I was sitting in a museum bench staring up at the “slurry wall.”
The bench, made of simple fine-grained walnut, was like one you might find in any museum in the world. The slurry wall, that felt monumental. It towered over the hall and the visitors.
The wall is one of the exhibits in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. Although, it isn’t really correct to call it an exhibit. It’s literally part of the complex itself.
It’s a retaining wall of concrete held in place by giant bolt anchors drilled into the bedrock. It was entirely practical, built to keep the Hudson River from flooding into the lower levels of the World Trade Center complex. It still performs that function. It was never really meant to be seen.
But I was there looking at it. It was like a cliff, almost a natural wonder.
Many things that were never meant to been seen are in the museum. Giant girders twisted like licorice from the collapse are displayed throughout. A truck driven by firefighters of Ladder 3 – all of whom were killed – sits crushed and ruined.
The foundations of the towers themselves, box beams set in concrete, have been carefully exposed like an archaeological dig. These artifacts, like the Survivor Stairs and slurry wall are of such scale that the museum was built around them.
Out of the context of that day’s terrible events, displayed in a spacious and modern museum, dramatically spotlit, these items somehow seem like modern art. They are granted an unwelcome beauty. It felt wrong.
This is difficulty of trying to show something as gigantic as the Sept. 11 events and aftermath. We end up looking at it through a pinhole. We can shift the focus about, but we end up only able to understand or even process a small part of the whole. We can never really see.
Perhaps that’s why the most moving exhibits of the museum are the most tiny: Items dug from the rubble or recovered from the other Sept. 11 scenes.
Eyeglasses, golf balls, someone’s job performance review, shoes, purses, the business card and wristwatch of Todd Beamer, who died on Flight 93 trying to stop the hijacking. 1
They’re all mundane but personal items. The victims wore them. They picked them out and bought them. They kept them on their desks. They were objects that meant something.
I was sitting on that bench, watching people stop and stare up at the multistory cliff and was thinking about how small we all really are.
All this was still rolling through my mind as I was looking out across the memorial site reflecting pools, two giant squares that mark the towers’ footprints. They are surrounded by bronze plaques cut with the names of the dead.
Someone had placed a single white rose into one of those names – Michael Massaroli. It seemed to be going unnoticed by others taking photos of the pools. I had to wait for them to move just so I could look at the name, run my fingers over the shape of the letters.
The museum is a powerful experience, but this rose struck me the hardest. It didn’t try to sum anything up. It just was.
Tiny, small, human and unbearably sad.
The museum has placed boxes of Kleenex at regular intervals in this part of the museum. You’ll likely need them.
When Jurassic Park was released in 1993 it was clearly a groundbreaking film.
The sense of awe of Drs. Grant and Sattler seeing a specialeffectasaurus grazing the treetops transferred directly onto audiences. Likewise, the T-Rex attack put man and dinosaur together realistically (and dangerously) in the same frame for the first time ever.
The dinosaurs felt genuinely alive. We were badly outmatched. Even Samuel L. Jackson got eaten.
This movie and 1997’s Titanic showed that if computer effects could resurrect dinosaurs and a long-lost passenger ship, they could do anything.
But through three sequels – although I’ve not seen the latest Jurassic World – one thing has always bothered me about the Jurassics Park. Well, two things. OK, three.
For one, they should be called Cretaceous Park because most of the dinosaurs in the movies are from that period.
The second is that the movies don’t seem to have progressed beyond “dinosaurs somehow escape and chase people” monster movie plots and simplistic off-the-shelf morality about how corporations are greedy and evil.1
But my main complaint is this: Why do the dinosaurs keep going out of their way to eat people?
After being cooped up in cages being fed, wanting to hunt, having 65 millions years of gut instinct suppressed, the first thing the dinos do when they get out is go after the humans instead of, I dunno, other dinosaurs. Human is the only food they want. They’re like 2-year-olds who only eat mac and cheese and chicken fingers.
This problem is far more evident in the book, as the T Rex continues to track and plague Dr. Grant and the children repeatedly as they journey back, and the raptors chew through steel bars to get at the humans.
The movies paper over some of this by ascribing motives to dinosaurs. The T Rex was attracted to the moving light! The humans stole the T-Rex’s baby! And the humans – er – stole the raptor’s eggs! That third one is a sign they were running out of ideas.
