Entry 111: An Apple a Day

As an avid reader of this blog, I'm sure you've notice that I've posted this entry on Wednesday night, not on Saturday afternoon like I usually do. That's because I'm leaving for a week-long business trip to Southern California in a few days, and this is the only chance I'll have to write an entry before then. I'm going to a conference in Palm Springs, then I'm headed down to San Diego for two nights, where I'll hopefully be able to see some family, if only briefly. I probably won't post any entries while I'm on road. It's not a free-time issue. It's a computer issue. I'll only have my work computer with me, and I try to be careful about the websites I visit on it for work policy and personal privacy reasons.

[Palm Springs, tough place to go for work, I know.]

Anyway, the topic today is Apple. They've been the bane of my existence lately. I'd wish a pox upon Steve Jobs, but, you know, he kinda already died from one.

1. Everything on my iPhone got erased. I was upgrading the OS to the latest version through iTunes, and I received a message telling me an error had occurred -- no further explanation just "An error occurred during process [random number]". I clicked OK (my only option, if there was a "Fix Everything" button, trust me, I would've clicked it), and then it just continued with whatever process it was doing. I thought to myself "huh, this probably isn't good", but didn't know what to do, so I just let it finish. After it was done, I had the new OS, but nothing was backed up on iTunes. (I'm guessing that's where the error occurred.) So, all my apps, all my settings, all my contacts, all gone. It's like I just bought a new phone. Now, I'm probably one of the better people for this to happen to, because I try to keep things simply, I don't like having a bunch of shit on my phone with all these notifications and all that (it drives me crazy to see all those little numbers all over my phone), so I only had about five apps. Plus, only about three people ever call or text me with any regularity, so not a huge loss in the contacts department either, but still it's annoying.



2. I've decided to teach myself how to program apps, and setting everything up is turning out to be a colossal pain. I'm good with computers when it comes to programming algorithms. That's basically what I do for a living: derive, implement, and debug algorithms. But, that's more about being good at math and logic than it is about being good with computers. I'm not super knowledgeable about using computers. When it comes to programming, I want somebody else to set up the workspace application, and the compiler, and the linker and all that -- just show me where to type the code and what button to press to execute it, and I'll be off and running.

But, of course, I don't have somebody like that. I'm trying to do this myself. So, I buy a book for about $20 that starts at the very beginning of app making, and I start going through it page by page. First, I have to pay $99 to be part for of the Apple Development Team, kinda Apple proprietary BS, but whatever. Next, I have to buy Lion OS for S's computer (she has the Mac, I'm "borrowing" it) for $30, so I do that. Then I realize that the book I bought is outdated. It's only two years old, but already Apple has changed some things. I try to use it anyway, but it's basically unusable -- the screen shots are different, things are in different places on Apple's website than it says in the book, there's a new version of the development software, and so on. They're all subtle changes that somebody who knew what they were doing a little bit could probably easily navigate around, but that's the whole point, I don't know what I'm doing, at all. So, I break down and buy the latest edition of the book. I get it on my Kindle, so it's only $10. I download the development software I supposedly need, and then quit because I spend the whole day doing everything else, and now I'm burned out. I do plan on resuming things when I get back, though. I'm already $160 into it, and I really enjoy banging my head against a wall and feeling stupid, so why not?

3. I feel somewhat conflicted morally about owning Apple products. They are produced in China in work conditions that we would not deem acceptable in the U.S. Now, sweatshops are a bit of a sticky wicket, because although they seem abhorrent to us, they actually do provide an upgrade in salary and standard of life for people in developing countries, and over time they push up wages to something approaching U.S. standards. (Really, Paul Krugman says so.) With that said, Apple has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. I'm sure they could champion a U.S. manufacturing movement if they wanted to. It's just not that important to them. And why should it be? It's, frankly, not that important to us, we buy their products anyway.

