mahiwaga

Charlie White writes about what he hates about the iPod which is, I guess, praising with faint damnation. First off, the proper colloquial term is “hatorade” or maybe “hatoration” if you want to get pendatic. Get it right.

But, seriously, no one wants FM. FM radio sucks. FM radio is, if you think about it, probably a big part of the reason why iPods got so popular in the first place, because FM radio sucks so bad. I can’t stand that shit. After listening to about 30 minutes worth of commercials, all I get is crap music anyway. If I had to drive from San Diego to L.A. with nothing but FM radio, I think I would kill myself.

Now Bluetooth and/or WiFi would be cool, but the fact of the matter is that there’s no way the RIAA or MPAA would let you get away with it, at least probably not without making a deal about crippling your device with DRM the way that Microsoft is outright maiming the Zune. As long as Apple toes the line and uses their DRM on iTMS (which is far more permissive than any of the other sad, sorry mp3 stores, unless you count the DRMless allofmp3.com whose legal status is, to put it mildly, a little shady), then the RIAA and MPAA can’t say shit about the fact that I can rip the CDs that I still buy into DRMless mp3s (or more exactly, AAC files) even though what they’d really like is for me to have to buy multiple versions of the same song. (Seriously, is the Zune even going to let you play DRMless music?)

I still think that stackable iPods are the way to go. 80 GB not enough for your song collection? Buy another one or two or three and network them via Bluetooth or wifi. And have them appear like one gigantic iPod to your Mac.

Again, I think that the Powers That Be™ would have a total shit-fit if Apple allowed DRMless file sharing, so unless we get rid of these guys, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing a wireless iPod any time soon.

And iTunes: thank God it doesn’t abide by the usual Windows conventions. iTunes on Windows feels almost like iTunes on Mac OS X, and when I switch out of iTunes, I find myself shocked with horror that I’m in XP. As for ease of use, sure, there are people who are so tech-incompetent that you wouldn’t trust them with anything more complicated than a toaster, but as far as seamless integration goes, I’m all for the Mac OS X (or should I say NeXTSTEP?) way of making it “just work.” Plug in your iPod, boom (or blammo), you’re synced, and you didn’t even have to click on anything (except maybe for the stupid system-tray indicator in the taskbar) And if you’d rather manually pick and choose what you sync, more power to you, there is an option to do that. C’mon, compared to the average Windows app, iTunes is a no-brainer.

What will Jobs et al have in store for us in the next 5 years? Who knows. Maybe it’ll be another flop like the Cube (except, wait a minute, I’m typing this on a Mac Mini—surely I’m not the only one who sees the similarities.) Maybe it’ll be vaporware like Copland. Or maybe it’ll be a hyper-advanced technology that no mere mortal will grok, like the Newton (or NeXTSTEP.) Apple has been a loser company for far longer than this particular winning streak, and yet we’ve seen this company come back from the grave. Sure, it’s questionable whether or not Apple would survive sans Steve (and the ‘90s tells us that it probably wouldn’t), but for now, I say milk the guy’s brain for all it’s worth.

It is interesting that of all the home computer companies of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, really only two have survived: Apple and IBM (requiescat in pacem, Commodore, Tandy, Atari) and IBM doesn’t make home computers any more, not even Thinkpads. (And interestingly, both have survived the juggernaut known as Microsoft Windows by jumping on the UNIX bandwagon—or I guess in the case of IBM, never letting go of it in the first place.) Five years ago I was still on x86 hardware running RedHat 7.0. I wonder where I’ll be five years from now?

I just read this post about depression by alison on bluishorange, and I am so there.

The scene is so familiar, and I’ve wondered for eleven years now what my alter ego in a parallel universe would’ve accomplished without this cloud of serious mental illness. I can’t even imagine. Sometimes, when I’m not wallowing in self-pity, when I can actually think clearly, I’m amazed that I’ve even gotten as far as I’ve gotten.

Last Friday night was bearable, although I did go straight to bed at 7 p.m., and I didn’t wake up until 8 a.m. the next morning. For the past month I’ve been sitting in this fog, not wanting to deal with the world. All I did was drag myself out of bed, go to work, come home, and then go back to bed. Shampoo, wash, and repeat. Thank God I like my job, otherwise my existence would be utterly pointless and it would also be a living hell.