But nothing suggests that dinosaurs would have different motivations than any other large predator, who eat every couple days and spend most of their time laying around to conserve energy. An 18-ton, 40-foot T Rex 2or an even larger Spinosaurus of Jurassic Park III taking time out of her day to chase humans about is like a lion devoting great effort to chasing field mice.
The Jurassic Park raptors, despite having recently eaten both Samuel L. Jackson and the Australian game hunter, chase the two children around the kitchen because … reasons? Dessert, perhaps?
The Jurassic Park III Spinosaurus tracks the humans3 all over Isla Sorna, including crashing through a fence, following them on an hours-long boat journey and finally wading into a river to have one more go at them.
At some point it should have thought, “Fuck it. I’m going to hunt something significantly easier to kill, like that T Rex I dispatched in 30 seconds in the first act.”
But that’s what people, me included, are paying to see, so who needs reasons? Hollywood finds a way.
Jurassic Park is basically a remake of Jaws with the same greedy overseers and nature out of control. Except the animatronics worked this time. This is also the plot of Billy and the Clonasaurus.
That’s 16,329.3 kilograms and 12.3 meters in pretend measurements, for any Lincoln Chafee fans in our readership.
The humans in this movie are all annoying, selfish and stupid. I was rooting for the dinosaurs. Also, how loud was the ringer on that satellite phone that they could hear it 100 yards away inside 20 tons of dinosaur?
By college, computers and word processors had taken over, but in grade school and high school it was still clickclickclickding.
Getting the letters to swing the 8- or -10 inch arc and strike the paper with a solid thwack took some force. A typist on one of these machines had to hit through the key and do a clean followthrough.
The IBM Selectric that came after was much easier to use. I recall it hummed menacingly when switched on. The keys felt more like switchgear – hard plastic, mechanical and stiff. Hitting one unleashed momentary fury.
Bang.
The keys, the vibration, the keystrikes were all tactile, a true mechanical device, not at all like the computers we use today.
In college, I traded up again. The student paper where I worked had a bank of computers with IBM PS2 keyboards. For many, this was legendary, the Stradivarius of keyboards. It was a solid, heavy slab embedded with key switches that made a firm, clean click when pressed.
Apple’s Extended Keyboard II is fondly remembered by longtime Mac users for many of the same reasons. They felt mechanical, like the typewriters that they replaced. Only better.
At this point I’m at risk of sounding like I’m about to tell about how I tied an onion to my belt, “which was the style at the time.” But this isn’t a nostalgia trip about historical keyboards so much as a riff on Henry Ford’s “people would have asked for a faster horse” line.1
Trading up isn’t always obvious. Or, more specifically, what you are trading up for often isn’t.
All those machines were heavy, big and moderately unpleasant to use by today’s standards. Typing fast on most non-electric typewriters was a practiced skill. The keyboards on those machines – really any machine – says something about them.
They’re antiques now, but in their day they were technology. They were the result of someone setting out to make the best object they could using available materials, budgets, manufacturing constraints and design goals.
This is another way of saying my favorite mantra: Design is about choices. I have a good example of that right in front of me. I’m writing this review on the new 12-inch Retina Macbook.
The computer is extremely thin and light, impossibly so. A mere wisp. My formerly light and portable 13-inch Retina MacBook now feels like I’m walking around with a paving stone in my bag. This new laptop is so thin and light that it makes a 13-inch MacBook Air look like a Ford F-150 SuperCab parked next to a Mini Cooper.
To accomplish this Apple made sharp design compromises. The keyboard is barely there. This has proven to be one of the more controversial design decisions that Apple has made recently.
It feels significantly different to type on than current Mac keyboards. It’s not the same as typing on glass, but the keys are not fully buttons, either. Thanks to a new mechanism the keypress feels precise, more precise than regular MacBooks, actually. But there’s much less key travel.
For some, this is just a step too far. Another Apple folly. The notorious hockey puck mouse on the original iMac. The beautiful but overpriced G4 Cube2.
Here’s Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and the grumpy “hey, you kids, get off of my lawn” one-third of the Accidental Tech Podcast, on his experience with the 12-inch MacBook:
I can type on the MacBook, but I’d rather not. What I hadn’t considered was that even though I had common tasks that could fit within the MacBook’s limited specs – email, writing, chat – all of them required a lot of typing. Oops.
For this and other reasons – too slow, the trackpad – he hate-quit his MacBook and returned it. “Hate” isn’t an exaggeration. “I just hate using it,” he says in summary. I probably would have gone with “it’s a good machine, but it’s not for me,” but it’s his blog and he can say what he wants.
