Entries from April 2008 ↓

Yeah:

Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.

-Rudolf Arnheim, psychologist and author (1904-2007)

The proprietor of iWonder Designs — programmer extraordinaire, accomplished artist, and my brother — just redid his site, and it’s drop-dead gorgeous. Not standard Web 2.0 gorgeous, with the giant buttons and the rounded corners and the pastel palettes — no. Idiosyncratically, oddly gorgeous, a lovely-strange melange of wanted poster and tea-stained tablecloth and ancient parchment and samurai sunrise, and it just works.

Anyway. Check it out.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. My hard drive just crashed.

But not just crashed. Crashed and took two weeks of data with it. Including my taxes (unsent, of course) and a story I was actually managing to make some progress on, a rare thing in these fallow post-Clarion days.

And the killer is, I could have stopped it. Not the hard drive crash, which is an unavoidable hazard of the trade (although this is the second catastrophic failure in the last three months, god damn it Apple), but the data loss. Over the past year, I’ve cobbled together a backup strategy that seemed, to me, pathologically anal. It includes:

1. Full, bootable backups to two separate hard drives.
2. Incremental backups to a Time Machine drive.
3. A remote subversion repository for the stories
4. A remote IMAP respository for my email

And yet I still lost data. Why? Because I — idiotically — haven’t actually used any of these lovely mechanisms for a long time. Haven’t done a full backup for a month. Haven’t plugged in for a Time Machine backup in two weeks. Haven’t been checking my stuff into subversion. About the only thing I have been doing is using my IMAP store, and that’s only because there’s nothing to actually do there. The protocol does it all for you, automatically.

I guess that’s the problem here. It’s not that my backup strategy is insufficiently anal: it’s insufficiently automated. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 37 years on earth, it’s that it never pays to count on me. I have this habit of letting me down.

So how to automate? Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Get that new Time Capsule router, which does incremental backups over your home network network, automatically and wirelessly.
2. Bite the bullet and subscribe to .Mac. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about its hyper-shitty WebDAV-based filesystem, but it does give you automated remote backups wherever you are, and it integrates effortlessly with Leopard. Also, it’s perdy.
3. Make TextMate automatically commit to Subversion when you close a file. Not sure how to do this, but TextMate seems infinitely customizable. There has to be a way.
4. Burn CD backups of static, archival data — old stories, financial data, etc.
5. Set up repeating alarms that prompt me to do full weekly backups, with SuperDuper¹. This is the weakest link in the strategy, as it requires me to actually do something — but I tend to respond to alarms.

Anything I’m missing? That seems like it should cover it, as long as I’m at least occasionally plugged into a network. It has to, really. Hard drives expire with alarming regularity in our household, and every iota of lost data is just searingly painful. I love my data.

I went to the Apple Store this morning to see if they could fix my damaged iPhone, and was rebuffed — but not for the reasons I expected.

So I got home, brooded a bit, then wrote a letter to Steve Jobs, bitching about the whole experience. Which is mildly ridiculous, of course. In the larger context of Bad Things That Can Happen, this is microscopically small potatoes. And the phone still works fine. And really I’m incredibly lucky to have one at all. So I have no reason to bitch.

But I’m bitching anyway. This really rankles, and it rankles at a level that transcends the experience itself. So I wrote the letter.

Now I just need to get up the nerve to send it. One does not anger Lord Jobs lightly.

Anyway. Here it is:

Dear Mr Jobs:

I have been a wild-eyed Apple enthusiast since around 2001, when I got my first Mac — a Titanium Powerbook — and fell instantly, ardently in love. And that love hasn’t waned in the past seven years. Really, it hasn’t had a chance to. Every time I think you guys can’t possibly do anything cooler, you do — tiny Nanos, perfect Macbooks, beautiful Airs, paradigm-changing iPhones — all rolling out of Cupertino in a steady stream of unadulterated awesomeness.

So I feel kind of bad that my first letter to you ever is a complaint, and such a minor complaint at that. But it is, I’m afraid.

A couple of months ago I came into possession of a beautiful iPhone. I’ve been slobbering over this lovely piece of machinery since you first announced it, early last year, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Beautiful, elegant, effortless. Everything a revelation, everything a delight. It still takes my breath away, every time I pull it out of my pocket.

And then, last week, I dropped it. My heart stopped. I took a moment to curse the gods for their cruelty, and then myself, and then the concrete floor for not getting the hell out of the way when it saw the phone coming. And then I picked it up — and, found it, miraculously, undamaged. Not a scratch. Everything working perfectly.

And so I breathed a sigh of relief, quickly apologized to all the gods I’d cursed — no hard feelings, ok deities? — and went about my business.

Three days later, a crack developed on the screen.

