive for the Mac, move my external drive to the Mac (not bloody likely), or partition the hard drive (also unlikely). I'm not going to go through one type of trouble (changing my existing back-up set-up) to avoid another (manual backing up), particularly when I can't be sure the two PCs that also currently access my external drive will recognize it if it's hard-wired to the Mac.
The nifty-looking but relatively pointless (for me) "cover flow" view option.
I can see the benefit of some of the visual aspects for select users even if they aren't doing much for me. There are probably some people out there who think the "cover flow" view option is better than other views, for instance. If you have a ton of pictures and want to be be able to rotate through them rapidly to see them rather than look at thumbnails, it probably has a higher utility factor than using Apple's "Preview" to open them all up and scroll through a list of thumbnails. Personally, I think using Preview is better as it opens the thumbnail you select at a large size in the main preview window.
By clicking a folder in the dock (red box in t he screen shot), you get a pop up of all the contents of that folder as part of the "stacks" feature.
By far, my favorite thing in Leopard is the "Stacks" feature in grid view. The "fan" view just looks stupid but the grid allows you to see the contents of all folders within a folder that is stored in Dock with a click. This means you don't have to store as many frequently-accessed folders in the Dock (which shrinks the icons to ever tinier sizes as you cram it full of more of them) or tunnel through nested folders.
There are a lot of cool-looking things in Leopard and I can't say I regret the upgrade at this point in time. However, I also cannot say it's a must-have upgrade for any particular user of Mac OS X unless there is a compatibility issue at play. In the end, the biggest reason to upgrade generally ends up being the fact that software developers will write to the newest version of an OS and running older versions increases your chances of having problems if you don't upgrade. However, that does not yet appear to be the case with Leopard but only time will tell.
Gaming circles are like little closed societies. They have rules that you may not understand, make jokes that you don't get, and may interact in ways that make you feel left out. The oft-used scene in movies and television where you see 3 or 5 geeks sitting around a board playing "Dungeons and Dragons" and engaging in dialog which makes absolutely no sense is meant to bring this home. It's also used to make you think gamers are strange in their insularity.
The level of weirdness you perceive is largely a function of how familiar you are with the "culture" of a particular game. If you were a part of it in any way, you are less likely to see the gamers who are actively embracing it as strange. One of my friends (Shawn, hello loony!) told me that on-line gaming has become mainstream enough for commercials to include references to World of Warcraft. There's a commercial for the Toyota Tacoma.
There's also one for Coke.
(There are more but I'm not going to embed them all since this post will be long enough without them.)
This is an indication of one of several possible things. One is that the target demographic for these (and other products) is squarely in the same demographic for playing World of Warcraft. It could also mean that there are enough people out there playing this game that the references may make sense to most people either because they play or they have someone in their families who does.
If you watch these videos, you'll notice that the joke is in the insertion of game elements into real life or vice versa. Despite the fact that gaming society is often seen as weird and idiosyncratic by those who have never been a part of it, the truth is that people pretty much behave the same as they do in real life. Here are a few examples based on my personal experience:
The Aggressive Salesman:
In games, there is an economy just like there is in real life. Just as gold and jewels have greater value in the real world, items which are scarce and highly-valued have greater value in the game world. The only difference is that game gold isn't always the most precious commodity depending on the game's mechanics.
My husband and I have experienced opportunistic players who will try to undercut your "prices" for game goods in Diablo II. The way we trade in this particular game is to make a new game (which anyone can see the name of and join) which is named in such a fashion as to state clearly what we have and what we want in exchange for it. Invariably, people will pop in who have the same item to offer at a somewhat lower price. Considering that all they have to do is make their own game and name it with their lower price, this is akin to someone jumping in and trying to steal your customer away by offering the item you have on sale for $25 for only $20.
Since it takes no effort at all to make games, this is rather rude and selfish but I'm sure it's the sort of thing that people would happily do in real life if they wouldn't get kicked off the store premises for trying to undercut the competition. As it is, stores do have their variation on this by offering to beat the price on an item their competitor offers if you offer proof of a lower price.