His critique is onto something, though. The keyboard is the key to understanding what the machine is about. If you hate the keyboard, you’re going to hate if for all the other compromises that went into it.
The machine is best understood as an intentionally limited device.
For some people, like me, this 12-inch will be a replacement for a larger MacBook. But Apple is positioning this machine against super-portable devices, such as the Microsoft Surface or its own iPad.
And it completely blows away Microsoft’s keyboard covers or typing on glass. Or iPad keyboard attachments.
People who choose the new MacBook will get the advantages of a super-light, thin, fanless laptop with all-day battery life and a better keyboard than all other devices in its class.
It took a couple days, but I realized how the keyboard was supposed to work. Your fingers glide over the keys that respond to a much lighter lighter touch. I feel like I’m beating the keys on my regular MacBooks now. A week in I’m finding that I’m not only used to the keyboard but that I actually like typing on it.
It’s different enough that it takes adjustment. Think of someone used to a manual typewriter being confronted with a modern MacBook keyboard.
For some, this sounds like The Simpsons Mrs. Krabapple telling students who were complaining about their uncomfortable new chairs that “eventually your bones will change shape.”
But I’ve been pondering the idea of technology changes, about how keyboards have evolved through the years to suit needs, ever since the machine came out and complaints started. But, I suspect there’s more than just pursuit of thinness going on here.
Apple has a tendency to adopt ideas that are counter to what has been done for years, decades even. But when you think about why Apple did it, the idea actually makes more sense.
Case in point: Natural scrolling. Scrolling down on a trackpad to make content go up on the screen is a vestige of scroll bars, c.1984. It’s a layer of abstraction added because of the limitations of technology at the time.
Natural scroll, by comparison, is direct manipulation of onscreen content – just grabbing stuff and moving it around. It’s like the real world. It’s the interaction model touchscreen devices use.
My buddy and I debate which scrolling method is correct. (Answer: Natural scrolling. Period.) But down-to-go-up scroll is understandable only as tradition, not something cognitive or intuitive.
This machine feels like Apple making a forward-looking decision in this vein. Future laptops will only get lighter and thinner, more like mobile devices. And the standard for mobile devices is typing on glass.
Is this a step toward Apple going all the way and just ditching mechanical keyboards someday? Maybe. Apple has clearly been headed that direction with its trackpads for some time.
The new lineup of MacBooks replace physical trackpad clicks with haptic feedback and multitouch. Right now a user can select, double click, move things, etc – everything a clicky trackpad can do – without ever actually clicking the trackpad.
Clicking is a vestige of the past, a time when a mechanical button was the best available technology to send input to the computer. Considering available technology, clickless trackpads actually make more sense. Users interact just fine with mobile devices with no physical button clicks for app input.
The haptic feedback trackpad on the 12-inch MacBook is really just Henry Ford’s faster horse. It behaves they way it does because of expectations, not needs. But this progression is still a sign Apple is headed somewhere else.
This keyboard – this laptop – is a statement. 3 It’s an opinionated design. It’s future-looking.
I think of my young nephews. They do most of their typing on an iPad. That’s their frame of reference. A minimalist keyboard would be an improvement to them. For this generation, expectations are going to be quite different.
And down the road is where Apple is always looking.
This quote it probably apocryphal, but it makes a nice point.
I own a G4 Cube. It is an amazing machine visually and design wise, especially the computer guts that lift out like a nuclear core. The machine is in the MOMA permanent collection. It serves the same role at my place, sitting on a shelf looking beautiful.
It’s also a sign. If Apple likes anything, it’s cost savings from economies of scale. Expect this thin keyboard to show up across the line as their machines undergo redesigns.
While writing about his voyage through the viral media sausage making machine, I realized that my blog templates had a serious design flaw. I had no place to put my snarky asides.
I needed footnotes. All the cool kids have them on their blogs. 1John Gruber, for instance.
One of the nice things about having locally sourced, artisanal site that I made myself is that I can just add items as needed. I opened my code editor and wrote up styles for superscript and an ordered list style.
But I hated them almost immediately. They operated as skip links, which are simple and basic, but are also gross and confusing because they can easily leave a reader feeling stranded on the page.
I set out to make the best skip links ever. They zip a user to the bottom of the page, then return them to where they were reading. Try it! 2 They’re both easy and fun! In the spirit of progressive enhancement, users with JavaScript turned off, or if JS doesn’t load, get basic skip links.
