We Should See Other Blogs

I’m a bit of an Android fan. I like the customization ability, the tweak-ness of it. I like that there it has its own “distros” like CyanogenMod (full disclosure, I run CM7 and love it). I’m (hopefully) not a typical Android user, though. I’m what they call a super-user, or an early adopter, or a technology maven. A one-man Lifehacker. Be that as it may.

The worst thing that ever happened to the personal computing market is Microsoft. Their monopoly (however it developed) changed the market, and Microsoft itself. It changed the market by inhibiting innovation (real innovation, not slapping a shiny new interface on an old hunk of crap) and preventing many potentially wonderful products from catching on. Microsoft’s monopoly made it into a giant bureaucracy that could only produce good, solid products by painstaking evolution (Microsoft Excel being one of these products) or by buying startups. Google is on its way to becoming this sort of lumbering giant as well.

Look, instead, at the console market. There are a bunch (and have almost always been a bunch) of competing consoles. And they’ve figured out how to gain the lead, to gain mindshare: rapid, disruptive innovation. Not just the generative, evolutionary advance of processing power and better graphics (boring!) but new game-play modes and methods (interesting!). The Wii and Kinect are examples of the latter. The PS3 is an example of the former. The Playstation team needs to (and hopefully knows it needs to) do something, anything wonderful and different to gain that mind-share back. Otherwise they’ll lose their place in the market. While everyone else is having fun making a fool of themselves with a motion-sensing controller or an infrared camera and some neat AI… PS3 owners can sit in the dark and shoot every-more-realistic zombies.

I don’t ever want Android to become like Windows. I don’t want it to have 90% market share. I want it to do well (after all, getting stuck in Apple’s gilded prison shouldn’t be something anyone wants), but not too well. I want Android to excel, but not dominate. There’s a place at the table for everyone. As there should be. Apple can have their shiny, crippled products for those who want such things. Android can have its tweak-able, customizable guts and interface. WebOS can have… whatever it has. And Windows Phone can pick up the scraps that fall off the table.

This way there’s competition. This way there’s innovation, disruptive change. This way there’s benefit for the customer, no matter whose customer you might be.

I’m sick to death of evangelists. They’re the worst examples of every faith’s pushiest and showiest and emptiest people. Yes, I’m working from a stereotype. Deal with it.

I’ve been evangelised by Jehovah’s Witnesses (the worst of the religious lot, because they bring their crap to your door), Mormons, Muslims, Fundamentalist Christians, and Open Sourcerers.

All of these people hold pretty important ideas about God, life, freedom of information, morality, and other important topics. There’s something worth discussing (if you wanted to, which I don’t) there. How you see God can change your life. Information and the freedom thereof can change an entire culture. Your morality can change your actions. These are Big Ideas, worth of discussion, debate, and furious examination.

Then there are the worst of the worst: Apple zealots.

Where religions like Buddhism and philosophies like information freedom contain important ideas (whether you agree with the ideas or not, at least agree that they’re important), Apple zealots have a shiny toy that makes them happy. They’re like children with a new colour of block showing it off to all the other children, unaware that it’s just another block and they’re just a bunch of blockheads.

There’s this pseudo-religious quality to their conversion experiences. Their Stockholm-Syndrome-like devotion to a company run by people who rightly deserve to be called a bunch of assholes.

That would all be okay (people like things and that’s fine up to a point), but when I’m having a conversation about technology and you interrupt with your HAY LOOK I’VE BOUGHT AN IPHONE ITS SO GRATE IT HAS GAMES LOL, or your MY MAC NEVER CRASHES OR GETS VIRUSES AND IT CURED MY GOUT AND ENLIVENED MY SEX LIFE, I feel justified in comparing you to one of those retarded little yappy dogs that won’t. ever. shut. up!

Look. I understand great design can make people feel marginally better about things. I understand that being part of the club makes you feel good. I get it. I really do.

But it’s just a thing. A THING. Not a religious experience, not a drug, not a miraculous life-changing device that will forever alter your destiny. It’s just a thing.

If it makes you happy, okay. No problem. It’s a little weird that you like a thing that much, and you should probably re-examine your crass, materialistic worldview, but whatever. Just don’t make it my problem by yapping about it in public as if you had done something important like cured AIDS or made world peace (both of which I could probably tolerate you evangelising, thankyouverymuch).

You went to a place, bought a thing, and now you’re telling people about how it changed your life. Let’s go all C.S. Lewis for a second here. Either you’re lying, in which case you’re pathetic for trying to lie about something so trivial; or you’re crazy, in which case you’re pathetic because you’re crazy; or you’re telling the truth, in which case you’re pathetic AND your life is pathetic for being changeable by such a tiny, worthless item of merchandise.

Here’s the takeaway: Keep your electronics fetish to yourself. Keep your life-changing bull-hockey on the other size of your teeth. Don’t reveal yourself in all your misery to those who are able and willing to mock you.

• I feel like I just can’t get anything done at work. I can’t make promises to customers more than two days in the future, because I’m not really in control of production. If anything, I make suggestions and those higher up than me decide to ignore them. Honestly, it’s incredibly depressing, and I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying; it’d be a lot easier and probably a lot better if I didn’t. Because if I can, every day, just, almost get what I need to get done done, I’ll never get any help. I’ll just get a snowballing workload. I’ll be my own Katamari Damacy, except at the end of the day I won’t be creating new stars. I’ll be the hollowed, burnt-out husk of one.
• I have to say that technology has taught me at least a few lessons. In view of the price drop on iPhones yesterday, in view of any version of Windows’ security and functionality before at least two service packs, and in view of the data one can lose using alpha software, I have learned that Early adopters are idiots. Sadly, early adoption is something of an internal mechanism, a natural function that can hardly be denied. Or you could put it this way: I’m an idiot, too.
• I’ll end my sentences with prepositions if I bloody well please, thank you and please come again.
• Don’t assume that anyone you know is pronouncing a Japanese word or phrase properly. According to my research, there’s about a 92% chance a Japanese person would laugh at them. Politely. On the inside.
• I like the taste of creamer. I hate myself for this.
• Interesting thought here. According to classical evolutionary biology (forgive me for accepting the premise for a moment), there is no over-arching design in evolution, there is no God meddling in the process, there is only survival of the fittest. But then, there’s no such thing of survival of the fittest, is there? It doesn’t really matter if a method of adaptation is optimal or not, only that it sucks the least. So maybe it should be Survival of the Least Awful, eh? The point is this: evolution isn’t a linear progression and you can’t say something is “better” in any real sense because it is more complex. Also, evolution can’t be said in any meaningful sense to select for truth. (Consider how your eye vibrates, for instance, and the images it ignores, it simply deletes in those moments; consider how very little of actual reality we can see with our eyes, all the spectrum that’s simply invisible to us; consider that there’s little reason that there aren’t ten senses and we’ve only evolved into five.) In that sense, we could, technically, be living in a dream world that doesn’t actually represent reality, if that dream world somehow gave humans an evolutionary advantage. What does this all mean? Well, let me put it this way: if evolution doesn’t select for truth, merely for adequacy, and your brain is a product of that process, how can you say evolution is true, since it’s a product of said possibly faulty brains? Thus you can reasonably say that classical evolution is self-defeating; any evolutionist that trusts his own reasoning tacitly believes at least some sort of a guiding force
• With that out of my head, I can finally get back to my sea of paperwork. Yay!