The Bully:
In gaming, bullies are often called "griefers." This is a concept that was rather famously played out in one of the best episodes of South Park of all time. Like real life bullies, they attack only those who are vastly weaker than themselves so that their "victory" is assured. In role-playing games, you play characters who "age" by gaining levels. Higher level characters have greater strength and life and are nearly impossible for vastly lower level characters to defeat. It's akin to an 18-year-old beating up a 5-year-old. What is worse than that is that characters that have played a lot and racked up a lot of levels tend to have superior equipment so it's like that 18-year-old wearing steel-plated armor and wielding a gun while the 5-year-old is equipped with his bare hands and donning a wet paper sack.
The reason such in-game bullies are called "griefers" is that their purpose isn't to prove their superiority but to spoil the game for other players. When they enter a game full of lower level players, their intent is to spoil the experience. Weaker players who were enjoying playing together and accomplishing a mutually-desired goal often scatter to the winds when a griefer comes in and smashes them.
The Bosses, Their Followers, Their Challengers:
If you've worked in an office, you know that there are people who gain positions of authority either through nepotism, force of their characters, charm, or superior skills. There are also the subordinates who will either blindly follow the leader or undermine his or her credentials to be in such a position and seek to unseat their superiors. In gaming, the same situation often plays out among those who choose to play with regular groups.
The interesting thing is that the very same factors that tend to play into gaining a position of authority in real life play into getting one in a gaming society. Players who have game "wealth" frequently attract groups of hangers-on who benefit from their largess. The rich players shed their "lesser" and duplicated game gear and shower their devoted followers with such gifts. The wealthy players often form a following of another type of player, the beggar, who is constantly asking for better equipment either overtly or obliquely when amongst other more experienced players.
Additionally, having familial or real life connections to someone who is in a position of power may allow you to ascend to their level when they grow bored and give up the game. Of course, there are also those who become leaders through superior skills. If there is a difficult goal to attain and someone persistently is capable of accomplishing it where others fail, that person may gain followers and be a default leader, at least intermittently. In my experience, however, such players tend to play alone most of the time (which is how they hone their skills in the first place) and tend not to seek leadership roles. I suspect this is because the liability associated with being a leader is you have to drag along a lot of incompetents when playing and the dubious value of their allegiance to you is not worth the hassle of failing repeatedly due to their feckless playing.
The Attention Seekers:
There's always some kid in your class who is doing something to attract attention to himself or some guy at work who meanders around to their coworkers' desks making stupid jokes or who laughs too loud so everyone notices him. Games have their versions of these folks as well.
There are actually several sub-divisions of such attention seekers in games. One of the most common seems to be the sexually-obsessed types who take every opportunity to make a risque joke, sexual innuendo, or flirtatious comment. The worst of these is incredibly persistent and I'm guessing looking to fulfill an inner need to be sexually-desired through in-game banter. Another flavor of such types offers up a lot of witless scatological humor. Just like the dumb classmates you had in elementary school who liked to make farting noises in their armpits, such game players think they're absolutely hilarious when they talk about passing gas or mentioning their breasts, posteriors, or genitalia.
The "Mommies":
Don't mistake the idea of a "mommy" for someone who will look after you all the time. Mothers are just as likely to tell you what to do all the time and scold you when you fail as they are to bandage your wounded knee and offer soothing words. In games, there are those who try to protect the weaker and less-experienced players and help them accomplish the game goals. The pushier "mommies" though will also insist that you do everything exactly as they say or they will withdraw their care.
The Altruists:
A similar type of player to the "mommy" is "the altruist". This is a person who sometimes helps out people just for the sake of offering up an act of kindness. This is the same sort of person in real life who will give a homeless person money or food. Just like in real life though, your attempts to help sometimes bite you in the ass later. Just as beggars who you give money to may try all the harder to extract cash from you next time they see you walking down the street, generous gamers may find themselves being constantly nagged for assistance.