As I alluded to in my last entry, This American Life recently did a piece on working conditions in Apple supply factors in China. They then retracted it. It turns out the man who gave them the information, Mike Daisey, made up a great deal of it to make his stage monologue more dramatic. I recommend checking out the story. It's pretty interesting.

Alright, off to bed, it's a work night. Until next time...

Entry 110: Why Can't Everybody Think Like Me? (Part II)

In November, I posted an entry on this blog titled "Why Can't Everybody Think Like Me", in which I offered the egomaniacal conclusion that "our country -- nay, the world -- would be a better place if everybody thought like me." I now have a word to attach to this type of thinking, intellectualism. I want everybody to an intellectual.

Yes, I am aware of how pretentious and elitist this sounds (although, elitism kind of gets a bad rap, but I'll have to save that for another entry), but it's actually the opposite, if you use Lawrence O'Donnell's definition of an intellectual. Penn Jillette said O'Donnell's definition on his podcast, but I can't source it online, so I'm probably butchering it massively, but the spirit of what O'Donnell allegedly said is "An intellectual is somebody who is willing to change their thinking if the situation warrants it." Along these same lines John Maynard Keynes famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said to one of his detractors who accused him of being inconsistent, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

[Political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell. Oh, wait, that's former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback NEIL O'Donnell, my bad.]

Fact-based thinking and objective reasoning are things that pretty much everybody can partake in, regardless of your background, which is why I said that O'Donnell's definition of an intellectual is an unpretentious, nonelitist one. It affords the opportunity for everybody to be an intellectual. But, of course not everybody is one, and that's a problem. More and more people are practicing what I call the religion of ideology. They just become absolutely imbedded in their likely wrongheaded positions, and the more others try to pry them out with facts, the more they dig in. I find it really bizarre.

[Economist John Maynard Keynes. Now this dude looks like an intellectual.]

Anti-intellectualism happens across the political spectrum, but particularly among conservatives (see this link). To be a "conservative" today you have to adhere to many positions -- such as, smaller government equals better government; the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector; and low taxes, even for the super rich, are always good -- even when facts and objectivity should lead you to the contrary. (On the anti-science side of things, you can throw in denials of climate change and evolution.) Such positions are simply accepted as matters of faith and are unarguable.

As an example, I heard a piece on "This American Life" about the conservative city of Colorado Springs. It, like almost every other city in the US, is having budget problems, so the leadership responded by slashing spending and adopting an extremely businesslike, pro-private sector approach to their affairs. In some ways, so far it has been a success. They were able to put a stop to things like automatic raises to poor-performing government employees, and bloated pensions. But, at the end of the day, the implementers of the plan are hard pressed to actually point out any savings. Their response is that they believed that down the road it will save. They believe in their ideology, but it isn't so clear that it's right. Sure, in turning services over to the private sector, you can cut some inefficiencies (namely, unwarranted salaries and benefits), but you introduce new inefficiencies in needing to maximize profits (instead of simply being sustainable), and in having a bunch of separate entities serving their own self-interests instead of one entity trying to serve the greater good. Also, although getting burdensome salaries off the books might be a good thing, you have to be careful in treating a government like a business, as the salaries you're cutting are ones that would be spending in the local economy.

["This American Life" host Ira Glass. He's recently stepped into a bit of controversy regarding a different story about working conditions in Apple factories in China.]

In the same story, a woman in the Colorado Springs government suggested a property tax to pay for vital services that would otherwise be cut, such as streetlights. It would amount to around $200 a year for the average homeowner. It failed. So, they actually turned off the streetlights in many neighborhoods. People could pay the city $300 to turn them back on for a year. One guy did this for his neighborhood, and then thanked the woman in government for this program. When she asked him, if he supported her tax, and he said no, she pointed out that for $100 cheaper he could have had the streetlights and a bunch of other services. His response was still adamantly against the tax, because he doesn't support increased taxes and big government. Even when presented with a clear-cut example of how public ventures can be much more efficient, he rejected it.