Saturday I resolved to actually clean my apartment, which has been in a state of regretful squalor for a good three months now. My will, unfortunately, waned, and I decided to go to sleep at 11 p.m., despite knowing there was a party downtown, and that other people were probably having fun with their lives.

But I couldn’t actually fall asleep. Having not spoken to a single soul for 28 hours straight had really gotten to me, and I was feeling pretty shitty, so I got out of bed and drove to L.A. to my parents’ house. I got there at 12:45 a.m. and no one was awake. But like I said, at least the dog is always happy to see me. I finally got to sleep and felt much better in the morning. I can’t tell you what changed in my mood. It’s all very perplexing to me.

E randomly called me up today and we somehow got to the topic of death. (Lovely stuff.) Now I know I shouldn’t be one to complain because his dad was actually killed, but I think that I’ve been having a hard time dealing with my dad’s heart attack a year and a half ago. I mean, he’s doing great now, and he’s past that critical juncture of 1 year. The 1 year survival rate of having an infarct in the territory supplied by the left anterior descending coronary artery is pretty poor, particularly when you present with new-onset heart failure, but my dad has always been good at beating the odds. But I think it made my already fragile world even more tenuous.

B and S and E have all asked me if I’m dating anyone, and the answer, as always, is no. Part of it is that I’ve been pretty much emotionally maimed and mutilated and I don’t remember how to trust other people. Let me tell you, this makes it hard to form meaningful relationships with people you meet. It’s really easy for me to see signs of rejection, even if they aren’t really there. My first reaction to anything negative in a nascent friendship is to retreat and disappear.

Yes, the past two years have been kind of lonely. Just a little.

But the other part is that I haven’t been as aggressive about going out as I used to be. My oldest friend likes to use the statistical argument: meet enough women, however randomly, and you’re bound to meet someone who likes you eventually. It may take decades, but I know that he’s right. I tried applying this argument to my life in med school, but, as you can see, it didn’t really work out. I just need to meet more people, really, but I don’t even want to do that any more.

I find myself going home to visit my parents a lot.

The thing that I learned that has really messed me up badly is that, no matter how much someone loves you, ultimately, in the end, everyone leaves.

S tried to argue with me that it’s different if you die, in contrast to, say, betrayal, or moving halfway across the country, but it all adds up to the same thing. When everything is fleeting and temporary, where is the sense in trusting in anything? (Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been betrayed, but what are you going to do?)

So on Sunday, I went to watch “The Prestige” with my dad. My dad is a movie fiend. He loves going to the theater, even to watch shitty movies. He tells me he’s been obsessed with the silver screen since he was in high school, sometimes ditching class to watch in the fetid, non-air-conditioned theaters in the Philippines, spending a weeks’ worth of lunch money just for the treat, even if it mean being hungry for the next seven days. It’s been a while since I watched a movie with him.

As an aside, I’ve liked every Christopher Nolan movie that I’ve watched. The bizarre twists in everything he’s done just leave me in awe. He’s got M. Night Shymalan beat hands down when it comes to surprise endings. But I won’t talk about the movie here, except that it’s hardcore steampunk, dealing with electromagnetism and Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws and even the ethics of cloning (all right, I lied, that’s a big-time spoiler right there, try not to remember it.) Tesla is my hero. Boo for Edison.

But what I’m saying, I guess, is that we’re all going to die sometime, and will you feel like you’ve spent enough time with your loved ones when that time comes?

I’ve dealt with too much death, I guess. There is something perverse about watching the unfolding drama of a human being who is dying. There is something horrifically perverse about watching it multiple times. There is something awful and grotesque about having to deal with death almost every single day because it’s part of your job description, and you almost—almost—become blasé about it, except that you’ll be thinking about it for years on end, remembering their names etched onto your brains. The terrible grandeur, the horrifying magnificence of it all makes me want to puke sometimes.

And so, with this as a backdrop, I wend my way through life almost deliberately alone (except, you know what? I don’t want to be alone) because anyone that I grow to love will always abandon me. Boo-hoo.

That, I think, is the heart of my pathology. So maybe I’ve made some headway with identifying the problem. God only knows how the hell I’m going to succeed in fixing it. That is, if something like this is even fixable.