In games, altruism can sometimes be misconstrued as an attempt to find an opportunity to be a griefer, particularly in regards to assisting with quests and whatnot. I'll admit that I'm, on occasion, an altruist player and have been known to take a much higher level character into games to assist lower level players with especially difficult quests only to be told to "get the hell out" and called a great many profanities because the assumption is that the only reason I could be there is to turn on people and attack them at the worst possible moment.
Functioning effectively in various gaming worlds has a lot in common with how the real world works. It's not a bunch of anti-social weirdos engaging in strange activities but a bunch of normal folks playing out the same sort of roles that people do in real life. The only difference is that the basic rules for success are different and people who might never have a chance to assume such roles in real life may find they have the skills to play them out in the gaming world.
There are some changes I've been meaning to get to in this blog for quite some time and one of them has been adding a list of links for all the folks who are kind enough to take the time to comment. If anyone comments regularly and there is a link to their profile, I will click on that link and read their blogs as often as I can (if they are bloggers).
This morning I woke up at 7:30 and decided it was time to stop thinking that I should do this update and actually get it done so there's a new list of links. If you've commented several times and I didn't put you in there, please be patient as this will take time to thoroughly complete.
I apologize for taking so long to do this as I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to add their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, those thoughts are like an extension of my posts which add a unique perspective or an interesting story and they deserve to be posts of their own. The comments I receive add qualitatively to the value of my blog for everyone and the least I can do is add a pointer back to the sites of the folks who are kind enough to do that. After all, if they've got something interesting to say here, imagine the excellent content they're offering in their own blogs.
Note: To those who keep commenting on this post (long after it was made) as if it were my last word on Amazon Vine, there is an updated post here. Also, please note this post's date before making snarky comments. It reflects the state of the Vine very early on. If you can do a Google search to find the original post, you should have the grey matter to search for subsequent posts in this blog to make sure you're seeing the whole picture.
Two months ago, my husband and I were invited to join "Amazon Vine". The program was sold to us as an opportunity to get products early and for free in return for reviews. Since I've written about 4 pages worth of Amazon product reviews, I figured this may have been the reason we were chosen.
If you read the banner above (click it for a larger version), it says "Free stuff, spotlight reviews, envious friends. It doesn't get much better than this." I'm beginning to think the only thing my friends are going to feel is that I'm an incredible sucker for believing this program is in any way operated as it has been represented.
In the first two newsletters, attempts to request every single product are met with this message:
In the case of the first newsletter, I assumed my waiting 2 days to ask had something to do with it. Amazon sent out out an e-mail a couple of weeks later saying they'd "underestimated demand" and things would be better in the future. I heard the second newsletter hit my in box with a "ding" and figured I'd try again much more rapidly. Lo and behold, every single item was out of stock within 2 minutes of my having received the message.
The Vine message boards attribute this to a "disconnect" problem. This is a pretty absurd notion as it shouldn't be the case that delayed messages (the claim is 8 hours) should cause a complete shut-out in getting a chance to receive and review items. If the program is always going to be survival of the fastest, then it is essentially useless to anyone who isn't monitoring their e-mail constantly for the message's arrival and clicking madly to get first crack at items to review. This would hardly have anything to do with receiving quality reviews for the products and would have everything to do with a mad grab for anything and everything you can get because it's "free" (you do pay postage, or so I'm told...I can't know for sure since I've never seen any item available).
It's my guess that this is a clever means of spamming customers and that my husband and I were chosen not because I made a lot of reviews but rather because we've bought a lot of items. The newsletters encourage you to focus carefully and develop an interest in items because, in theory, you should read the description and choose only to receive items you personally want enough to inspect, read, or watch carefully and write a thoughtful review about. If you pay that much attention to an item and don't get it, there's probably an increased chance that you will buy it or something similar in the future.
I have no doubt that Amazon is giving away some free products and that there are a very small percentage of people on the Vine newsletter who receive items. However, I believe their mailing list is knowingly far, far greater than the number of items available for review. While the Vine program claims to be exclusive, I sincerely doubt that it's sampling a small pool or people who have written helpful or thoughtful reviews in the hopes of stimulating more of the same.