I spent the last week or so, a couple hours a night, writing the JavaScript to make that happen. Then I tossed all of that out this weekend and rewrote the entire thing from scratch.
It was working smoothly on the local version of my site. Satisfied that it was ready, I published the code to my live site where it immediately broke.
I’m fairly new to writing in straight-up JavaScript. I’ve done jQuery for about five years. There’s a jQuery vs. JavaScript debate going on. Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses, but the jQuery partisans are correct that jQuery solves a lot of problems with JavaScript.
Finding and targeting items in the DOM is much easier with jQuery. In my case it was made doubly difficult because I write my entries in Markdown. They are just raw HTML with no styles, IDs or data tags to grab onto with JavaScript.
But it all appears to be working. For now. Except in Firefox. And maybe Internet Explorer. Frankly, we can’t be bothered to check.
We are offering a money back guarantee3 to anyone encountering issues with our footnotes.
Please contact the David Putney.com complaints department where your issue will be given all the attention it deserves. We will contact you in six to eight weeks once your complaint has been settled to our satisfaction.
Despite having footnotes on my blog, I am still not one of the cool kids.
Like this. If you hit the “Take me back to where I was reading” button. It will. At least, I hope so.
There’s teachers you remember, and teachers you remember. And I remember my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. VeVea.
Basically it’s because I disliked her intently. Dreaded going to school disliked. Was terrified of her disliked. Hated is probably a more accurate term.
She was a strict disciplinarian, a thin-lipped disapproving woman with the demeanor of a drill sergeant and the same tragic Brillo Pad hairstyle as TV painter Bob Ross.
Her favored punishment was to make students “write words” 1 a la Bart in The Simpsons opening credits. She would start students off with five sentences and escalate with each infraction by adding five more.
She kept the tallies in a notebook on her desk she called her “disappointment book.” My tally ended up somewhere over one hundred by the time I escaped her class.
Students who were made to write words would then present the sheets of paper – carefully numbered, of course – to her in front of the class. She would tear them up and toss them in the trash.
Later in life I befriended my grade school principal and he asked “Who was your least favorite teacher?”
“Mrs. VeVea.”
“That’s pretty much what everyone says.”
My brother and sister all had Mrs. VeVea and endured her rules and her arbitrary application of them. We all hated her.
Yet one of her rules still endures with us in a strange way.
She’d take the lunch count every morning at the beginning of class. Students who brought a lunch were required to answer “No thank you.” Students who were buying lunch, then priced at 50 cents, were required to say “Yes, please, 50 cents” as they walked to the front with their money.
Like so much in her class, it was a bizarrely regimented ritual for what was basically a roll call. It ended up burned into my brain – all our brains.
My brother, sister and I still use “Yes, please, 50 cents” to mean “emphatic yes.” Not just yes, but yes!
As in, “Do you want a beer?”
“Yes, please, 50 cents.”
I found myself saying it without even thinking today at the coffee shop. I got a bizarre look.
So here’s to you, Mrs. VeVea. Looks like you won after all.
Her favorite phrase to make students write as punishment was “I will act like a fourth grader.” It was a bit tautological because students typically had gotten in trouble for exactly that: acting like a fourth grader.
That’s not a euphemism for some sort of dread disease. His Millennials to Snake People Chrome plugin became fodder for the Viral Internet Journalism Industrial Complex.
In reality, it’s actually pretty cool to suddenly see something you made referred to and linked all over the place. I was minorly internet famous because of UX from hell, a piece I did about bad UX on news sites. But it was but a mere fraction of the scale of his plugin fame.
His creation is a Chrome plugin that converts “millennials” and variations of the term into “snake people” on any web site. Eric has a droll and quirky sense of humor. You can see it at his novelty site literallytheindianocean.io.
I installed it as an unsigned plugin on my machine straight from his GitHub repo a while ago. When he put it on the Chrome store, it got 17 installs. Although it did catch the attention of someone who made a Twitter bot based on it.
All in all it seemed like a nice little joke shared by friends.
The first indication that something was about to happen was when a friend common to Eric and I retweeted Owen Williams, a tech reporter for The Next Web.
Best chrome extension ever - changes “Millennials” to “snake people” 😂
I tweeted back to my friend and asked, “You know @ericwbailey made that?” He didn’t. It wasn’t long before other people I follow – non-mutual friends – were tweeting about it.