I wept, re-cursed the gods, then went into my local Apple Store, hangdog, and asked how much it would cost to repair the damage.

The Genius I spoke with — friendly, pleasant, competent — said that they would replace it, for free, since there wasn’t any apparent damage to the rest of the phone. I exulted, uncursed the gods, and went off to my corner to wait for him to process the transaction.

But then he called me back, and apologetically told me that he couldn’t replace it after all. I’m not using AT&T — I’m a T-Mobile customer — and so he couldn’t, as a matter of policy, do anything with the phone. I offered to pay for the repair, but he shook his head. Unless there’s an AT&T account attached, Apple can’t help me.

I walked out of the store as I’d walked in — hangdog, crack intact, with absolutely no recourse.

Apple’s insistence that everyone use AT&T with the iPhone has always bewildered me. There’s nothing about the device that should pin it to one carrier, and the notion of inextricably tying hardware to online services is a terrible, terrible policy that the carriers have used to their advantage — and the consumer’s detriment — for far too long. Think about the world that would have been if the same ruinous policy had been foisted on us early in the history of the computer industry — we’d all be buying computers that forced us to use Compuserve, or Prodigy, or MSN, or — god help us — AOL.

The iPhone is a paradigm-changer — the very first usable smartphone. And more than usable. It’s an absolute revolution. It’s what we’ve been waiting for for years. So why not extend the revolution to actual policy, as well? Why not break the shackles that have held us these corrupt carriers for so long?

But leaving all that aside for a moment — of all the carriers to tie the iPhone to, AT&T is the worst that Apple could have picked. It’s not just their substandard service — that I could live with. What I can’t live with is AT&T’s cavalier surrender of their customer’s privacy to to government and industry. From NSA bugs implanted directly into switching stations, to proposals to monitor every packet that passes through their lines at the behest of the entertainment industry, they have demonstrated an unparalleled eagerness to betray their customers’ trust, at every turn.

I understand that many people don’t care about this, or don’t care about it enough to deter them from going with AT&T. Fair enough. But many people do — I do. And I can’t stomach the thought of giving that company any of my money, much less committing my data to their compromised pipes. Not even for an iPhone.

So, after I got my phone, I unlocked it, and started using it with T-Mobile. This is my great sin — wanting to use this beautiful piece of hardware with a service that I can believe in, and trust. And for this sin, I’m relegated to second-class status. My phone is an untouchable now, stranded in this nether-world between what’s allowed and what’s reasonable.

The obvious answer here, then, is DON’T BUY AN IPHONE, DUDE! And that’s right, of course. I am under no obligation to purchase this miraculous piece of hardware, and Apple is under no obligation to support me if I choose to use it in ways it deems inappropriate.

Fine. But not the point, I’d argue.

I think the reason that I — and people like me — are so zealously attached to Apple isn’t because you guys make beautiful machines, or write lovely software, or have miraculously good customer service. It’s all that, of course. But, fundamentally, it’s the aesthetic that attracts me — this manic devotion to the user, to providing a satisfying experience on every conceivable dimension.

But that’s not quite it either. Apple is doing more than trying to please its customers — it’s working toward some inchoate ideal of perfection, a kind of shadowy Platonic form, and is unwilling to compromise anything to get there.

Ok, a little overboard, maybe — but that’s more or less how I feel. Apple appeals to the bits of my lizard brain that respond to that kind of passion and purity. But when Apple does something like this — turning its backs on legitimate customers who have done nothing worse than go the extra mile to use their products — it subverts the whole thing. It’s not just that it’s screwing us over. It’s worse than that. It’s poisoning the beautiful ideal, in a fundamental way.

So that’s my beef. Take it as you will. My addiction to all things Apple continues unabated. I’ve already begun to feel the unmistakable heartpangs of pure love whenever I see an Air, so I’m clearly just as smitten as ever. But there’s a fly in the ointment now. It doesn’t make me angry, or irate, or even annoyed. This is, after all, a very minor thing. But it does make me sad.

Anyway. I hope you guys are planning to drop this exclusivity thing, and soon. It just doesn’t belong.

Huzzah, felicity, and joy … Fafblog is back:

“Screw this dump!” says Giblets. “This universe is old and fat and smells like smelling and Giblets is busting out!”

“Should we go over the wall or take the tunnel?” says me. I been diggin a tunnel.

“Nuts to the tunnel!” says Giblets. “What we do is we make like we’re sick. Then when God comes in to check on us we punch im in the liver an run out the door!”

“They’ll be on the lookout so we’re gonna need disguises if we wanna make it the resta the way,” says me. “If we bop Europe an Australia on the head we can sneak out in their continent costumes!”

The internets may now resume normal operations.