Apple's intolerable smugness

I'm a fan of Apple and their products, but every six months or so I'm forced to become apologetic about my persuasions. This is because every six months or so, a Macworld convention is held.

The conventions are garish affairs, more about the company's image than about anything worth reporting; they are frequented by the kind of people capable of applauding the most fatuous of Steve Jobs pronouncements. More often than not these conventions are just vehicles of ridicule, used to poke fun at their looming competitor. Apple is nothing if not petty.

There is also much prevarication on display. Take, for example, the Macworld held in January this year, the one that announced the iPhone to the world. Of the many glib mouthings of Mr. Jobs at that conference, this one stands out for its utter lack of sincerity --

114, 000 viruses? Not on a Mac.

This is nearly a lie. Though there are currently very few viruses for Mac OS X, there's no reason why that should not change in a hurry. In fact, Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition proclaimed, in January 2006, that he would show up one security flaw in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger for every day of the month of February, and then proceeded to do just that. Get this in your head, Mr. Jobs -- Macs can have viruses too.

All this wouldn't be so bad if Apple was really all it claimed to be, but it's not. Its incompetence at handling customer issues is well known, as is its lack of regard for post-release product flaws. As an example of the former, take the DVD burner issue of a few months ago. Apple released a firmware update for Macbook DVD drives in May 2007. By June, there were complaints from hundreds of Macbook users (including one from myself), who claimed that their drives were defunct as a result of the update.

Save for removing the upgrade from their servers, Apple did nothing to resolve the issue. Never mind the myriad complaints on three separate forums; never mind the suppressed indignation of Apple devotees; never mind the hundreds of people who weren't under warranty when they trustingly downloaded the update. Never mind the customer.

Apple also has a bad case of foot-in-mouth. After months and months of deploring Windows Vista at every possible opportunity, they released Leopard (their latest operating system) on Friday, six pm local time. By seven-thirty this forum already had its first entry -- a poor Apple zealot, while installing Leopard on his machine, encountered a hitch that refused to go away. The good man actually waited for half an hour hoping the installation would complete on its own, and perhaps went through a brief moment of denial before giving in and posting to the discussion board.

In the two and a half days since, there have been upwards of 350 entries to the board, and Apple, in response, has posted a makeshift solution that does not come close to resolving the issue.

Grow up, Apple. Seriously. Or shut the fuck up.

Unaware

We would walk
by the TV sets at dawn --
and watch as Mister
P. oozed oil on
to the fire.

Feeling as
mud walls in a blaze or numb--
as cotton pods; who
could tell the
difference?

The silence,
spreading under our watchful
eyes, blinding us
with nothing less than
ambivalence.

Our failings,
dodged us, their blanched veneers
like windowless
houses desolate
once again.

And once more,
we circled beneath the freshly
clotted copper
sheen of sunset --
unaware.

A brief comment

J.K. Rowling has declared Albus Dumbledore gay. In a press conference earlier this week, she revealed that Dumbledore was attracted to Grindlewald, a wizard whose powers, at their peak, were comparable to Dumbledore's own.

I'm offended by this pronouncement, not because I'm homophobic (I'm not), but because it appears to be a cynical attempt to gain media attention and redirect it towards the books. Never has the sexual preference of any character in the series been relevant; in fact, one could perhaps point toward the absence of sex in the books as evidence toward the (obviously absurd) assumption that everyone in the series is homosexual.

Even more ridiculous is the gay community's reaction to the announcement. Peter Tatchell, a gay activist of some repute, had this to say, 'But I am disappointed that she did not make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit in the Harry Potter book. Making it obvious would have sent a much more powerful message of understanding and acceptance.'

Hardly that. The books are not exercises in twenty-first century sexual liberation, with commentary on society's inability to accept homosexuals. In fact, I would argue that any such attempt would have distracted from the thematic elements of the story while being jarring and pretentious. Whatever her other literary merits, J.K. Rowling is no explorer of the human condition.

No, the only explanation is that Ms. Rowling, after all her superhuman accomplishments of the past few years, is now displaying disturbing signs of humanity.

A critique of my own writing -- part 1

I've spent the past few days looking at stuff I've written -- emails, comments on blogs, articles, bachelor's theses (just the one, actually), rants on forums, and almost anything else that I can get my hands on -- in the hope of being able to view my prose objectively and therefore improve it.