I'm going to see if the program gets any better but I have very low expectations. One of the reasons I feel this way besides a natural cynicism about any business failing to take advantage of an opportunity to advertise under the guise of "free stuff" is that the program currently allows people to get up to three items to review each. Those who get in are getting a lot and those of us who don't are getting squat for the time we waste with the newsletter. If the program really wanted to encourage reviews, it'd limit each person to one item that they'd spend more time with and write careful reviews of.
Personally, this is damaging my regard for Amazon and making it less likely that I'll choose to purchase from them in the future. I don't like being played for a sucker. Even if I give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk this up to poor organization of the program, it doesn't necessarily inspire confidence in them as a business. Either way, Amazon loses and they go down in my estimation. Since my husband and I live in Japan, Amazon has always been a good way to get access to books, DVDs, and CDs we can't get here and to get them more cheaply. Up until now, we've been content to buy from them but this experience is convincing me to take more of my business to Deep Discount DVD even when prices are roughly equivalent (in the past, when all things were equal, I chose Amazon).
At this point, I think that the tag-line for the Vine program ought to be, "It doesn't get more pointless than this."
None of these things look like the other yet each of these things belong. (Screenshot from the Apple Store page)
Note: I'm not going to talk about the iPod (or iPhone) that were just announced. I'm sure you've had enough already.
If you're old enough, you may remember commercials for a stock brokerage called E.F. Hutton. If you're not old enough, I'll tell you that this company was mainly known to the non-financially-oriented-set (that used to be a lot more people than nowadays where everyone from servers at McDonald's to your granny play the stock market) by its commercials. These ads featured crowded, noisy places (such as packed to the gills restaurants with a loud murmur of chatty people) and one person at one table would say something like 'E.F. Hutton says... ' and the whole room would go quiet. This was followed by the tag line, "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen."
One can't help but notice that Apple is the E.F. Hutton of the computer industry. When they roll out new products, every major and most minor news sources cover not only the actual announcements but also announce that there will be an announcement. This is in rather stark contrast to most other computer hardware makers such as Dell where the release of new models is mainly covered by computer industry news sources.
As someone who has used a Mac since my earliest days as a computer user (I started with a 128K Mac in college and moved on to a Mac Plus for personal use a bit later and am now on my 11th Mac now), I've seen Apple spend far more time as the media whipping boy than as its darling and it leads me to wonder how Apple made the transition from the company that could not possibly survive because of its proprietary hardware and small market share to the company whose every product release people perk up their ears for and whose products are so desired that people are willing to pay a premium for them.
The obvious answers as to why Apple is the company everybody listens to and watches are the "iPod" and "Steve Jobs". While it's true that the release of the iPod has put a stylish Apple product in many hands and Mr. Jobs has put a strong figurehead with consummate sales and showmanship skills out there as the voice and face of Apple and Apple would not be where it is today without these two factors, I think the attention Apple's releases get are due to more than Steve and the iPod. I think one of the bigger reasons is that Apple has such a heavily pruned (or streamlined if you prefer) product line that new releases are considered events. Unlike Hewlett Packard or Dell, which offer relatively bland, highly-customizable and varied models, Apple has a very limited range of products - Minis, iMacs, Pros, MacBooks (and Pros), iPods and only recently iPhones.
It's not only the fact that there are just a few products though. It's also the fact that, by and large, each product has a very distinctive form factor. Different Mac models actually look different from one another in an instantly recognizable way. Different Dell models tend to have small variations in color aside from the obvious differences in size based on type (tower, mini-tower, notebook). This has nothing to do with the value of the computer inside, of course, but Apple's design and style are more about making you feel like each machine is a piece of art or stylish furniture rather than boring you with options for maximum RAM capacity or expansion slots. It's not that these things don't matter to serious users but they don't matter to most average consumers who use their machines for relatively mundane tasks.
