DrunkenBlog

Rumble young man, rumble

Via the comments and email, some have taken me to task for poking fun at Canada. They had some valid points, and really Canadians and Mac users share a sense of kindred-ship that might not be apparent upon first glance. This is what I've dubbed the 'Canadian Parallel', and goes like so...

• Both use the byproduct of a plant as their insignia.
• Canadians exported Celine Dion, who is constantly on the radio but whose high-pitched repetitive screeching sets many an ear on edge. Mac users did the same with Jeff Raskin.
• Canadians have strong opinions, but the only people who really care about them and are even aware of them are their fellow Canadians. This pisses them off to no end.
• Canadians have a habit of defining themselves by their differences to their neighbor to the south, rather than their similarities. This doesn't mean that those differences aren't important, but that they often take on greater mindshare than they otherwise would...
• Both Canadians and Mac users are strangers to broad economic growth, but there are bright points... traditional areas aren't generally among them, though.
• Canadians have a subset of their population which most Canadians don't really understand. This subset is, for all intents and purposes, xenophobic (I'm looking at you, Quebec) towards all things non-native.
• Both Canadians and Mac users are fairly starved in the way of native gaming that isn't piped in from afar.
• The best and brightest produced from Canada have a habit of leaving for greener pastures where the opportunity to rake in the dough is just so much greater.
• Canadians are economically dependent upon the USA in a disproportionate way. While they love seeing their officials thumb their nose at the USA in public, there's an unspoken expectation that their officials work hard to increase the economic cooperation in private. *points to Office*
• 80 to 90% of Canadians are clustered to within 200 kilometers of the USA/Canada border, with the rest being vast stretches of wilderness that no one is willing to go into because the opportunity cost just isn't worth it. Sorta like the 3rd party application market for the Mac.
• There's an old joke that goes:
  Q: "Why don't Canadians play 'Wheel of fortune'?"
  A: "Because they always go, 'I'd like to buy a vowel, eh.'"
  
  This joke won't make a whole lot of sense unless you've seen Strange Brew or know some hardcore Canucks, but basically Canadians have a habit of tacking on "Eh?" to sentences, which sounds like 'A'.
  
  Again, Mac users have Jeff Raskin as a parallel, and his inability to speak in public without tacking on a mention of his book or website to every sentence. At this point, I don't it's even a conscious action, he just can't help himself.

The 'Canadian Parallel' isn't meant to be taken seriously, but rather it's a tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out how easy it is to start with a conclusion and then work your way backwards.

There's also some food for thought mixed in, and probably enough rings true that at least some people could be convinced that there really was a freakish connection between the two groups... but only those predisposed to believing it and looking for reassurance. The right person approaching it with the right frame of reference could easily see how the context is missing from the points and, by tugging enough of the threads, handily invalidate the whole thing.

It wouldn't really matter to those who were already predisposed, though. They would have been reassured, and most importantly would have new talking points to throw at others. They would have had their view validated.

This, unfortunately, describes most of what now constitutes 'the Mac web', and why I'm often at a loss and left standing there shifting my feet when asked what Mac sites, let alone magazines, I read and recommend.

Not really. If you look at say, the existence of God, science actually allows for it... assuming the evidence supports it. Science also allows for God to not exist, or simply to say "I don't know yet".

Alternatively, Creationism (the belief that God created everything) allows for one of those to be true, and often employs a phenomenon called 'The fallacy of shifting the burden of proof'. This means that a Creationist will say, "God created the universe, because of x..." and it is your job to disprove it.

Now what constitutes 'x' is a funny thing. It is usually far enough out, and optimally hard enough to prove, that they've bought themselves, and their belief, time.

However when x is proven not to be true, as I said, their belief doesn't allow for their belief to be invalidated... rather they just latch onto something else a little further out and sweep the last belief under the rug. For Mac users, the current incarnation of this would be 'The Halo Effect'.

Many of the hardcore Mac users, for better or for worse, have a pro-Mac agenda. You might say "Well, DUH", but many of them would actually bristle at the notion. They'll usually say they have a pro-good-hardware agenda, pro-speed or pro-design agenda, and they just happen to like the Mac because of those.

You can tell the difference because those talking points go out the window when they cease to be of use or, and/or are perceived as becoming a liability.