Within a couple hours I was seeing it pop up on my Twitter feed with links to various publications – Buzzfeed, Slate, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Daily Dot, etc. A Google search shows literally dozens of sites that wrote about it.
It reached such viral heights that Vox founder and media darling Ezra Klein was using it to make a joke.
According to a friend who studied such things, getting something to go viral takes little effort, at least in a brute force way. The trick is to get an influential person or two with a lot of followers to tweet about it or post it to Facebook.
It’s hard to trace the origins of the Snake People viral phenomenon. Someone like Williams and his 10,000 tech-interested followers could certainly be the instigator. In the case of my own viral boomlet, the director of Harvard’s Nieman Lab tweeting about my story seemed to be the “off to the races” moment.
To me, though, the mechanics of virality are less interesting than the why. Namely that it was much less about my friend’s wish or efforts for his plugin to go viral – as far as I know he wasn’t pimping it around all that much – and totally about online publishers’ absolute necessity for their items to go viral.
Eric created a near spot-on “thing” to go viral. It’s funny, a little bit weird, cleverly executed and quick enough to sum up in a single tweet or headline.1 It makes for a nice ongoing joke for a couple days.
Here’s a sampling:
The Verge: Millennials to Snake People is a Cloud to Butt whose time has come
CNET: Here’s all you need to see that millenials are really snake people
BuzzFeed: This Perfect Chrome Extension Replaces “millennials” With “Snake People”
Mashable: Brilliant Chrome extension replaces ‘millennials’ with ‘snake people’
Slate: You Don’t Have to Be a millennial to Laugh at This Chrome Extension That Turns millennial Into Snake Person
Huffington Post: Millennials Are Snake People, Chrome Extension Reveals
When stories “go big” they have to really “go big.” That’s why my friend’s simple and clever plugin was suddenly brilliant, perfect and awesome, according to various writers. Although by now the Internet has found a new best thing ever. Sorry, Eric.
Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, The Verge, Business Insider, Vox and even old-line media jump on and overhype things like “snake people” because they operate financially much like Crazy Eddie’s Discount Mattress Outlet. Prices for online ads are low and falling – much lower than comparable print ads. Clickthrough rates on such ads are an abysmal .06 percent.
The internet model exists to move as much inventory as possible as fast as possible. Virality means high hit counts and low time on site, meaning that people read the headline and a paragraph or two — if that. 2
So basically my friend’s plugin went into the internet aggregation sausage making machine and links came out the other end. (See what I did there.)
And they all wrote roughly the same story. A couple reporters made an effort to interview him, Slate threw in a little think-piecing, but tonally and content-wise most were largely interchangeable.
I don’t begrudge Eric for his moment of fame at all. It was nicely earned. It was fun to watch. And I enjoyed repeatedly texting and Slacking him links to all the internet orgs breathlessly writing about his plugin, something that he seemed to find simultaneously exciting but slightly mortifying.
But seeing it in action is a reminder of how much of journalism exists to simply feed the machine. It’s like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. The more you feed it, the more success you get, and the more it has to be fed.
I did notice a certain irony in the whole situation, too. And it’s actual irony, not Morriestian irony. My friend wrote his plugin as reductio ad absurdum to play on the media’s ongoing fixation with millennials.
Only because of the media’s fixation3 with millennials did his plugin mocking it become a thing.
And isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? A little too ironic. You know, I really do think …
According to The Law of Curated Humor any example cited by a news organization as “funny” won’t be. An SNL recap is a prime example of this rule in action. That means that the excerpts and screenshot examples featured in articles about Millennials to Snake People aren’t nearly as funny as installing the plugin and using it. It’s the surprise that makes it work.
This short time on site means, of course, that they aren’t actually looking at the ads. Technology has also disrupted advertising by being able to measure its effectiveness, or lack thereof, which are why rates are so low.
Running the Millenials to Snake People extension while reading story about the Millennials to Snake People extension results in wonderful tautological passages such as:
The extension also changes “snake person generation” to “snake person generation” and turns “Serpent Society” into “Serpent Society.” And, the best part, “parseltongues” becomes “Parseltongues” (a fictional Harry Potter language).
It’s nice to use. It feels nice on your arm. It looks nice, too, and is quite nicely built. It’s surprisingly nice to make phone calls from, and it’s a nice way to get notifications on the go.
The haptic feedback buzz feels nice when a new push alert pops in. The alert sounds are nice, and the digital crown has a nice smooth, precision feel when rotated. The inductive charger that effortlessly drops into place is very nice compared with the fiddly plug on a cell phone.