[Colorado Springs.]

It just doesn't make much sense to me. I don't get why average citizens that just want to go along and get along (almost everybody) care so much about these ideological battles. People shouldn't want big government or small government, they should just want better government. Wherever that takes us, it takes us. What good does it do the average Joe or Josephina to dig in on either side of any issue and refuse to ever come out?

In other news, I just wanted to quickly comment on the conclusion of the case against Dhuran Ravi, the Rutgers student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate who committed suicide a few days later. He was found guilty on all charges including the most damning, bias intimidation (bullying). I was somewhat surprised by the verdict. I'm not sure I completely agree, but being pretty well-versed in the facts of the case (I become super interested in this case, for some reason ), I'm OK with it. It was a judgement call and the jury judged against him. He has only himself to blame. His defense tried unsuccessfully to play the immature-jerk-but-not-a-criminal card. As the NY Times puts it

His lawyers said he simply did not believe he had committed a hate crime. They argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him.

Which I believe is absolutely true, but if your response to this scary situation is to invade somebody's privacy and humiliate them in an illegal manner, well, then you might have to pay the price, and it looks like Ravi probably will, perhaps with prison time, perhaps through deportation. Although, his lawyers will certainly appeal.

Well, that's it for this entry. I have to go to stupid Home Depot now. Until next time...

Entry 109: Playing Opossum

I believe we have a possum living in our yard. Possibly it's more correct to say we have an opossum living in our yard. The opossum/possum distinction, if you want to get technical, seems to be that an opossum is one from an order of marsupial found in the Western Hemisphere, and a possum is one of various phalangers found in Australia and New Zealand. However, most American dictionaries list "opossum" as the number one definition for "possum", so it appears the term possum has been co-opted in American English to simply mean opossum.

Either way, some large, ugly rodent scurried into the bushes one night a few weeks ago as I opened the door to leave our house. It startled me, so I let out a "what-the-he...?!", which S overheard (she was a bit behind me still inside, so she didn't see it), so she starts asking, "What?! What is it? What did you see?"

Being the quick thinker that I am, knowing that she would be freaked out by a possum living in our yard, I said, "Oh, I just saw a possum... in our neighbor's yard. It ran away."

"It was in our neighbor's yard?"

"Yeah, in our neighbor's yard."

"OK."

Cut to this past weekend, our friends come over for dinner, and what's the first thing one of them says to us? "Just saw a fat possum in your yard as we were walking up here."

"In our yard?" S asks.

"Yeah."

"Oh no!" She turns to me, "Babe, it's in our yard now!"

"Uhh... Well, the funny thing about that," I say, "it was in our yard before. I just said it was in the neighbor's yard, so that you wouldn't freak out."

"Babe!!!"

"Oh...," our friend says, "I mean... I saw it in... uh... your neighbor's yard too... Yeah, um, the, um, neighbor's yard. Yeah."

[Part of a famous Pogo cartoon that is a play on a famous line by Oliver Hazard Perry. Pogo is an opossum.]

So, the next morning I find S Googling ways to get rid of possums, which is exactly why I tried to hide it in the first place. We don't need to get rid of anything. There were two sightings of a completely harmless (albeit ugly) creature in a month. I think we can live with that. I mean, it's a possum. Its nocturnal, it scurries off the instant it sees a human, and its defense mechanism is to, literally, pretend that it's dead. It's not exactly a ferocious beast. It's not like we found a malnourished Kodiak bear living under our house.

But S has an irrational fear of things like this, so she wants to get rid of it. She went so far as to suggest that we hire some sort of exterminator to hunt it down. "Yeah sure, why don't you have him get rid of the squirrels and the birds in our trees while you're at it," I say sarcastically. This prompts a mini-fight, because she says I'm being mean, and that I need to be respectful of her feelings even if I don't understand them. She's right, of course, this is something I need to work on. I'm not exactly the most sensitive person in the world, but I have to be the voice of reason here also. We can't be obsessing over a stupid possum.

