Siri-all.

I just realized that whenever I talk to my phone, I refer to it as “Siri” even when it is not doing Siri stuff. Like I was just listening to NPR and the reporter said something I thought was stupid and I said, “Well Siri, that's just stupid.”

So I guess that now - in my brain - “Siri” does all the things my phone does. Which means that the ghost of Steve Jobs lives in my subconscious now, which I am not crazy happy about, but even I have to admit that is some really well done brand inception-ing.

Surely I am not the only person experiencing this, right?

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A Quick First-World-Problems Technology Rant.

This is going to be a quick first-world-problems technology rant. I will try to keep it short.

So I have an iPhone, and its great. I have an Apple TV, and its great. These things are great as long as they’re working.

Last year I had an iPhone 5 and it was great. I really liked it. I also have a Chromebook, which I genuinely love. People make fun of me, but I love it deep down in my heart; it is simple. It updates itself, it turns on right away. It doesn’t weigh very much. It is integrated with Google Drive and for awhile last year everything was great. I had the Drive app on my iPhone 5 and I could write something on my Chromebook and throughout the day I could go through and edit it on my phone. Everything just worked.

Then my iPhone 5 stopped charging. I tried a bunch of stuff and then went to the Apple store and the dude there looked at it and told me the pins were dead and that once the battery died, the phone would be a brick. There was, apparently no solution. So then I went to Sprint and the dude there was GREAT, he found a way to renew my contract (at a lower price) and get me a new iPhone. That dude was awesome.

But then I had the new phone and for some reason all the memory was eaten up, somehow, by the old phone and I couldn’t back up the new phone or run the new upgrade (the new upgrade on my BRAND NEW PHONE). I read all of the internet trying to fix this, but it didn’t matter. Finally Apple wore me down and I bought the goddamn additional storage package for $0.99 a month and I was completely pissed off about it. I felt like I was being completely screwed with my pants on for precisely $0.99 a month. For less than $12 a year, Apple was perfectly happy dick me over. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply make something that worked properly? And I really think that the answer is ‘Yes’, only they wouldn’t bleed an extra $12 out of me that year.

So fine, I upgraded my storage and I ran the updates. Then I realized that with the new update my Photostream was gone. For those of you not using Apple, there were two main folders for photos; the Camera Roll (which held all of your photos) and the Photostream (which you could curate). Well I have an Apple TV and it has a function that will stream the Photostream pictures as a screensaver. I really like that. It has been one of the small joys in my life that, while I am working on schoolwork at home I can put on some music and let my custom-build screensaver do its thing. Well once the Camera Roll disappeared, so did my ability to curate. This pissed me off in a way that even I will admit is disproportional, but as I said, this ability to curate was one of the small things about my existence that I found real joy in and I am all about finding joy in the small things.

BUT THEN! There was ANOTHER update, so I ran that one and then the Photostream was back! Hooray! Except that then my Apple TV stopped working. BOO!

I tried to recover it but couldn’t because I don’t own the proper Apple-only cable that I would have needed to do that. So I went online to get the phone number for the local store to make an appointment, only I couldn’t make an appointment online because I don’t pay for the proper sort of account which would allow me to make an appointment online. So I went down to the store (it took a week to get down there because I was very busy) and they set me up with an appointment and told me it would be an hour, so I went to buy some pants (because I was at the mall, which I don’t go to very often and because I needed some pants), I came back after 45 minutes and they said, “Oh, we already called you and you weren’t here” and I said, “That’s because you told me it would be an hour.” I realize now that what I was supposed to do was hang out in the store so that I would play with all their stuff and then want to buy some more of their stuff and I object to that because I like my Capitalism to at least put in the work of being a little bit less obviously manipulative than that.

Finally I waited another half an hour and finally someone could see me. That dude played with the Apple TV, then decided that it was dead and simply gave me a new one. When I asked what had happened, the dude said he didn’t know. So sure, it is great that they just opened a box and handed me a new one, but all I really ever wanted was for the original one to simply work.  

That brings us about up to speed except that the other day I was reading the “Tips” thing on my phone and it said something along the lines of, “You have a lot of photos on your phone, why not try the iCloud Photo Library Beta?” Well this made sense to me because it had always bothered me that none of the photos on my phone could be accessed when I logged into iCloud. So I turned the iCloud Photo Library Beta thing on and now my photos are all there and accessible through the iCloud.

Yay?

No.