In the case of Apple, less is more. Since new products are rarely released, announcements of upcoming products generate a lot of buzz. Everyone is wondering if we're going to see something fresh and innovative or a revamp of older models. The former often brings excitement and praise (though there are always detractors and nitpickers). The latter sometimes brings disappointment because there's always hope that Apple is going to wow us with something new rather than spruce up something old. If you read tech blogs, you find that people are so intensely interested in all new design changes that they're analyzing things like possible changes to keyboard and mouse designs. When was the last time anyone got excited about the way a Dell keyboard looked? Apple has seriously got the whole business of using select design to drum up interest and excitement down pat and only they can manage it because they have always been seen as a maker of elite (and possibly elitist) machines. This used to work to their disadvantage but now they're using it to their advantage.
It's no surprise that each new release is talked about and greatly anticipated though I guess the down side is that the news when it finally arrives almost never lives up to expectations. It's a little like seeing a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift and being more excited about what might be inside than what is actually within. It's not unusual to be a little disappointed when the gift is finally opened. This is probably one reason why Apple's stock usually drops after the release of a product even if that product is almost certainly going to sell well.
You often hear that couples fall out of love not over one big thing but over a collection of little things that add up to disillusionment and disappointment. My unconditional love for all things Apple and the Mac died in such a fashion. I still like Macs but I no longer have blind faith or unwavering loyalty. They became something I used rather than something I enjoyed due to a series of disappointments.
1. Around the time of the Performa series (which ended in 1997), Apple stopped using cheaper lower-quality components in an attempt to better compete price-wise with PCs. Unfortunately, these components suffered more premature deaths. The series of Macs I purchased after my LC III began to suffer from regular hard disk and CD ROM drive failures. In fact, every desktop Mac I've bought since my LC III has had its hard disk and CD ROM drive replaced except the Mini (which has only had its hard disk fail after 2 years). This killed the illusion that Macs were superior in terms of their hardware or the idea that the higher price tag on them was justified.
A screenshot of a kernel panic identical to the ones I had in my early Mac OS X usage (lifted from Apple's page on kernel panics).
2. The earliest incarnation of OS X ran horribly on the Mac I was using at the time, a G3 DT/266, despite the fact that I had copious amounts of RAM and was told that it was a compatible machine. It not only had frequent kernel panics which subjected me to the Mac equivalent of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death on PCs) for the first time but also had an awkward forced multiple user installation set-up which went a long way toward confusing people who wanted the same type of single user situation as they had under OS 9. When this early version of OS X crashed and burned, the screen turned white and cryptic geek-speak fed across the screen. It was clear Apple lied or mislead users about which machines could run OS X in order to increase early adoption rates. Web forums were flooded at the time with complaints by users who had purchased computers with "OS X-ready" stickers on them shortly before OS X was released only to find the OS ran like an lady with a walker who frequently fell down when they upgraded from OS 9 to X (an upgrade they paid for, no less). It was clear early versions of OS X were more of a beta that you had the pleasure of forking over $120 for rather than the advertised fully-fledged "rock solid UNIX-based OS".
3. Apple told all of its users that it would offer a "free forever" e-mail hosting service with a 'prestigious' Apple-based e-mail address (mac.com) which they then swapped over to a subscription-based service which one had to pay $100 a year for. At the time of this little bit of bait and switch, you only got the e-mail service and a modicum of storage space which you could use to automatically back up your hard drive onto Apple's servers via OS X. It was not only not worth it from a money for value point of view but it made it clear that Apple would say whatever it took to lure people in then change the conditions of the arrangement. It didn't help that the Mac devotees worked overtime to justify the way in which this was done.
On the left, pure evil (the command prompt). On the right (Mac OS X Terminal), wondrous heaven. It might be a black/white thing but they're both loathsome ways of entering arcane commands in my opinion.