I had a conversation with an older gentleman once, on what our words meant. His question went something like this:

"Let's say you walk up and down the avenue telling every girl you meet she is beautiful, whether or not you believe she is, to curry favor. Then you meet a special girl, and tell her she is beautiful. You are using the same words, but by saying them to all the other women, whether or not it was deserved, have you diminished their value?"

You can take a lot of different points from that, but let's go with the idea that if you have a magazine, and every product you carry gets a positive review, your magazine's reviews have ceased to have any real value.

It's hard to find a larger Mac site, let alone a magazine, that gives anything but favorable reviews. This doesn't mean that some of the products it's reviewing aren't dogs. In many cases they have severe issues, but they might at most be given a sentence at the end in ambiguous language if they're mentioned at all.

Some of this has to do with whom is cutting them their checks, but in many cases these people actually like the Mac, and saying "You know, both Dreamweaver X and Golive X just really bite on the Mac" is, because of their love for the Mac, tantamount to harming the platform, because that's all there is... and wouldn't it suck if someone read that and decided not to buy a Mac, because they heard such and such sucked on it.

So it's just not discussed, and it's hoped that the next version will be better... unfortunately this isn't reassuring to the person who gets Dreamweaver home and can't believe what a poor product it is on the Mac, and is confused as to why none of the reviews mentioned it.

This is only one example of many, and we haven't even touched hardware reviews, but it's a major reason why Mac sites and other such things are dwindling. You can't really trust what they say, because whether or not what they are telling you happens to be true, it's all at one end of the spectrum.

Years ago, a company I did work at used to back up their computers to a large tape drive which, at the time, was about the only thing with the storage capacity to do it.

The software would pull the data off of the machines and spool it to the tape drive, and when that was full, you'd just plug in a new tape. If you needed something from backup, you'd find the file in the software, and it would tell you what tape to enter in. These backups went back for years.

All was well until one day the tape drive died, and they had to replace it with a new one. This occurred quickly, and the new tape drive was installed and went on it's happy way backing up files without a hitch... until the day someone tried to pull something from backup, and realized none of their tapes would work.

A phenomenon called 'head drift' had occurred, which meant that slowly over time the alignment of the heads of the drive had drifted out of their factory-default. This meant that the data it was meticulously laying down onto the tapes made perfect sense to it, but little sense to any other drive. The data was there, but unless the new drive's heads were aligned to exactly match the original drive, all the new drive saw was noise.

Sadly, the head of many of the hardcore Mac users has drifted out of alignment with the rest of the world's reality to such a degree that it's just noise.

Awhile ago I was privy to an interesting interchange between two people, where one was in the market for a new computer, preferably a laptop he could depend on, and the other was trying to convince him to get an iBook.

His selling point was the great quality of the Mac hardware, among other things. Since I knew this guy peripherally, I knew his iBook had been sent in for repairs no less than five times, and from memory went something like this:

• Screen problem, where the hinge was chewing through the cable. Was sent in and repaired.
• Logic board problem, which was sent in and fixed.
• CD-ROM stopped working, was sent in for repair.
• Trackpad stopped working, along with the firewire port... was sent in for repair.
• Logic Board again, which was sent in and returned without being fixed because the 'problem could not be reproduced'.
• Logic Board failed in a spectacular way, and was sent in for repair and repaired.
• The machine is currently having display issues, and trackpad issues, which sounds like a logic board problem... when he called Apple, the support person asked if the symptoms were actually happening right then. Since they were intermittent, and weren't, the person couldn't issue an RMA number until the person called and they were happening right then (I'm seriously not making this up), so he knows this machine is going to have to go in again.

I know the above because I listened to his frustration while he went through it, and I know he's known enough others with similar problems through his Mac user group. One of those members works at a school and has seen massive failure rates with white iBooks, let alone the Powerbook and eMac problems, but those are tales for another day.

Since I was there, I couldn't help but ask "Didn't you have to send yours..." which caused him to promptly downshift into a newer mode for Mac users, that of "Well yes, but all computers are going to have problems, but Apple fixed mine... how they are taken care of is what matters...", which meant he's now focusing on the service, not the hardware itself.