Now my goddamn Photostream is gone again! I am so fucking frustrated. I went online to read the various complaints like this one and found out that if I turn off the iCloud Photo Library Beta that I have to download all of the photos back to my phone, but I am looking at my phone and the memory usage is the same as it was before, so I’m not sure where the photos are right now.

This is all very confusing and frustrating and that is my larger point (I do have one, I’m not just bitching). I remember that back in the day when Apple was trying to build its market share, that their products were incredibly easy to use. That was one of the selling points: they were intuitive. Apple made Microsoft seem like this big, bloated, slow, uncaring, hegemonic, money-grubbing machine that didn’t work very well. Well, after all of this, that is how I feel about Apple now. So every time I hear that they are making more money than oil companies, I start to think that it is because they are behaving more like oil companies. Sure, their products are great, but I’m beginning to see that there is a very looooooooong tail of costs that come with these products. The thing that pisses me off most is that I’m not seeing the virtue in the things that are being done here. I don’t give two shits about their new iWatch; I just want the things I have already paid for to work the way I was led to believe they were going to when I bought them. I don’t feel like Apple treats me as a customer, I feel like they are treating me as a pupil.

Now this is not just an Apple rant. As I said, I use Google Drive and they did this idiotic thing last year where they separated the individual kinds of files into different apps. This means that I had to download a separate Google Docs app onto my phone in order to continue editing on the fly the way I had been doing before. What used to require ONE app now requires TWO apps. That is a pain in the ass, but the big difference here is that Google Drive is completely free. When they do something stupid I know that it is because of some misguided desire to improve, not out of a sycophantic desire to squeeze more money out of me.

Quite ironically, I learned this week that Microsoft offers something called Office Online, which works exactly like Google Drive but allows me to create real Word documents in the cloud (my only complaint about my Chromebook has always been that its functionality with Word totally blows). So now I am in a situation where Apple seems like a big, bloated, slow, uncaring, hegemonic, money-grubbing machine that doesn’t work very well, while the combination of $200 Chromebook and a completely free Microsoft app offer me (a writer and grad student) the same capability that a $1,200 Apple laptop would.

At the moment I am so desperate and frustrated that I am actually writing all of this down. When my contract is up with Sprint in about a year, I am seriously going to consider not staying with the iPhone. I love the capabilities of the iPhone and having had a Samsung Galaxy in the past, I understand that the iPhone is better, but what it isn’t, is better enough to bridge the gap in trust that Apple has dug with me over the past year.  It should not be true that I trust Google and Microsoft - fucking Google and Microsoft, I know! - more than I trust Apple right now.

And this is all to say nothing about Foxconn and how guilty every single one of us should be feeling about all that.

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The White iOS.

The White iOS

by james bezerra

The new iOS

is very clean, white, glitchy;

art you can’t touch.

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Just a Little Wrong.

So this is a couple of weeks late, and possibly insensitive, but I still keep chuckling about it.

A day or two after Steve Jobs died my dad got home from work and said to my mother, “Honey, I think that Bill Gates died today.”

Come on, that’s hilarious!

I love and admire and respect my father very much, but he has a knack for getting the pop culture stuff a little wrong. One of the other winners was the time he said, “I watched a whole episode of that Rupaul’s Drag Race because I thought it was about drag racing. But it wasn’t.”

That’s not the all-time, best-in-show winner though. My dad doesn’t sleep much, so tends to stay up late working on his laptop with the TV on in the background. He enjoys a good western, as most of our fathers do, and so one night – while looking for something to have on the TV in the background – he came across what looked to be a western he’d never seen. It did not take long however before he discovered that Brokeback Mountain is NOT a western. He is still a little shocked about that one.



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The Name is Music.

Recently my energetic and always in-motion brother the Texas Diplomat gave me a hand-me-down Mac Book (I know, my life is really hard). Aside from the general awesomeness of such a super thing, there is a specific awesomeness here and it has a name.

That name is music.

My music situation has been quite sad for the last few years. When I moved to LA I had a beautiful and wonderful music library. It was esoteric and exotic and just the right amount of pop-y. It was so massive that it lived on an external hard drive. That hard drive crashed and I lost it all. Photos too and a lot of writing, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that I lost a life lived in music.

The years after that were a meager time for me. I was both poor and busy and only able to rebuild in fits and spurts.

I had an old (very, very, very old) Compaq that did its business but didn’t do it swiftly or elegantly. For college I bought a little HP netbook that I love because it is the nearest digital equivalent to a pen and paper, but it is such a simple device that I didn’t trouble it with music.