Anyway, the whole thing was more or less put to rest, when I showed S a website espousing the virtues of possums. Particularly, she liked the claim that possums eat rats. I find this highly dubious, honestly, but I'm going with it nonetheless.

[Not a huge fan of Rush the band either, but their version of this song frickin' rocks.]

On a different topic, I just want to chime in on the whole Rush-Limbaugh-Sandra-Fluke-slut thing. I alluded to it in my last entry, but didn't go into detail, because I've always thought the most effective way to deal with people like Limbaugh is to universally ignore them. I always thought that it's, by and large, the outrage of their haters that turns them into superstars and gives them a mainstream platform. Although it's natural to want to fight back, it's always seemed counterproductive to me. By tearing them down, you're actually propping them up.

I still mostly feel this way, but my friend RT opened my eyes to the possibility that there might be some value in a public backlash against Limbaugh, since his show is broadcast over public airwaves and on the Armed Forces Network. If his show does indeed suffer from a lack of sponsors or is dropped from AFN, over his comments about Fluke, then this would be some sort of victory, I suppose. But my main point is that normal, knee-jerk, tit-for-tat verbal sparring doesn't work with somebody like Limbaugh. I don't think you can usually hurt him this way. If he insults you, you lose. If you insult him, you still lose, somehow. You can't shame somebody who has no shame. So, why try? Just let him preach to his choir of morons (which although quite large by radio audience standards is still a small percentage of the total U.S. population) and that will be that.

[Random shot of a full moon I took near my office building. My lo-res iPhone camera can't do it justice.]

It's been interesting to see the spate of articles coming out questioning why Limbaugh is chastised by liberals for his misogyny while left-leaning personalities like are Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, and others are mostly given a pass for theirs. It's a fair point. Charles Barkley once said (I'm paraphrasing), "If you like somebody, you cut them some slack," and I think there is a ton of truth to that. We all have a pretty severe double standard for people we like and people we dislike. With that said, I have yet to read a quote by any "liberals" that was as bad as what Limbaugh said. (By no objective measure is Calling Michele Bachman "bat-shit crazy" or Hiliary Clinton a "she-devil" comparable to calling a birth control-advocating college student, who previously was not a public figure, a "slut", and demanding she release sex tapes.)



Also, in the case of Maher, he's a comedian (at least ostensibly so, he does toe the comedian / political commentator line). If it's understood upfront that somebody is saying something with a primary objective to be funny, just for the sake of entertainment, then I basically give them a pass. If somebody isn't seriously advocating a position and is just trying to crack jokes, then people need to lighten up. The world would be a pretty dull place if all people had to be PC all the time.

Anyway, I've run out of time with this entry. Until next time...

Entry 108: Our Culture War and Mattress Moving

So, a lot has been going on these past few weeks with the "Culture War" in our country. I touched on it a little bit last post with Rick Sanatorium, but it seems to have gone into overdrive the past few days. One reason is that conservative blogger/provocateur Andrew Breitbart died on Thursday of some sort of heart trouble. He was only in his early 40s. I never bothered to learn much about Breitbart, but from what I could tell he sorta had a Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde private-public life. In private, he supposedly was a nice, normal, loving, and funny guy, and in public, he was a vitriolic dispenser of anti-liberal half-truths, and a leader of some conservative "busts" of suspect fairness and motive (most notably ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, and Anthony Weiner). He was frequently criticized for using quotes and videos out-of-context to support his point of view.

[Breitbart (left) and Taibbi.]