Now here we have a person who has first hand knowledge that this is one fucked up model in terms of quality, yet he wasn't going to mention the problems he'd personally experienced, and he's recommending it to a new user while trying to sell it with the reliability card. That's bizarro-world logic.

In fact, that logic is so fucking bizarre that we can be forgiven the assumption that the person is no longer consciously acting in that person's best interest, but rather hanging that user out to dry just to get them on the Mac. Getting them to give Apple their cash, and being responsible for 'switching' someone to walking around with an iBook when it's not in the shop instead of a Toshiba or Dell has become more important than giving that user honest information.

Some would call that marketing, while some would call it the equivalent of sacrificing the user on the altar. Why they would do that is up for debate, but that type of logic is why Mac users seem to make absolutely no sense sometimes except to themselves.

When you've stopped making sense, when your logic has become so foreign that you might as well be speaking a different language to most, you're only going to be servicing the same types who were there when you started. When you lose them, they don't come back, and you don't refresh the ranks because anyone else trying to come in later is just confused because what they're hearing after awhile just stops adding up.

This is the most insidious problem with head drift: you eventually lose trust and credibility to anyone outside your circle. The sky may be blue, and even though you're saying it's blue, what you're saying can't be trusted because you'd never admit to it not being blue if that was the case... so people have to go other places to verify that the sky is indeed blue.

One of the unfortunate side effects of head drift is that the rest of the world is just as confusing to you as you are to it, and that you've gone off the deep end isn't immediately self-evident. And yes, sadly you can be forgiven if images of the current Democratic Party are popping up in your mind.

I like Apple kit, and I know Apple kit, or I wouldn't bang out thoughts on it. Unfortunately anyone who has used Macs for awhile knows that awhile ago, it just stopped being a good idea to pick up a first revision of any Apple product (rev. A) if you actually wanted to be productive with it. This rule is right up with the ones about not buying new Mac hardware right before an Expo.

Personally, I used to wait until a revision of any Apple product would hit before I'd chunk down my hard-earned cash on it (rev. B), but then was burned really badly by that. Really, really badly, and now I wouldn't buy until at least a revision C, and only after it's been in the wild and whatever main problems people were really experiencing have been taken care of.

I do recommend Apple hardware to a lot of people, and I believe there are many people out there that aren't using a Mac that would love it and have their needs met... but not everybody.

Not even all the grandmas, as I've literally seen someone talk his grandma into a Mac, only to see his distress at his grandmother's distress because she now couldn't play cards with her friends on Yahoo and she couldn't access her bank account online because it was a small credit union that used a system that required a special download.

Her grandson hadn't accounted for this, he just knew she primarily did email, banking and web stuff on her computer and thought the Mac had that down pat. In other words, before I point someone at a Mac, I make damn sure I know exactly what they'll be wanting to do.

And no, I wouldn't recommend buying an iMac G5 right now, not until it's had some revisions to fix what may ail it. Yes, even though the threads on Apple's discussion board on the heating problems have a suspicious habit of being deleted, chances are there will be problems.

I'd love for that situation to be different, I really would, and it goes back to an earlier problem I mentioned: x86 just doesn't have this problem. If Dell happens to have a problematic model, you can just pick up a ThinkPad or Toshiba or eMachines or whatever is getting good buzz.

If the Powerbooks are having massive problems, you can theoretically just get an iBook. If the iBooks are having massive problems, you're just screwed, and telling that to someone interested in a Mac just sucks, but you kinda sorta have to if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.

This could really only be solved by Apple improving their quality control, or cloning, and since everyone knows that cloning is the third-rail of Mac politics I'm not even gonna go there.

I know I'm not alone in my finding the 'Mac Web' to be... inadequate. Most of the Mac web has degenerated to press release links with little real information. As far as I can tell, this boils down to three main things:

• 'Enabling behavior' on the part of Mac users
• Some is due to the fact that Apple, for it's size and scope, has insanely high brand recognition.
• Many of the current 'Mac sites' are done by people who love the Mac, but understand very little of what's going on... they got OS9, but OS X is still way more foreign to them than they might care to admit.

Awhile back I was pointed to an article on the Mac web that had a lot of attention, and basically boiled down to saying that if Microsoft pulled Office from the Mac it wouldn't be the end of the world and Apple would get along just fine. Mac users were lapping at it like it was candy.