Even the packaging is nice. All in all you can call the Apple Watch a very, very nice product.
But is nice good enough?
It took me a while to figure out what bothers me most about my Apple Watch.
I’ve been wearing mine for a couple weeks now, which is long enough to get a good feel for it as both a device and as fashion. I liked it, but had a nagging doubt about it. I’ve now seen a couple watches out in the wild. There was just something about them …
The other night as I was walking home from the store, it hit me. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it.
The model I settled on and bought – a 42mm stainless steel with link bracelet – falls into the bourgeoisie fool-parted-from-money range of the product lineup. I figured that if I was going to buy a watch, I’d buy a fine-jewelry watch.
Early reviews by watch experts said it had the feel and build quality of a Rolex or TAG Heuer. I would be getting something comparable to those gold-star brands, it seemed.
And it is, physically. It is quite literally the most nicely made thing that I own. The band and case have the same weighty, polished, detailed quality as my friend’s Rolex. The watchband closes with a lovely, precise snap. Links pop on and off the bracelet easily for size adjustment.
It’s impeccable as style and fashion go. Except … when I look at it, I see this:
A plain black square. The watch face is just out and out missing from the Apple Watch most of the time. And a watch face is what makes a timepiece such a beautiful object.
Recently a friend showed me his 1939 solid white gold pocket watch with a Cadillac crest engraved on the back. The watch case was lovely, but the gorgeous art deco watch face made me weak in the knees.
By comparison, the Apple Watch offers a dead-eyed stare.
To be fair, a smart watch with a permanently lit-up screen is impossible right now.
Apple looked at the available technologies such as miniaturized processors, sensors, batteries and such and made a watch as soon as it was possible. Limitations mean the Watch must be off far more than it is on.
And, unlike a Motorola 360 – which is so huge it looks like the person wearing it took a train station clock off of the wall and strapped it to their arm, or the Pebble smart watch, which is as ugly as a Soviet tractor – Apple’s aesthetic and sizing demands ensured that the Watch is a compromised device.
Some might associate the word “compromised” with failure.
But design is about choices – what you leave in and what you leave out – and Apple seems to have made wise choices given what was possible. Putting brackets around the Watch and defining it by its compromises seems a place to start.
The past couple decades have seen the computer migrate from what was mainly a desktop box to laptop, then into our pockets as phones and to our sofas as tablets and finally onto our wrist. The Watch is the end result of a chain of multiple compromises.
Laptops lack desktop speed, input options, storage and ports. Tablets have even more limited input, barely usable keyboards, limited processing power and few or no ports. Phones have even worse keyboards, smaller screens and more awkward form factors.
A Watch has no physical text input, limited app functions, no web browser, tiny screen space and extreme battery, storage and processing limitations. It has no GPS, Wi-Fi or cellular of its own. It needs an iPhone to work at all.
A phone compared with a desktop computer falls short all over the place. But mobile is taking over the world nonetheless. The best computer is the one that you have with you.
Is the Watch in its present state “good enough” in the way that a phone is? Apple has certainly labored hard to make it so.
As a communication device, it’s passable, occasionally quite good. It leans heavily on precomposed messages and Siri. Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get a Siri-dictated message correct, but on the whole it seems to be pretty accurate, nailing all of these phrases on the first try.
Dijon mustard
La Dolche Vita
Babylonia
She sells sea shells by the sea shore in the Seychelles.
X-Men Days of Future Past
Extrapolate
Oscar Wilde
They’re coming over there to do their thing.
We had a nice trip with my niece to Nice.
Then I decided to really test its mettle by dictating the second verse of the Gilligan’s Island theme song (inaccurately, alas, from memory) as rapid fire as possible. The results:
Oh this is the Taylor at castaways they’re here for a long long time they have to make the best of it it’s an uphill climb the phone no bites the motorcars not a single lechery like Robinson Caruso is primitive as can be so John is here each week my friend you’re sure to get a smile from the tailor seven castaways here on Gilligans isle
Considering the degree of difficulty, it did OK, but I’m not sure I’d want to send the results to Tina Louise. Or Daniel Defoe, either, considering it called his most famous character a lecher.
It is much better at making phone calls than I expected. I was thinking I’d have to hold it up Dick Tracy style and shout into it, but it’s just a regular old speaker phone. Although the limited speaker volume and awkwardness of others hearing both sides of a conversation makes it of limited use in public.
