Poor, poor Snow Leopard...

I imagine this leopard, chillin, enjoying a nice snowy day, when along comes an Apple photo crew.

*FWAP*, they nail him in the head with a snowball, and as he looks at them with annoyance, they snap his picture.

I can only hope that shortly after this picture was taken, the Leopard ate every single one of them.

• It shines light on the fact that Apple is casting an unfair stereotype of PC users
• It gives existing Microsoft costumers a group of people they can feel proud identifying with
• It makes Apple look like elitist snobs (which, to be fair, they are)

Disclosure:

I am operating system agnostic.  I use Linux at work, PC at home, have worked extensively with Mac’s.  I consider them all fairly similar platforms for software development, with PCs lagging behind a little because of the lack of a real shell environment, but it still doesn’t slow me down all that much. I have an iPod, it was free.  I don’t like it all that much more than the MP3 player it replaced, but it’s fine.

Conclusion:

Anyway, good job Microsoft (I don’t say that often).  Also, Vista is a steaming pile of crap, and when I got my new PC with it preinstalled, all of my applications crashed so often I had to go revert to XP and download tons of hard to find drivers to get it all to work.  Maybe they should hire the person who came up with that commercial to sort out their product development.

So being freaked out, and having found at least some credible evidence that this might be true, I am giving up my happy, lime green bottle that has been good to me for so many years. I went to the REI superstore downtown and was surprised at how small their selection was. I spoke to an employee and he was very helpful, pointing me to a Klean Kanteen, which is not as pretty as my nalgene, but is 100% stainless steel (that means no nickel). I plunked down $20, which also seems ridiculous, and now I am breaking it in.

Do you think I am being too reactionary? Buying into conspiracy theories? Just generally nuts? Maybe… but I’ll let you take that gamble with your own health.

Now, before I tell you about Reuben I should tell you about my neighborhood. In less than two years we have: had our car broken into 3 times; had our shed broken into and our bikes, ladder, and miscellaneous tools stolen; seen homeless people loaded into the drunk tank; seen a car evade the police by jumping a curb; and more. That said, our neighborhood isn’t really a BAD place, but it merits caution. Thus begin my internal psychological dialog:

“Careful, who knows what this guy wants”
“Shut up, you’re being paranoid”
“I bet hes going to ask you for money, he wouldn’t rob you in broad daylight like this”
“You’re only saying that because he’s black”
“How dare you accuse me of being racist!”
“Well, if he were an old white man you wouldn’t say that”
“Well, OK, maybe you’re right. Let’s see what he wants…”

Reuben was older, wearing a plaid knit newsboy hat, some sort of synthetic brown pants that were impervious to stains or wrinkles, and a couple of layered jackets. He seemed friendly and I said hello. He asked me for a ride to Kaiser, his car had broken down and he was late for a Doctors appointment.

“He seems nice, I want to help him”
“Maybe he’ll pull a gun on you when you get into the car”
“He is NOT going to pull a GUN”
“Well, you should hide your wallet just in case, you have a lot of cash right now”
“Fine, I’ll hide my wallet, sheesh”
“And ask him a few questions first, like where his broken down car is and stuff”
“OK, OK”

So I asked Reuben where he lived, which he shared, and where his car was, which he pointed out to me at the end of the block. Taking him to the Doctor would mean I would be late to work. Oh well, thats OK. I told him to stand back, I wanted to pull the car out so he could get in the passenger side without trudging through a snowbank. He stood back and I got in the car. To my shame, I took my wallet out of my pocket and hit it under the floor mat in the back seat. I pulled out into the street and waited for him to come to the passenger side door. He had some trouble with it, my doors are old and heavy, so I gave it a nudge and it popped open. Reuben grabbed the door handle and I saw his hand shaking.

“Man, we are such jerks”
“Totally”

I started driving to Kaiser and we made small talk. He told me that he worked for Gates Rubber for 20 years, fixing flat tires and replacing dead batteries for their vehicle fleet. We spoke about the best way to get to the Kaiser parking lot, though I had decided to head for the front door. He kept wanting me to drop him off far away so as not to inconvenience me. At one point I asked him his name, since he hadn’t told me yet, and I told him mine. We shook hands, and then he told me, again, that he worked for Gates Rubber for 20 years. Reuben also told me he was 82 years old. I found that hard to believe, but I have always had a hard time judging ages. I like to think of everyone as ageless, living forever, so age shouldn’t matter. Someday maybe.

I dropped Reuben off after making sure he had someone he could call for a ride home, and wished him luck. I still don’t know if I should feel good about myself for helping him out, or bad for thinking the worst. I wonder how many people wrestle with their subconscious like this. I guess that will give me something to think about for a while. All in all, not a bad start for a Thursday.

This got me thinking about software prices in general, but I will stick with Photoshop for this example. My guess is that Photoshop has one of the highest percentages of piracy in it’s install base. Adobe gets nothing from those people. A certain portion of those pirates are going to steal it regardless of the price tag, because that’s what they do. I can’t help but wonder, however, how many people say “$650! Screw that!” and hop onto a file sharing network, cutlass gripped mercilessly between their clenched teeth.

Of that latter group, I would guess that some percentage would be willing to buy it if the price tag weren’t so high. So how could Adobe lower that price bar and net the cash from these pirates? Since the upgrade is $199, and the release cycle appears to be 12 months, you are essentially paying $16.60 for the new hotness. Why not offer a service at $20 a month to use the software, possibly with some larger lump payment to get going ($50). Now someone only has to come up with $70 to get into their product instead of $649.

Now the real benefits kick in. Instead of waiting a year for new features, they can roll them out in real time as they are developed, creating a more agile product for their customers. They could also experiment, tossing in features here and there on a trial basis, without some delicate, long impacting consequences.