I think of having that MI one day alone in some squalid one bedroom apartment, ready to go work, going face down in the bathroom. I think about how long it will take before someone will realize that I’m gone, truly and utterly gone. I think about dying alone, and part of me tries to get used to it, because one day it will happen, but most of me just becomes hysterical and insanely depressed at the thought.

There have been days, and sometimes weeks, which I’d rather just sit out and maybe even disappear completely from. But I guess it’s that thought—that life is so goddamn fragile—that makes me grudgingly get out of bed and go to work. Because, if nothing else in my life has any significance whatsoever, at least I like my job, and maybe I even do a little good sometimes.

I stumbled upon this post about NeXTSTEP (the OS that Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple way back when), which basically already had almost all the features of Mac OS X. Which makes sense. Mac OS (what is now known as Classic) was an evolutionary dead-end with regards to operating systems, about on par with Windows 3.11. And while Apple worked on the vaporware that was known as Copland and even while they flirted with BeOS (what could’ve been, huh?), NeXT was already there and was already a decently established development environment. Hell, it had already spawned an Open Source project (GNUstep) before Apple finally decided to get their shit together and bring Steve back.

I think back to how primitive the computer I used back then was. It was a 386/33 with 32 MB of RAM running MS-DOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0. Windows was crap. I used DOS mostly. It was closer to the good old days of playing around with my Commodore 64 except with no sound, although VGA graphics with 256 colors was pretty sweet. I managed to learn Pascal using Borland software. Long before the Internet had blossomed, I connected to BBSes with a 2400 bps modem (8 times faster than the 300 baud modem I had on my Commodore 64) I sent e-mail via UUCP and read news on FIDOnet using packet readers.

And so it shocks me that Mac OS X functionality was already extant. Granted, NeXT cubes cost nearly as much as a new car (and that 386/33 cost almost $2,000!) and the 80386 was just the first processor that Intel made that could actually run UNIX (although it would probably be excruciatingly painful to do so.) Clearly, NeXT was not making computers for the home.

But fast-forward back to the present. Where is the innovation from Apple with regards to OS design? Aqua is ultimately just a more polished, “lickable” version of the NeXTSTEP GUI, and, functionality wise, Mail.app hasn’t really changed much. WYSIWYG is taken for granted. Mac OS X basically inherited NeXTSTEP’s (and UNIX’s) capabilities of playing nice in a multi-protocol network environment. (Even to this day, I end up weeping in agony whenever I try to setup Shared folders on Windows.) XCode (neé Project Builder) already existed.

The thing is, Apple makes home computers. Sure, you can run Mac OS X on an XServe in an enterprise environement, but most people are probably using an iMac, or a Powerbook, or a Mac Mini at home. This is where Apple differs from NeXT significantly. You don’t have to mortgage your home or sacrifice your firstborn to own a Mac these days. They are pretty much similarly priced to their x86 brand name counterparts.

I think the seeds of some serious innovation are already in place, though. The new high concept is the hypervisor. Imagine running multiple OSes natively on one machine. Forget about dual booting. Consider running Vista the way you can run Mac OS Classic or XDarwin. Who needs a separate gaming machine, unless you want a console (which is probably the smarter move anyways. Who still plays games on their computer, for God’s sake?!) And thanks to Intel, Apple might have a slight head start in this race. Virtualization is built into the next generation of Intel chips. By the time these chips become ubiquitous and cheap, I bet you Apple will have a working hypervisor built in to their OS, just a click away from being able to run Windows while still having a UNIX-based, nearly uncrashable OS running the show at the same time.

This is all geekery, I understand. Virtualization probably doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to the non-geek. But I think it’s going to be big.

In any case, Apple has made some innovations when it comes to hardware. Think wi-fi (where would we be without AirPort?) Think real plug-and-play and Firewire. And while the following is something only a geek could love, Apple has finally modernized the x86 platform, freeing it from the shackles of the ‘80s era “real mode” that was in vogue when the 80286 came out, and from the ancient, decrepit tyranny of BIOS, a sad relic of the uncontested reign of IBM, still unbetrayed by Microsoft. GPT: no more having to care about the difference between primary and extended partitions. EFI: no more having to care if you have an IRQ free for that PCI card your adding, or of hardware conflicting with each other.

Apple may not be making big dramatic strides that the average non-geek can appreciate, but they are making steady progress. Better that than having to wait six years for the next marginal upgrade.