But it doesn’t do many things that I actually use my phone for. It doesn’t have a web browser. I can read and post to Twitter, but I can’t read linked stories. Slack is limited to @ mentions and direct messages, although both are nice on the go.
Maps and navigation are, quite simply, terrific. Somehow glancing at my wrist seems less silly and touristy than pulling out a phone every few minutes to check my progress. And the Maps app accurately counted my path down by yards then feet until I got to the front door.
But many apps – Pandora, Overcast, Camera – are just wrist-mounted controls for the phone. It’s nice to load and listen to a podcast from one’s wrist, but it’s not a replacement for a true podcast management app.
If I had to pick one killer feature, it would be Apple Pay. Waving my arm at the scanner at the supermarket is objectively better than credit card swipes and PIN numbers and makes even taking my phone out to pay seem complicated.
So, as an iPhone replacement, it’s a decidedly mixed bag. But then again it would be as the Phone has had several generations to evolve into the remarkable devices we have today. And we have also grown used to its limitations.
If the Watch isn’t a phone replacement, then what is it?
Put simply, the Apple Watch is a very nice digital watch. Probably the nicest one ever made. Certainly much nicer than the calculator watch I had as a teen.
But digital watches are not a big market, and the world hasn’t exactly been clamoring for them. Geeks love to cite the $20 million raised by the recent Pebble Kickstarter, but 78,000 backers isn’t that many buyers.
For Apple, $20 million is a rounding error. They probably spend more than that every year on bagels for their employees. This is a market that Apple is trying to make out of the whole cloth, and they need to make a large market.
The iPhone was an easy sell, by comparison.
I was on the fence about buying the original iPhone until I opened the web browser and loaded my site. It was perfectly rendered in every detail on a tiny phone. I turned to the sales rep.
“I’ll take one.”
I got it home, activated it, and took it outside, off my Wi-Fi network and sat on a curb near my house in the middle of the night and surfed the web. It was mindblowing.
Everything about the first iPhone felt like Kubrickian technology-as-magic. Moving that same experience to the wrist isn’t and can’t be magical in the same way.
It’s worth remembering though that Steve Jobs famously introduced the iPhone as three things:
A widescreen iPod with touch controls
A phone
A breakthrough internet communications device.
Of those three, only the third item grew into something with world-changing implications. In less than a decade, more smartphones have been sold than desktops and laptops ever. A cell phone is the first computing device that literally every person on earth will eventually buy.
A really good digital watch has no world-changing implications. It’s not hard to imagine a watch that could be.
Just as it took a few iterations and an app store and creative third parties to figure out what an iPhone really was, the Watch feels like an undecided-but-open-to-ideas device. Some future device, however, will be.
Apple needs to get started now if it hopes to someday build that mythical future ür Watch. That’s what this is.
But does that make us first-gen buyers Apple’s beta testers? Probably.
I wanted to love my Apple Watch as much as that first iPhone. I wanted it to be as magical. Instead it’s, as I said earlier, a very nice digital watch.
That, in a way, sounds like damning with faint praise, as if the Watch somehow falls short.
Measured monetarily vs. utility, perhaps. My Apple Watch cost roughly the same as my off-contract iPhone, and that iPhone is a far more useful device. I could never advise anyone to spend what I did for my watch, unless of course they were of such means to consider it a paltry sum.
But even as it does many of the same things as my iPhone, I find myself liking the way it does them better. I like meeting alerts and emails on my wrist. I like remote controls for my iPhone. I like to lock and unlock my computer from my wrist.
I love Apple Pay on the Watch. I love having movie tickets and boarding passes on it.
I like the way it makes life just a little bit more convenient. After two weeks of Apple Watch use, I wouldn’t buy one at the price I paid. But I wouldn’t I want to go without it now either. It’s just too nice to not have. I’m willing to settle for nice.
There’s something end-times Roman Empire about Mad Max: Fury Road.
It’s not a new idea that the decadence of the Romans’ entertainments said as much about the people who enjoyed them as it did about the entertainments themselves. Fury Road is the kind of over-the-top orgy of blood and violence and inhumanity and mayhem that an ancient Roman can only dream about.
Times may change, but people don’t.
Read as commentary, Fury Road is all our excesses – love of violence, celebrity culture, braggadocio, flaunting vulgarity – drawn out to a logical conclusion. The dystopian world of Mad Max combines the brutality of ISIS throwing gays off a building as a crowd cheers with the “hey, look-at-me” vulgarity of the Kardashians.