A little context here -- it's really difficult for me to criticize (positively or negatively) my own writing, especially after I've just written it. The loss of perspective while surveying one's own work is of course widely known, and I will not go into it here. Suffice it to say that I can only view my written work with either extreme pride or intense disgust; objectivity, during these occasions, is a distant dream.

I used to spend the first few months when I discovered this woods-for-trees phenomenon groping about in contrived self-pity. Here, I thought, was a perfectly good person (myself), in pursuit of a perfectly admirable goal (writing a good book). And what should come between the goal and its execution but my stupid ego and its frustrating inability to understand my writing. Woe was me.

No longer, because I have belatedly discovered that I can blog (oh, how I despise that verb!) about it. For the next few weeks or so, I will be putting up sporadic thoughts about my writing and how I can improve it. These blog posts will highlight my inadequacies as a writer by primarily focusing on patterns that have surfaced in my prose over the period of the past three years. If nothing else, these articles should at least serve as interesting exercises in style.

The uninterested (who number, no doubt, in the billions) should avert their eyes now.

What was relevant then....

...is relevant now.



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats, obviously.

A note to myself

Cold sugarless tea tastes almost as bad as raw parsley.

Misdirected articulateness and Salon.com

This article by Glenn Greenwald (of Salon.com) reminded me of something I'd written a couple of months ago to a friend. Actually, almost everything on Salon nowadays reminds me of that email, which I will reproduce below, but not without first commenting on a certain pattern that I observe emerging from the liberal half of the blogosphere.

Before the comments, however, here are a few definitions.

Neocon -- A person who professes great love for America and American values. Supports (on principle) the current war in Iraq and hopes for a future one on Iran. Opposes (on principle) abortion, homosexuality, birth control. Professes great indignation at the moral excesses of the modern world. Is Christian. Dislikes/hates (on principle) all other religions. Is very probably xenophobic. Is not amenable to argument.

Liberal -- A person who is the opposite of a neocon, and that too not by choice; a liberal defines himself as being everything a neocon is not, with the exception that he shares the non-amenability-to-argument characteristic. He might also be Christian, though this is typically irrelevant.

Salon.com -- a liberal stronghold.

Given these definitions (without context) most people would conclude that the best thing to do would be to ignore these neocons, who seem at least moderately deranged. But apparently liberals can't get enough of them. They (and by they I mean entities like Salon.com as well as individuals like Mr. Greenwald) examine statements made by neocons and then go forth and denounce them strenuously.

And, inevitably, people follow its example. Whether they do so consciously or not I cannot say, but the fact remains that most liberal bloggers today are content -- happy, even -- to react with outrage to any and all statements that they may come across that seem 'neocon' enough.

Anyway, now that you know where I'm coming from, read the email.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/08/20/rove/

The title of the article is 'The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove', which should tell you a bit about how the author likes to make his argument. Indeed, in an article at least 1500 words long, he enumerates everything that makes Rove untrustworthy and loathsome, citing examples from as long as twenty years ago. Verbosity notwithstanding, though, the article can be summarized in one sentence -- `Karl Rove is a cunning man who furthers Republican values at any cost.'

The problem with this approach to denouncing his agenda is subtle but real. If there is nothing more to Karl Rove than his desire to defend Republicanism, then there is no point in subjecting him to the sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis that the author attempts in the article -- it is as misguided as trying to dissect a bully's intentions. If, on the other hand, there is more to him than meets the eye -- if he is in fact driven by motivations that hide beneath the veneer of Democrat-hatred that he so earnestly assumes, then the analysis is incomplete, scratching not even the surface. I would argue, in fact, that the author does not possess the intellectual equipment to make such an analysis.

Of course, at some level this is sophistry, because we all know that the sole agendum of Karl Rove is to bash liberals, which absolves the author from any scholarly responsibility he may have had. People say that the Bush government has galvanized satire in an unprecedented manner, but I say it has also galvanized the sort of ersatz erudition exemplified in articles such as the one above. It is easy to sound intelligent when the subject of your argument is not.

I wrote this email, I guess, to expand upon the point I tried to make on the phone yesterday. If the primary objective of a debate is to provoke a questioning of morals, ideas and motivations, then perhaps it is worth conducting; if, on the other hand, it is used as a means to proselytize, to establish a boundary between imaginary aesthetic goals (Pro-choice or pro-life? Support gays or bash them? Right or Wrong?) it degenerates into insubstantiality. Arguments can only help deal with problems, not solve them.