It was disturbing, as anyone with half a brain knows that if Office was pulled right now, let alone when that editorial came out, the Mac would be dealt a blow that could well be fatal. Not having .DOC compatibility right now is a horrendous blow to anything trying to be mainstream. It's just the way it is.

Unfortunately these Mac users who were sending this to me, and commenting on it in the email groups and usenet weren't really interested in the situation, they wanted to be reassured. There really is a healthy market in pandering, but Mac users have shown themselves to be way more susceptible to it than most, and it's damaging them.

I mention the insanely-high brand recognition, because even if someone recognizes that there's a real problem here, often they consider it an antidote to what might be said about Apple in other places. Basically, a lot of magazines found that using Apple in a tagline can be an easy way to rile some users and get some extra advertising revenue.

You can see some of the same with the iPod; some of the articles are nothing more than blurbs, but because it says iPod in the headline, people click. Not a whole lot you can do about that, news places are going to write about what people have an interest in, even if they don't really have much to say.

Some of the shite is very, very stupid, and yes I got really tired of hearing the term 'beleaguered'. However, much of this is again a circular problem, much of which Mac users bring upon themselves by turning into screaming banshees at anything resembling something they don't like. At one point, it was a badge of pride, and entire clubs were set up around posting an article that was deemed to be anti-Mac and turning their members loose on the author.

In their stupidity, it took way too long for them to realize that some of it was on purpose, just to get the advertising impressions from the controversy. Much of that has died down, with many of the members getting tired, bored, realizing the stupidity of what they were doing, or just losing religion.

Unfortunately, the damage had been done, and in a way things have taken an even scarier turn: the press has seemed to get bored with anything that doesn't have to do with the iPod, and these people have less and less to rant about.

But do make a note of this: when you are asking to be reassured instead of informed, unfortunately that's often what you get.

Over the last few years, we've been conditioned to think 'blogs' whenever we're finding the 'traditional' media inadequate in some way. I really, really like blogs. Around once a month I even sort of pretend I have one.

Unfortunately, blogs aren't a panacea as a replacement for more 'traditional' media, at least so far. The idea of what a blog is and what a blog can be has gotten blurred over the last while, and I've certainly contributed to that, so let's just say personal-publishing.

Assuming you think there is a real problem here, chances are blogs popped into your head as the savior to what ails us... there are some real problems regarding blogs, at least in the context of this conversation:

• Link me
  By their nature, blogs have a habit of being snippet-oriented. It can be really difficult for your average person to figure out what the hell is going on from most blogs, especially when things start going back and forth. In it's more extreme form, it's not uncommon to see a link without any thoughts whatsoever on where they're asking you to go.
• What where why when
  One of the reasons why I did the roundtable earlier was because I had a bitch of a time tracking down what was going on with RSS. Most of the info was spread out in snippets over a few hundred posts over a score of different blogs, so I had to figure many others were just plain lost. See #1.
  
  Blogs have a habit of just not being very good at a top-down view, they're often more the trenches where people are fumbling around. At the very least, they're often missing that all-important starting point that allows you to fumble through the links with half a clue.
• The missing moderates
  Blogs have a tendency to be a bit like politics, in that those who gravitate the most towards doing them often wouldn't necessarily be your ideal choice. In some ways this is really, really good. In other ways it can get really, really bad. Bloggers often have passion to spare, and are often at the extreme ends of views. Like most politics, what's missing is the moderates.
• There just aren't that many Mac blogs
  This might seem to be an odd statement, but in my experience the majority of the best-known 'Mac Blogs' are by developers, including a few shareware developers and Apple developers. Nothing wrong with that, after all I read them... but you can probably tick them off on one hand, there are constraints imposed by their very nature, and there is plenty of room to grow here.
• The privledge [sic] of responsibility
  I wouldn't be surprised if DrunkenBlog had some sort of record for slashdottings of blogs, and at this point I pretty much just remember the first time when it was bright and shiny, and it doesn't help that that first time was the most... extreme.
  