4. The Mac user community changed its tune about what made an operating system great. In an indication of how baldly hypocritical Mac users can be if it suits their need to tout the advantages of the Mac at any cost, they started expressing their unending admiration for the use of the terminal function when mending Mac OS X's shortcomings and bugs while they had spent nearly two decades before derisively regarding the use of the command prompt in Windows. Pre-OS X, all users could talk about was how easy Macs were to maintain and how we didn't have to remember a bunch of arcane DOS commands to control the deeper functionality of our computers. Post-OS X, all users could talk about was how much power and control you had by using arcane UNIX commands in the Terminal application.
Additionally, users became hostile toward anyone who wasn't happy with the way they had to type in commands in terminal in order to convince OS X's permissions to let them empty their trash. Early on, it seemed that many of us somehow didn't qualify by default to perform such an earth-shaking OS-altering function as emptying the trash in OS X. Before OS X, people were helpful because they were a part of the happiest computer user community on earth and they wanted us all to be one happy family. When some of those family members were disgruntled at the turn of events, things got ugly. The blind faithful were like overprotective parents who told you how stupid and incompetent you were any time you criticized Mac OS X's early teething cries.
The division between the faithful and the confused early users of OS X was probably one of the biggest factors in allowing the scales to fall from my eyes. I wondered if I was that blind and hostile any time someone attacked my "baby". This was a turning point for my attitude and my Mac changed from something I identified with as a user and became just a machine I used like my oven or television.
Place item in trash. Basket is full. Empty trash. Basket is still full. Repair permissions. Empty trash. Basket remains full. Run MacJanitor. Empty trash. Basket is still full. This happened today, folks, not early on in Mac OS X's evolution.
By the way, I still can't empty my trash on occasion. In fact, two problems gave me the incentive to write this post and that was one of them.
5. Every incarnation of OS X was idiosyncratically altered to fit Windows user conventions. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the way the Mac worked in certain ways but rather that Apple was more interested in making switchers (from PCs to Macs) more comfortable than sticking with a way of doing things that the faithful were accustomed to. Here are a few cases in point:
Shift-clicking used to allow for both contiguous and non-contiguous selection of files. This made it possible for one method to be used for selecting multiple files in either situation. In OS X, this was changed so that non-contiguous selection now required a Command-click. Why was this introduced? It's because this is the way file selection works in Windows.
In previous versions of the Mac OS, the OS would not attempt to force you to structure your file system in any particular fashion. Applications didn't have to be kept in an "Applications" folder and the OS didn't become confused or issue warnings if you didn't put them there. With OS X, a Windows-style organization system was incorporated which strongly encouraged users to keep applications in the applications folder just as Windows keeps "Programs" in the "Programs" folder.
There are a myriad of other rip-offs and knock-offs that are clearly there to emulate a good feature of Windows (the Dock copying the task bar, for instance) or simply a feature to which people are indifferent (the web-style "back" and "forward" buttons on windows) . The bottom line is that the difference between using Windows and using Mac OS X is getting smaller and smaller. It's harder to tout how uniquely superior the Mac is when it's so similar. I guess since Steve Jobs was in love with his IBM ThinkPad before he returned to Apple, he wanted to Mac to work the way he was used to rather than the way we were used to.
6. Some things don't work as they should and some things should work but don't.
See that key combination on the right (in the picture above)? There's a key on my keyboard which says "delete" and has that little drawing with an "X" on it. If I press "Command+delete" and use that key, the file does not move into the trash. It will work if I use "Command + delete" and use the delete key which is next to the "=/+" key but not with the one under the "help" key. I'm using an Apple keyboard and the logical thing is to use the key which looks like the one in the menu but it doesn't work.
If you drag the cursor from the right in (along the lines of the red box in the picture), you cannot select the files in list view.
One thing that should work but doesn't (and used to work in Mac OS 9 and works in Windows XP) is selecting a list of files by dragging the mouse from bottom of a list in a window while you're in list view. It works in other views but not in list. Why? I guess it's just an oversight but it is rather annoying to have to change views or drag the cursor up to the top of the window. It also means pixel hunting if you don't want to select just the top file and drag it down.
