A very particular set of skills ... acquired over a very long career ...
Once again it be [Talk Like a ](http://www.talklikeapirateday.com/)[Pirate Day!](http://www.talklikeapirate.com/) Do yer duty!
(What’s that? Only nine posts since last year? Ne’er you mind that, ye landlubber! Get back to work — them decks don’t swab themsel’s, ye know!)
— Mad Russ Greybeard
Comments closed[I’d have said “Jackass of the Week”, but that would be redundant. Ba-da-bing.]
By responding to John Gruber’s comment on the Shelly Duncan autograph incident, I know I’m opening myself up to the same criticism of humorlessness; but it ticks me off every time I read it.
For the record, I’m an Orioles fan — there, I said it — but I have ties to the Boston area through both ancestry and schooling, and so whatever bias I may have in the situation is toward the Red Sox. (As would anyone else not a Yankees fan, I dare say.)
I think most people would agree that there’s a point at which writing “Red Sox suck!” on an autograph for a Red Sox fan is clearly intended as a good-natured jibe, and a point at which it is clearly inappropriate. For a 37-year-old beer-bellied bleacher dweller, for instance, it’s clearly a joke. For a four-year-old little girl with a red balloon, it’s clearly inappropriate. Agreed?
Now the question becomes where you draw the line. I think a 10-year-old boy pretty clearly falls on the “inappropriate” side of the line. Gruber apparently disagrees. I think if the boy had been a teenager — 14, at least — I would be more inclined to see it as a joke, however lame and unsubtle.
Of course, Duncan offers no apology, as quoted in the followup story:
> “I thought I was back in middle school or high school, where you try to make a joke or say something funny, and you end up saying something that gets you in trouble,” Duncan said … “I try to rile ’em up and be fun. I don’t expect anybody to make a big deal about it. Nobody ever has before.”
“It was just a joke! Can’t you take a joke?” *I* caused offense, but it’s *your* fault.
As for Gruber’s comments: well, they’re exactly what I’d expect to hear from a Yankees fan.
> When I was 10 I would have laughed my ass off if some player from the Red Sox had given me a “Yankees suck!” autograph.
Yeah, sure, because when you were 10, you were a punk-assed kid whose favorite team had won 26 World Series in the last sixty years. That’s pretty big of you. Suppose you’d been a Red Sox fan — but no, that would be impossible for you to imagine, rooting for one of the little teams that’s supposed to just roll over and play dead before the mighty pinstripes.
I speak from painful observation — although I am a part-season ticket owner, I haven’t attended a Yankees/Orioles game in years, because I don’t care to see ten thousand arrogant, foul-mouthed, drunken Yankees fans invade my home ballpark and ruin my afternoon. I certainly wouldn’t take my children there.
(I’ve stopped going to Orioles/Red Sox games, too, because the Red Sox Nation has become nearly as insufferable, and there’s even more of them, if that’s possible. Camden Street looks like Kenmore Square. And yes, I’m all too aware that the Orioles have brought this on themselves, for the twin crimes of organizational incompetence and being in the AL East.)
I don’t even really hate the Yankees. (Well, maybe Rodriguez. And Jeter.) I just want the Yankees to lose — in as humiliating a manner as possible — to piss off the Yankee fans. Ah, 2004. Sweet, sweet 2004… but of course that only put the tiniest dent in their insufferable arrogance. I’ve seen the T-shirts: “Still 26 to 1.” Hmmph.
That’s OK. I know of plenty other ways a baseball team can be humiliated. (Did I mention I was an Orioles fan?)
Comments closedI was seriously considering an iPod touch to replace both my current iPod and my Palm TX, until Apple somewhat arbitrarily decided not to permit editing calendar events on the iPod (although you can add and edit contacts … huh?). So now I’m not so sure.
Would it be completely absurd to purchase a refurbished iPhone for only $50 more than the “equivalent” 8GB iPod touch, and thereby get all the extra applications? Not just full-featured calendar, but weather, stock quotes, Google maps, etc. (Plus emergency 911!)
Is that worth $50? Maybe… I’d have to activate it and then cancel the AT&T service, but that seems pretty well documented. Many commenters mocked people who wanted to do this with their $600 iPhone, but for $349 it seems more reasonable. (Plus I’d have something to develop applications for… yeah, right. That’s what I said about the last three Palms I bought, too.)
Bonus notes from perusing the online features guide:
“[To] quickly type a period and space: Double-tap the space bar.” Cool! Does the iPhone do this too?
“[To] enter a pause in a [phone] number: Tap [some symbol], then tap Pause.
Pauses are sometimes required by phone systems—before an extension or password, for example. Each pause lasts 2 seconds. You may need to enter more than one.”
They took editable contacts out of the iPod touch, and left this in? Hello, McFly?
(All links go to the USA iTunes Store. Edit: These are now affiliate links. Go ahead — support my weblog habit.)
Comments closedI understand that some media companies feel the need to monetize their value propositions (to misquote the inestimable Merlin Mann), but isn’t this taking things a bit far?