If adoption of this practice took off, they could even lower the price to grab ever increasing percentages of those fence dwelling pirates, until the inconvenience of finding and implementing the pirated software overshadows the barrier to just plain purchasing it.

Until then, bon voyage!

Check out the Extra-Action Marching Band website. They are playing at a club tonight, maybe we will go check it out!

Anyway, all of that isn’t especially noteworthy, but as my mood improved I realized something. Funk is an extremely positive form of expression. Funk doesn’t contain large amounts of profanity or racial slurs, it doesn’t glorify violence, it doesn’t do any of the negative things that so many other genres do. In fact, if anything funk actively promotes love and understanding. They should be blaring Bootsy over loudspeakers in Iraq. Who could possibly want to fight while listening to “Love Gangsta”?

A couple is obviously two, for the definition is quite clear, the other values are derived by the numbers of letters in the word, which I noticed as an increasing pattern as words of greater length were used for quantity. When poled independently, several people confirmed the order of these words above, if not the specific quantity mapping.

It seems like a small thing, but these sorts of things are quite valuable. In fact, Bacon (Francis, not Kevin) referred to such barriers to communication as the “Idols of the Marketplace”. After all, didn’t your mother tell you not to worship false idols? Eh? Eh? Also, I suspect this personal quirk of mine might be why I dislike acronyms so much, at least colloquial acronyms (VI = “Village Inn”, knock it off Devon)

I camped out for tickets to the re-releases of the holy trinity (Episodes IV – VI) and never allowed myself to see previews for episodes I-III. Amy and I saw Episode IV together on one of our very first dates. During Episode V, Amy was pregnant with Mason and he kicked like crazy whenever exciting scenes came up. Amy was pregnant with Madeleine when we went to see Episode VI. I guess we can’t have any more kids unless they dream up an Episode VII . I get excited when I watch Star Wars. It has a special place in my heart.

What I thought was more interesting was to see the special place it has in the hearts of our children’s generation. Despite the stock complaints about the new movies from us old school fans, the kids love the Star Wars universe. My son says to me on a daily basis now “Let’s play Star Wars”, which consists of mild Lightsaber fighting and lots of fancy, dramatic ways of extending the Lightsaber blade out of the handle towards one another. On Halloween I say hordes of Star Wars characters on the streets.

We are a generation that is defined and described through pop culture. What I never expected were institutions within pop culture to survive generations. By it’s definition pop culture is generally short lived and fleeting (What happened to the Mambo #5 guy? How long ago WAS that, it seems like forever!). The fact that “Lightsaber” and “Star Wars” are in my three year olds vocabulary speaks volumes. Let’s just home that things like Star Wars continue to be the one’s that stick, and current icon’s like Paris Hilton fade quickly into the background when their time has passed.

So I got in line and stood there for some time. No numbers were called and no one in the line moved forward. Two of the four counters had plywood nailed over them and one of them was vacant. The center of the room had rows of hard chairs bolted to the floor and not one of them was vacant. I silently cursed at myself for leaving my book at the office. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” would be a cheery escape compared to the faces and ambience of this cramped little room with fluorescent lighting.

The minutes crawled mercilessly by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The line remained the same, the crowded seats stayed crowded. From what I could see not a single person had been helped. It was right about then that a woman in line up ahead of me caught my eye. She looked Hispanic, but with very light skin so I couldn’t be sure. Her short, dark, curly, oversized hair was accented by some poor silky looking black shirt. The synthetic fabric was stretched across her skin like an explorer, leaving no fold or crack unfound. After what appeared to be 5 or 6 decades on the planet, there was plenty of creative terrain to be displayed too.
The thing about this woman that struck me was her cell phone. It was clipped onto her belt in a clear plastic sleeve. It made me wonder if her furniture at home were adorned with clear plastic as well, ensuring that the style and condition of her vintage 70’s sofa would survive the ravages of time. I looked at her and felt something sad about her, something almost dark. Tragedy was just around the corner for this woman.

The phone lit up and filled the waiting room with its obnoxious ring-tone. The lady fumbled with her purse and coat and bags and managed to extract it from its clear plastic home just in time to avoid sending the caller to voicemail. She answered in a rushed tone, seemingly exhausted from the process of pulling the phone out and pressing the talk button.

“Hello?” she said to the caller. Moments passed and she just listened. “Oh my God ….. When? ….. How? …..”. She began to get congested and sniffle on the phone, leaning one had to stable herself as the news hit her. She was no longer talking, but speaking in a hybrid dialect of pain, sadness and horror.

“What’s the number? ….. Hold on, let me find a pen”. As she fumbled in her purse looking for a pen and paper several people around her jumped to help, handing pens out toward her with audible clicks. I had a pen too, but I was more than ten feet away from her and would have had to move people out of my way to get to her. I felt badly though, I wanted to give her my pen. I wouldn’t have even asked for it back.

She quickly scrawled down a number and stuffed it in her purse and said goodbye. Maybe the number was to a funeral home to make arrangements for whomever it was who had just passed away. She hadn’t seemed too surprised by the news though, maybe that’s why I sensed something tragic about her. She was standing there in line, waiting to get a social security card or something, wondering when her little plastic sleeve would deliver the news to her. She was ready for it, but the emotions inside her still managed to overwhelm her, no matter how much she had been prepared.

I looked at the clock on my plastic-free cell phone. Fifteen minutes had passed since I arrived. Not a single person had moved yet. I left the building and went down to the street and headed back to work, annoyed that I had wasted my time and would have to make a second attempt at this errand, and wondering incredulously how that woman could possibly still be there in line, and hoping the next time her phone rang it would be much happier news.