Shortly after Breitbart's death, Matt Taibbi the liberal Rolling Stone writer (about whom I'm never quite sure what to make) posted an entry on his blog entitled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douchebag." Needless to say, many people thought this was in extremely poor taste, and I did too at first -- I mean regardless of what you think of his politics, the guy wasn't Pol Pot, let's have a modicum of decorum -- but then I actually read the post. It's not that bad. The title, which seems particularly heinous at first glance, reveal itself to be kinda tongue-in-cheek, and the post is sort of a dark homage to Breitbart from somebody on the opposite end of the political spectrum. In fact, Taibbi tries to make just this point in an update at the bottom of his post after being harassed by Breitbart fans. Plus, as Taibbi also alludes to, Breitbart wasn't exactly magnanimous when Ted Kennedy died, so, yeah.

The reason I never paid much attention to Breitbart was that I just didn't care. I had other things to do. I heard a few things he said when he was just getting big, they seemed stupid to me, so that was that, moving on. I wish more people would treat ridiculous talking heads and idiotic political bloggers this way, shrug your shoulders and move on. The push back and outrage is what fuels these people. Take a certain radio host, who's again captured the spotlight recently by calling a birth control advocate a "slut". This guy has been saying moronic, incendiary things since I was in high school. The story should be when he says something reasonable. So, let's just move on, the same way you would move on if a homeless guy on the street corner was raving about reading people's auras in the trees. They deserve equal respect.

And so, moving on, myself, new topic. I decided last week to start watching Celebrity Apprentice. The show always sounded terrible to me (I had never actually watched an episode), but the cast this season is chalk full of people I find interesting like Adam Carolla, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, Arsenio Hall (hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo), and Clay Aiken (very funny guy, actually). So, I watched the first episode on Hulu, and I could barely get through it. It was two hours long! Who on Earth would want to devote two hours to an inane show like this on a weekly basis? I could watch two episodes of an actual substantive TV show, or watch a movie, or play 15 games of online Scrabble with two hours of free time.

[Dee Snider, Lou Ferrigno, AND, George Takei, how could anybody ruin this? Watch it to find out.]

And the production of the show is awful. The boardroom takes 45 minutes and every time they cut to commercial they replay the first minute of what they showed before, and they try to build suspense out of the stupidest things ("Which sandwich did Rachael like best? Find out next"... dum, dum, dum). It's not dramatic, it's irritating. I'm not surprised that the production is bad, I expected it to be bad, but I was thinking maybe the personalities could make up for it. Nope, the show sucks. Needless to say, I won't be watching anymore episodes. If it were a half-hour, maybe an hour, I'd give it another try, but when I went back to Hulu and saw the second episode was also two hours (I thought maybe it was just an extra long season premier), no way.

In other news, we finally got our mattress for the master bedroom. Getting it up our narrow staircase was a BITCH. It was just S and I moving it (so basically just me), and I think I dislodged a few vertebrae. At one point we were having such a difficult time that S just wanted to call professional movers to try to hoist it up through a window (which is how our box springs in the guest bedroom made it), but I was determined. I was at the top of the stairs sweating, looking at a twisted mess of cushion jammed into our stairwell thinking, "We ARE getting this son-of-bitch to our bedroom." And, lo and behold, we did.
The bed is super comfortable, but probably just coincidentally, I've haven't been sleeping great lately. It's not like I'm up all night, but I'm lying in bed a lot longer than I usually do. It's taking me longer to "turn my brain off". Then, yesterday I woke up at 6 a.m. about two hours earlier than normal. They are doing construction across the street, and this truck was dropping off supplies, which wouldn't have been a problem, but it had to constantly do back and forth, so it was often in reverse and doing that "beep, beep, beep" thing. Seriously, why is this the default setting for all machinery? It's so annoying. Was there once of rash of people being maimed because they didn't know a giant hunk of metal was moving backwards at them ("If only RVs made annoying beeping sounds when they move in reverse, little Johnny would still be alive today")? Or is it a bullshit, check-the-box, safety regulation? I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing it's the latter.

OK, that's all for this week. S invited friends over tonight for dinner, so I should at least make an empty offer to help her prepare.

Until next time...