|
|
 |
taliesin's log (voices of women)
|
mercredi 15 février 2006
|
|
| |
At the weekend, I had a roundabout discussion -- whose circular nature I don't blame on the other person, but a painful ability we share to tell one another precisely the same things in different ways -- on the unnecessarily complicated nature of iPods.
She has no interest in being like me and skim-reading several books that explain, like Apple can't be bothered to do in its packaged paperwork, why it's sometimes necessary to press two buttons at once and stuff like this. See below for more technical stuff and the helpful iPod item mentioned on the front page.
What my equally riled conversation partner didn't tell me (and vice versa) came from a woman at work today.
Late last year, Sarah sustained a nasty but invisible, in its latter phases, wrench and break to her wrist, a prominently exposed part of her. The protest was that many iPod users find her invisible permanently. She's absolutely right.
I see this myself every day, especially now they're everywhere -- not just iPods but all manner of music players where you'd believe the owners shove the earphones into their eyes. On buses, on pavements and in trains, they are constantly banging into people.
And, as my colleague pointed out, "It hurts! They're off in their own little worlds and don't give a damn about anyone else."
Of course, I don't do this very often since I'm far too busy avoiding people anyway, the way one does after living among abominable masses of them for 50 years and observing what they get down to in their dealings with one another.
Since we live in an era where Apple is no longer what it used to be and has gone down-market making fashion accessories I don't consider to be "real" iPods at absurdly high prices for what you get, is ever stingier with manuals and extra parts in the box, and then charges another fortune for what the firm itself now calls "accessories" -- like a Firewire cable for the many people who don't have USB 2.0 and don't want it any time soon -- what do you expect?
The "Apple is more like Micro$oft every day" argument bores me now because of the truth in it, but given the American liking for lawsuits, I can see the day coming when people who get whacked as often as my colleague file a mass action against Steve. What's problematic, however, is the potential defence argument that they're blind before they even get their iPods.
It's frankly disturbing to see how many men in Paris, among Apple's recent acquisitions who have their wires dangling as dangerously and stupidly as in the advertisements, haul pink Minis out of their pocket.
Pink!
I don't wish to know what's on their playlists... Moreover, who seriously wants to watch movies on a screen the size of a decorative postage stamp?
I'm not doing that to my eyes.
I was going to write about some splendid podcasts and why the French have decided that Canada is today one of the most interesting musical poles in the world, but I saw two smart suits with pink Minis on the way home and it turned my stomach.
After more listening to Metric, I'm going to count the number of Canadian women on my real iPod, since come to think of it, there are a lot of them.
Later.
I had a better idea, given the frame of mind. I wondered how many poor suckers (people who have yet to download a dodgy new version of iTunes without checking first, etc.) -- might have penned odes to their iPods. The answer is terrifying.
One I did like, though, by Maura, a long-time user.
She calls it an ode, but really it was a 15-entry list of brief reasons at notmyself.com on "why my iPod is better than a boyfriend". Somebody else's ode disagrees with her first three, but the closing bunch were penned with a golden nib...
For those made mad by manuals
It's very irritating trying to get a recalcitrant iPod to "mount" (that is, show up on your computer so you can inspect it) when the various methods provided by Apple -- if not in the box -- fail to work, so you have to go off on a long hunt for alternative means, probably learning more technology on the way than you'd like.
The "usual risk warning" is that now iTunes 6.0.3 is out ... only recently out, unless I've been on the moon ... take care! Regulars will know I never install a new version without reading about it first. My software download panel opened and offered it to me as I moved this entry, I chose the "download only" option and won't upgrade until I know it is safe. Why the uninstalled package that went where it should for now has an October date on it, don't ask me. I've not yet looked at the specialist sites.
Update at Feb 20: iTunes 6.0.3 works fine for me and apparently has a green light from friends with Windows XP.
For fellow Mac users, however, your Disk Utility may malfunction after the iTunes upgrade. If it does, see MacFixit. They've published post-upgrade solutions to this problem.
I'm deeply pissed off with trying to produce a brief summary of remedies for the general good when the answers are scattered everywhere and by the time you've got the key points in one place, the models in question are no longer on the market.
A lot of people don't have time to wade through specialist sites, even the fine ones. One service was done to all Mac users at least by writer John Rizzo and the O'Reilly people on my front page when they made the 15-page 'iPod Annoyances' section of a book called 'Mac Annoyances' available free to everybody. Since they did this themselves, I trust I'm breaking no rules by putting that .pdf file somewhere you can simply click on the link to fetch, like they did.
Some of the info in it is useful to PC and Windows users. You can either click to open it in another browser window if yours reads .pdf files as most do nowadays, or right-click to download it to your own machine (and if that browser happens to be Internet Explorer, you have only yourself to blame, not me, for the mangled presentation it gives part of my site, like it does others that conform to internationally accepted standards and not the ones Microsoft has invented. Do get Firefox -- or almost any other modern browser -- instead, if you'd rather live in the current century, not the stone age of home computing. It only takes 10 minutes to install).