Yes, that’s right: after exactly one sentence of the story, a full-column ad (about three column-inches high). Not shown: the banner ad that, combined with the video box, pushes the first sentence of the story a good six inches below the top of the page (if I wasn’t using a 24-inch Cinema Display, in fact, I’d probably have to scroll down to see it); or the vertical banner add down the side of the page.
We wouldn’t put up with this in a print magazine; why should we have to do it in a web magazine?
Comments closedSilver is the new white: With the new iPod classic coming in Black and Silver, it looks like the only remaining iconic white product in Apple’s lineup is the MacBook (unless you count accessories like the AirPort Express or Extreme).
Is there anything more ridiculous than the early iPhone adopters whining about how Apple is being disloyal to them with the $200 price cut? What is this, high school? Was Apple supposed to not cut their prices, to show how much they care? What do they think all this whining is going to get them, anyway?
Oh, OK. Huh. Hey, Beelzebub, send me up another iced tea, please. (I wonder if that will work elsewhere. “Hey, Mr. Honda, I bought this Accord a couple months ago, and now you’ve knocked $5000 off the price? I want my five large back!”)
So here we have what appears at first glance to be another entry in the “put iPhone in the headline and get unwarranted attention” sweepstakes:
iPhone Users Find Texting is 2x Slower Than on QWERTY Phones
but which turns out in fact to be more like the “write an egregiously misleading headline and get attention” technique.
Clicking through to the actual release reveals that if you take some frequent text messagers accustomed to physical numeric or QWERTY keypads and have them send six — six! — text messages on the iPhone — well, gosh, it takes them twice as long to do that as on their own phones … which they’re already used to.
(Apparently rubbing the iPhone on your head doesn’t cure baldness in half an hour, either.)
To their credit, they acknowledge this issue, sort of:
We were aware that participants’ prior familiarity with their own phones meant that there would likely be a learning curve associated with text messaging on the iPhone … Although participants were given one minute to familiarize themselves with the iPhone’s touch keyboard, their texting abilities on the iPhone were still at the novice level. [Emphasis supplied.]
So, apparently, they didn’t give the users any kind of advice on how to adapt themselves to the iPhone — the sort of thing any reasonably intelligent new user might do. Such as, oh, I don’t know, watch a video showing how it works?
Nor did they do the obvious followup and see how the users did after a couple of days using the iPhone — since it’s been widely reported that performance improves once the user adapts to the iPhone’s predictive key entry. Wouldn’t a usability research firm be interested in that information as well? Or would it just be satisfied to get a quick result likely to draw attention to itself, and send out a press release?
No, it couldn’t be that. What was I thinking?
Comments closedSo now Bandwagon and DreamHost are co-operating on a promotion: DreamHost members get a year of Bandwagon, and vice versa.
Well, I haven’t had a chance to set up my Bandwagon account yet — and, as has been pointed out, it may not be an optimal solution for large iTunes collections — but I’m a DreamHost subscriber, and my renewal date is coming up in a couple of months, so here goes. Now all three of you who read my blog will have something to chew on for another five months. (Hey, I couldn’t keep up with the blog when I wasn’t working full-time — what makes you think I’ll do any better now?)
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Bandwagon launches tomorrow; it purports to back up your entire iTunes library over the Internet to their servers (or alternatively to your Amazon S3 box) for a flat rate. Updates occur automatically in the background. Sounds like a good idea, if they can pull it off. (Mac only at the moment, apparently.)
Disclaimer: This post is earning me, like others, a free one-year subscription.
4 CommentsApparently I’m not the only one:
I went to www.brenthaven.com and what do I see but their featured laptop bag, the MacBook Slim. The name evoked compactness, and the picture appeared to be a clone of my Pro File 12, so I mustered up the will to spend $100 on a bag, and ordered one.
It came Friday, and it is beautiful, and well constructed. And I sent it back Saturday morning. The thing is huge. Great for frequent travelers who keep their office in their bag, not so great for me, who slips his laptop into its case every morning and every evening and needs only enough extra storage for an iPod.
Virtually the same thing here. I had a Pro File 12 for my PowerBook G4 12″ that I loved; I went back to Brenthaven, saw the MacBook Slim, assumed it was the same thing, and bought it just before a week-long cross-country trip.
And … it is huge. It has a “removable” padded sleeve, but in practice you wouldn’t want to use it as a lightweight sleeve, because (a) it’s Velcroed in there pretty good; (b) it doesn’t have much of a carrying handle; and (c) it’s really too big for the MacBook — I would guess it was a standard Brenthaven part that was the smallest one big enough to hold the MacBook, and then they built the rest of the case around it.
For that cross-country trip, it was decent — at least in the airplane; lugging it from the hotel to the convention center and back again was feasible but not much fun. But for going back and forth to work, it’s overkill. I guess I could have tried to return it, even after using it for a week, but that didn’t seem right to me, and by the time I got really unhappy with it my return period was long since past.
So what I ended up doing was buying a Pro File 15 from the same place I’d bought the Pro File 12 — and for virtually the same clearance price. The Pro File 15 is a little too tall for the MacBook but otherwise works fine, and is much lighter weight to boot.
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