Well now I have this white totem, this sliver; half plastic and half Steve Jobs’ soul. Today I moved over the poor, starving scraps of music that I had left, and then I re-logged into my iTunes account:

And it was glorious.

For literally years I have been scribbling the names of songs down on post-its, hoping that one day I would have a functioning music system that would allow me to find them again.

Well tonight I have gone back and found them again.

Yes, that's right: I am building a library. I have been building playlists! The art of building playlists is very much like writing, but with other people’s words.

So I’m sitting here writing this and listening to the first mix I have made in years. Literally years. Now I know that all of this makes you think that you are reading a blog post from 1999 (back when blogs were cool), which is roughly the last time I was cooking on a Mac, but to those of you soulless detractors who do not recognize that I am having a profound moment of musical re-acquaintance … well I have nothing to say to you. This is an irony-free post I am making right now!

I am very happy and pleased right now.

Music!

I love music and I feel that I have been without it as a force in my life for at least a year, if not slightly more.

I will not (right now) bother you with the details of the mixes and my particular tastes (laughable as they may sometimes be), for now I just want to encourage you to go click open your iTunes and find for yourself one of those songs - we all have those songs, those songs that are transcendent, that move us, that alter us – go find one of those songs, click play, close your eyes and just listen. Luxuriate in it. It is yoga for the soul. So go do that, you’ll thank me.

And I would like to once again thank my brother the Texas Diplomat: you sir are a man among men!

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Strange, but True Internet Facts!*

Did you know!
That the girl who dumped the founder of Google back in high school
does not come up on Google when you google her!

Did you know!
That David Fincher’s personal Facebook account
has been “accidently erased” due to a “technical glitch” seventeen times since the movie was released!

Did you know!
That the reason it took so long to get the Beatles on iTunes was because decades ago Steve Jobs promised Paul McCartney that Apple would never get into the music business!

Did you know!
When DARPA began linking computers on a network, thereby creating the first Internet,
they did it so that programmers could more easily share their porn!




*The editors here at Standardkink would like to make it clear that when we use the word “True” what we actually mean is, “possibly true, because who’s to say what truth is, really?” and when we use the word “facts” what we actually means is, “possibly facts, because who can really ever be sure about these things, you know?”


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Some 100% True-ish Facts.

All of these things are either 100% true, or less than 100% true.

1. When Sputnik was launched in 1957 it contained a single vial of Joseph Stalin’s semen. It is still circling the Earth, Sputnik and the semen.

2. While filming the film “Accepted”, Justin Long and Blake Lively had a tryst that is the basis for the screenplay “Gossip Boy” currently being shopped by Jonah Hill.

3. General Douglas MacArthur practiced yoga.

4. The modern necktie derives from neckerchiefs worn by Croatian mercenaries.

5. Robert F. Kennedy spoke German very, very poorly. His German friends made fun of him behind his back, and then felt bad about it later.

6. The baseball card of Moe Berg is displayed at the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia because in addition to being a major league shortstop in the 1930s, he also spoke ten languages and spied for the OSS.

7. Fans and advocates of the textile pattern Hounds Tooth generally and vehemently deny that it is derived from Glen Urquhart plaid.

8. I once accidently bumped elbows with Amanda Bynes at the Arclight in Hollywood.

9. Until the age of 14 author Sir Terry Pratchett was raised as a girl.

10. There has never actually been 400,000 of anything. There has been more and there has been less, but there has never been exactly 400,000 of anything (I learned this at the secret bi-monthly meeting of bad-ass accountants, a members only club).

11. At the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, racist epithets are shouted at you (via recording) as you walk through the entryway. This is actually a prank and not officially part of the museum experience.

12. Standard Memory Foam absorbs particles of your dreams.

13. 40% of the porn viewed online every day is accessed by women.

14. Steve Jobs once met Osama bin Laden in Dubai.

15. Conan O’Brien was once stalked by a priest from the Archdiocese of Boston.

16. American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Don DeLillo occasionally writes commercials for Chivas 18. He refuses to be credited for this.

17. Director Steven Soderbergh is a practicing Episcopalian.

18. SCUBA is an acronym that stands for Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array.

19. As a teenager, Harrison Ford dated his best friend’s sister.

20. Three different men have been married to Whoopi Goldberg.

21. William Shakespeare invented the word ‘submerge’.



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