My own iPod contribution may get me riled when it seems worthless until I remember that, apart from the friends for whom I began it, there are a lot of you out there with iPods that aren't the most recent types. Even if they are, basic rules still apply for keeping them happy. The happy day I've got as much of that information as I can into one place clearly -- and I don't know when that will be, since it's no longer a priority, but a dossier I just add to from time to time -- I'll likely be able to do just the same with it: bung it on my .Mac disk and tell you it's there.
An even longer-term project is to move all such technically tedious and Mac-related entries out of The Orchard, where I like it little more than on the front page, but I'd rather go on writing about music now than spend my time creating a new log category for stuff the manufacturers should have done in the first place.
10:43:33 PM 
|
|
|
|
|
mardi 14 février 2006
|
|
| |
The episode called 'A Rat's Tail' and other entries posted before a month's writing disappeared are no more lost than the musicians whose 'Voices' vanished at the weekend, but I've decided to sit on them for a while.
I don't know how to reinstate them where they belong in the diary of The Orchard without the risk of again messing up the link between log files on my machine and their counterparts the other side of the Atlantic.
So I'll either wait for a new "peg" -- that's newsroom jargon for non-feature stories that need one in the chronicling of world and personal events -- or rewrite them to be "timeless", which in essence they are.
February has brought its new mood, anyway. It usually takes me a little while to know how to title the monthly archive. For this one, 'The Janus month' seems more appropriate to me than it did to the Romans.
True, the turn of the year is a period when people look back on the past one, make resolutions and express wishes, hopes and sometimes fears for the coming one. In Paris, however, when you study faces, watch body language and hear what friends and acquaintances say when you greet them and ask after their well-being, I really think Lee summed it up: "February is brutal."
The same sullen weariness must affect lots of northern cities, where any talk of spring seems to concern a season that's still such a long way away. Yet on balconies and in parks and window-boxes like mine, something's happening. We town-dwellers may not always feel it, but the plants do, you can see it. My geraniums produced lots of buds last week. They're just small ones, but in them I naturally find an analogy for what goes on in our heads and hearts: decisions in the making, ideas new to us and life choices.
That's why I've called it 'the Janus month'.
8:47:22 PM
|
|
|
|
|
samedi 11 février 2006
|
|
| |
Before It* happened, this entry told you about a bout of the blues.
So what? I remarked at the time. That's life.
But that depressed mood came so suddenly, without obvious cause or even one that might have called for some investigative honesty with myself, I didn't think those blues were mine. The odd feeling of picking up somebody else's downer was so strong it seemed preferable to be taken for a lunatic than avoid asking "possible suspects", people with whom I know there's an empathetic rapport.
So I did.
It got me nowhere. All I can say is that one of those people was unusually out of reach (and nobody said: "You're an idiot. It's about you and you won't admit it"). If it was somebody else, maybe the answer's yet to come.
A work colleague knows my quirks well enough merely to have remarked when I mentioned it, "Oh well, one more for your X-Files."
I'm making a note of this not for anyone's enlightenment but since The Orchard is the closest I'll ever get to a diary and unless it concerns someone else's secrets, the old days of the log taught me that hiding anything is a waste of time.
The only notebook I keep is the music pad that goes everywhere to be scribbled on in the most uncomfortable places. That's my 'Cryptonomicon', where a new iMix list started today with three musicians and their 'Sung heros', some of whom could be any of us.
The 'Tough Love' list is finished, but now the songs need to be put in the right order and February's the month for it. It's such a long haul.
Others in hand include 'Wising Up', 'Transformations,' and one with a working title that sounds too silly to tell you but shall when I come up with a better name. I also want to do an iMix of songs about parents and their kids. And there's a "chill-out" list too, while I wouldn't be me without music for love-making mixes.
It's been a long time since I've embarked on a month of February without wanting to go into hibernation...
When this entry made its first appearance, Cindy said:
"With the weather (at least here, I'm not so sure about there) gone absolutely bonkers -- Spring instead of Winter, warmth instead of ice-cold, I think that many things are off-axis lately.
"In your case, perhaps it's from having experienced some terrific highs and it was a moment when you needed to have that low ... and hey, it didn't last, so that's a good thing. Sure, we hate it when it happens, but I think that saying 'you can't have the highs without the lows' has some truth to it."
Lee was blunt:
"February is brutal.
"I want to keep that 'One more for your X-files' thing in my mind, and pull it out when appropriate. I like that."
All I could add was:
"It's neither the lows that bother me any more nor the seasons being out of whack, since we need to put up with the latter and each do our bit to try to avoid warming up the world.
"What got me writing was just the feeling, very hard to describe, that someone else's state of mind entered my own. Maybe it was just me, but when I'm down these days I usually know exactly why.
"Shrug..."
Well, I ain't shrugging now.
*It happened yesterday. If you wonder what happened to every log entry after the 'Piano Blues' one of January 9, you're not alone -- but I may never know exactly what *It was.
11:34:37 AM
|
|
|
|
|
© Copyright
2007
taliesin.
Last update:
21/09/07; 22:23:50. |
|
|
|