  There's a certain mental crucible you get to go through (on the internet, no one hears you crying), and a certain humor to the situation, and all of your geeky friends are emailing because well, geeks know slashdot and think it's the funniest thing. I remember still being a little numb from my inbox when a friend IM'd:
  
  Them: "So what's it like to be slashdotted?"
  Me: "Kinda makes you wanna spellcheck"
  
  People have a tendency to be much more careful and/or mindful about certain things when they aren't just representing themselves, but rather something else. This can be their livelihood, their company, a project, etc. For a variety of reasons, these aren't things I've had to worry about with the blog, so when I'm posting at 3am and don't spell-check, the worst that can happen is some readers get pissed off enough that they don't come back.
  
  And I'm able to use the term motherfucker as easy as I please, or to go off on a tangent about Russian porn sites which may or may not be applicable to the matter at hand depending on whether or not you believe there's a method to my madness or I'm just drunk. However, there can be value in having to work within the constraints imposed by targeting a broader audience and representing something larger than yourself.
  
  Spell-checking has real value, as does proper grammer, as does fact-checking. Wordiness is a real affliction, along with the tendency to expound towards infinity... and if this site was called MacBlog instead of DrunkenBlog I might be worried about grandma freaking out at my colorful language and imagery while reviewing a product than I am.
  
  There's an old adage in software design that says the last 10% is the hard part. Bugs that come about through testing come to mind, but don't forget polish. There's a reason why many of the OSS projects out there aren't always known for their great documentation and polish (trust me, Apple isn't known for great documentation now either, so it's not the whole story), and a lot of is because those things aren't fun. Someone could be doing something else they'd rather do instead of those things, and they have that luxury because they aren't selling it.

It may seem as though I'm discounting, or dismissing blogs. That isn't the way to take the above, as many of the things mentioned come about because of the inherent strengths personal-publishing holds. There is room for it all, and personally I think there's a bit of a sucking vacuum.

At it's worst, the above is about providing context of where blogs are. At it's best, consider it a call to arms.

The great thing about personal-publishing, at least right now, is that the fiscal cost equates to zero for the vast majority. There are numerous services out there that will get you up and running in less than 10 minutes, for free. All the rest is gravy.

Many of my readers leave great comments, with great info, that are a few sentences-for-context away from being a blog post of their own. Many more of them do the same in forums, etc. There's no reason this information has to exist in one place and can't be fleshed out in others.

If you like the interviews here, I've said how they're done, and there's nothing stopping you from picking up a text editor and contacting the people behind a piece of software you like and doing the same. If they say no, pick another one. All you need is a text editor, an email account, and to conquer your own apathy and fear of rejection.

Ah, but you say you have no time, to which I'd ask you to consider this: Ten people posting one interview a month would mean 120 projects get more attention than they currently are in one year, all getting better at it as they do each successive one. The odds of getting those great nuggets that add to how you think go way, way up, let alone the unintended benefits to the project itself. Like, say, morale.

The interview thing is just an example. Chances are if you're reading this you consume a lot of content, and chances are you aren't saying a lot of what you think. Here's the great thing about this; you don't have to be right, and you don't have to know. Sometimes asking the question is enough, and sometimes the most mundane trips something in someone else's head. Write what you know, and better yet, write what you'd like to know.

You won't be changing the world, but chances are you'll be changing what makes up the Mac Web, and fleshing out that vacuum. Speaking personally, I welcome it.

A long while back, I had a conversation with Steve Wozniak right before Wheelz of Zeus was about to get off the ground. When you stop and think about it, the demands on much of this guy's time is just insane. Just about every geek knows about him, let alone those who consider him to be a personal hero. And trust me, there are worse personal heros to have.

This was during a particularly busy time for him, and I remember getting the sense of him being a bit burned out on some of the aspects of being so well known when you have the kind of heart he has. Trivial things that never occurred to me, like having hundreds of elementary school kids asking to interview him for their school project.

What also didn't occur to me is the lengths, and sacrifices on his time, he goes to to reply to them. Lots of those kids will grow up and forget about the exchange completely, some will think it's the coolest thing for the span of a day, and to some it will mean the world.

It's like Plinko. The point isn't whether or not you have 10 readers or 10,000, it's that you never know if someone will randomly hit it from a search or link and something sparks in their head. In the process, you might find that you change a little too.

You do it because you just never fucking know. If you're lucky, something random might happen that makes your day. You might end up inspiring a teenager with an iBook, or a teenager with an iBook might end up inspiring you.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    December 29, 2004, at 04:21 PM