7. DRM and spyware. With Windows, the spyware is pretty well-known and you can find ways to track it down and zap it. With the Mac, it's more insidious and less-publicized so you've got to be more in the know to find it and get around it. If you use Mac the Ripper to rip DVDs, a hidden file is left keeping a record of every DVD you've ripped. You have to know this is happening and know enough to download another application to put the kibosh on this invisible spying. My guess is this is part of a deal to allow Mac the Ripper's distribution while still fitting in with Apple's brown-nosing to DRM advocates in order to advance iTunes sales and selection. Additionally, the latest version of iTunes eliminated the ability to make MP3 files. This was presumably to placate the RIAA in some fashion but iTunes without MP3 conversion is ridiculous. These things in no way make the user's life easier and the former situation with Mac the Ripper (an application I don't use, as it is inferior to the Windows application "DVD Shrink", but was warned about by my former boss) seems mainly geared toward gathering data for copyright infringement prosecution.
Before the Mac zealots start arguing that none of this makes Windows better than a Mac, I'll clarify that that is not what I'm talking about in this post (read the "title" for a reminder of what this is about). I don't believe Windows is better than the Mac. What I'm saying is that these are the factors which contributed to my coming to taking Macs and Apple off a pedestal and seeing them for what they are, tools and a business, instead of being a Mac zealot. The Mac still has the edge on OS usability, better design, and an overall better feel than a PC but it's no longer something I can advocate people use without reservation or with enthusiasm. I can't say that Windows or Microsoft have let me down because my expectations have always been incredibly low due to the common (mis)perceptions about using Windows that are prevalent among Mac users.
I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary with this blog at the end of this month and have been using Blogger to post for that entire time. Since I started posting, Blogger has changed for the better in certain ways.
Labels were added so posts could be sorted or searched for by topic.
Auto-saving was added so that posts wouldn't be lost as easily.
The need to re-publish the entire blog (which only required clicking a link but could be quite slow) to update with a new post was eliminated.
Google e-mail addresses became user names and your gmail password became the password by default so using Blogger required a gmail account.
Improved customization of the design was added including easily allowing your banner to contain a custom picture (though I have not yet done this, I really should).
Default language settings which were hard to find and tend to re-set themselves based on the origin of your I.P. address now are right up front where you can easily find them. This is a blessing when you get swapped over to Japanese and can't work out how to get back to English.
There are a lot of advantages to using Blogger if you're not a control freak or interested in making a living from your blog (though you can make money with any blog by enabling Google'sadsense function, I'm guessing you can make more from a site better designed to showcase ads of various types). You don't have to pay for bandwidth if you have a high traffic site. You don't have to do any web site coding or design if you don't want to but you can make alterations to the pre-set schemes colors, designs and fonts if you so choose. You have various levels of control over comment moderation and notification. It's a pretty easy and straightforward way to run a blog.
This is the cramped space we have for moving around pictures.
Some things, however, have continued to be troublesome or tedious. The biggest one, and this is on my mind because I've done a lot of picture intensive posts as of late, is that you can't add pictures into specific points in a post. Every new picture gets loaded at the top of the post and has to be dragged around in a relatively smallish preview window for rearranging. What is worse though is that if you add pictures after having entered text, dragging them down to where you want to locate them often results in random text dragging with it and you have to go back and piece together the post.
My number one wish for Blogger would be for pictures to load at the insertion point or to be dragged and dropped precisely into place. As it is now, any post with more than a handful of pictures has to be carefully organized such that I load them all first in backwards order. Only after all of the pictures have been uploaded do I proceed to type up the post. This isn't always possible since I don't always know for certain what order is best.
Other than that, I really don't have any complaints and would recommend that people who are as unambitious about web design as me and who want to blog give Blogger a try.
Apple announced new iMacs today and they look great. The problem is that they're really not a huge improvement over what has already been released. More than ever before, I feel as though Apple is trying to woo (and wow) me with design. It's bigger in all the right places (the display) and smaller in all the right places (thickness), shinier, a little faster, a little cheaper ($300), and has a new keyboard design. I get the feeling Steve Jobs is waving the new computer in front of the Mac faithful and saying, 'look, pretty!'
Unfortunately, the beauty of the thin, elegant iMac also brings some drawbacks for the user which make me avoid buying a new Mac (again, I was pondering one awhile back). One has to realize that Mac Mini and iMac models are essentially laptop computer components re-oriented in a different box. In the case of the Mini, it's a headless laptop. In the case of the iMac, all the guts or the computer are stuck behind and under the display rather than under a built-in keyboard. This makes for a nice small footprint but creates some usability issues.
The biggest problem I have on a regular basis is that the low power innards of these types of models will cause your USB ports to act wonky on occasion, and not in a way which is uncommon or inconsistent in normal (read: NOT POWER USER) use. Since they are notebook components, they are designed to reduce power consumption while on battery power so shutting off ports that are drawing too much juice works to the user's advantage on a MacBook model. On a desktop model which is always plugged in, it's utterly maddening. I can't tell you how many times I've had one of my two USB ports shut down because I attached my camera, printer (which is externally powered itself!), Palm, or even mouse and had a "low power/port disabled" message pop up from my Mini. Once the port is disabled, it won't re-enable in most cases unless I restart.
The other problem for me personally with these models is that I want my next Macintosh to cover for both a Mac and a PC so I can live la vida dual platform without two machines. The main problem here is that the Mini and iMac models come with irreplaceable and relatively crappy video cards for gaming and that's what I mainly use a PC for. What I need and Apple refuses to give me is a mid-range Mac model, preferably a tower with a lot of expansion capability so I can upgrade the video. A Macintosh Pro model is not only more computer than I need but more cash than I'm willing to pay.
There are, of course, other issues with these consumer models (the Mini and iMac). They often have slow hard drives, limited RAM expansion capability, and no ability to add functionality with cards like a tower or box model do. That would all be just fine if there were a less compact (display-less) model which looked less gorgeous which you could opt for at around the $800-$1200 range but Stevie-boy isn't interested in these models because he's afraid it'll eat away at the more lucrative pro model line-up's sales. He knows the Mac faithful fear the boogey-man that is Windows (or these days, a bit of PC hardware) and those who really want a better Mac are far more likely to frequently buy completely new consumer models or opt for more machine than they require rather than dance with the Windows devil. Well, Steve, I'm not afraid.
Given the choice of waiting to buy a new computer, buying a new Mac which isn't what I want or buying a PC, I'm going to opt for waiting it out. However, when the time comes, I'll be looking more favorably at a PC if Apple doesn't come up with something that reflects my needs more than their marketing priorities.
There are a great many blogs and sites that I follow which provide advice for improving your quality of life in one way or another. I really should add a section for links to such sites but I wanted to take a moment to recommend a couple which I've found particularly interesting and enjoyable.
Lifehacker provides tips and links to sites with tips about many aspects of life including using your computer, changing your living space so it is more attractive and efficient, making your own versions of things more cheaply, saving money and time and reducing consumption. I don't find every tip useful and tend to skim the headers for each one and generally find one of use or interest several times a week. The comments on Lifehacker often add even more to the tips and provide a lot of information as well.
The nice thing is that the tips are useful to those of us living in Japan for the most part and not specifically geared toward people in any particular life situation. I strongly recommend bookmarking it and giving it a glance on a daily basis.
While Lifehacker is mainly concerned with improving your external life, Lifehack is concerned with both improving your outer and inner life (but not in a spiritually-oriented way so please don't think it's a religious site). There is an absolutely excellent post there on "10 virtually instant ways to improve your life" which every person ought to be forced to read again and again until they act in accord with those ideas and teach them to their children, friends, coworkers, and pets. Honestly, the world would be a happier place if everyone followed those steps (or at least tried to do so).
As with Lifehacker, I don't find everything useful but I give the headings a read everyday and find several really good items a week. The links to tips for using vinegar are particularly interesting this week.
The Google Reader RSS interface