The villain’s skull face mask and motorcycle-sprocket codpiece are as much his personal brand as his costume. It’s not a stretch to think of Donald Trump, freed of his last constraints of good taste, dubbing himself Rictus Erectus and riding around in a Mercedes E-class mounted on a monster truck chassis.
I suspect the production designers and people who came up with the cars had an absolute blast making this movie. One can imagine the production meetings:
“What if the attack force were led by a giant truck with rows of taiko drummers and a mutated guy playing power chords in front of a towering stack of amps?”
“I doubt audiences would like that. So, we also need to also make the guitar a flame thrower to be sure.”
High fives.
Humanity seems to be constantly at war between its good and evil natures. If history – or current events, actually – is any indication, evil nature wins as often as good.
One of the movie’s memorable moments comes when Nux, a young, naive War Boy – his head filled with dreams of glory, barreling across the desert, surrounded by carnage – plunges into an apocalyptic sandstorm shouting “Oh, what a day. What a lovely day!”
Exiting the theater, I overheard someone comment that Nux symbolized a Taliban fighter. Possibly, but I think he’s us at our very worst, heedlessly storming ahead into the unknown and danger, reveling in the spectacle of it all and not caring what it means.
It’s not a stretch to say a culture that lines up for iPhones or Air Jordans would, if driven to the brink, kill for food.
“Mad Max” walks a fine line. It shows our worst cultural excesses while reveling in them in beautiful, poetic, glorious fashion. All while wearing a shit-eating grin.
My Apple Watch is quite literally the most nicely made thing that I own.
While it might not have the heritage and mechanical engineering of a Rolex, it has the feel: a smooth, heavy ingot of the watch itself and a lovely stainless link band crafted to what seems like aerospace tolerances.
The software has that same general fit and finish, too. It’s a device that just feels good in all ways.
Well, all ways but …
I am left-handed, like 10 percent of people in the world, Ned Flanders, and five out of seven of our most recent presidents. This poses a problem on a device that depends so much on inputs from hardware – a “digital crown” scrolly-spinny thing and a “friends” button.
Apple’s design solution for this hardware shortcoming is to suggest left-handed people wear their watch upside down like Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster.
The overall effect is that a company that is obsessive about sweating details of their products completely punted.
The problem is subtle, but with the crown in the upper right, a user’s fingertips rest on their wrist to steady their hand as their index finger rolls the digital crown like a tiny mousewheel. For lefties, this is a more awkward motion.
Setup is also strange. I took my watch from what is, to be honest, exquisitepackaging where it was lovingly nestled like a Faberge egg, strapped it to my wrist, and was greeted with uhhh … wait, what?
The pairing process was also upside down, and it took at least a couple setup screens to get to the screen orientation menu. Annoying, yes, but perhaps necessary for technical reasons.
Once you actually tell the watch which way you want it oriented, the software doesn’t adapt. The watch OS has small scroll bar that appears next to the digital crown to both show position and to signal users to scroll.
When the watch’s orientation is changed, this scroll bar stays in the upper right instead of appearing next to the crown. You can see it here next to the zero.
With this signal missing, I found myself fumbling around trying to figure out how to make adjustments to the watch face. It was finally made clear – a ha! You spin the digital crown – when I found an image of the watch face with the scrollbar and crown in the correct orientation.
All of this confusion is strangely un-Apple-esque. It’s reminiscent of Mac OSX Yosemite “dark mode,” which was poorly implemented and suffered from display glitches, blacked-out menus, missing alpha channels and other junky half-assedness.
Us lefties have two options. We can wear the watch in a right-handed orientation on our right wrist – but now the microphone is on the wrong side – or wear it upside down and ignore the UX shortcomings.
Complaining about non-lefty friendly design in what is basically a luxury good seems small compared with the actual danger of, say, a lefty using a right-handed skill saw. But left-handed design in all devices is important.
The watch itself is a wonderful device. Dwelling on this UX problem might make it seem like I think it is not. It really is the kind of product that only Apple can make.
That praise still comes with a “but.” I just don’t like to wear an upside-down watch.
One of the most poignant lines in all pop music I find in Weezer’s disposable ditty Island in the Sun.
The band caught a lot of criticism when the song came out. People said it sounded like Sugar Ray. That’s a fair criticism, musically. But I find the song more meaningful than anything on the soul-baring Pinkerton album.
Frontman Rivers Cuomo spent years battling crushing depression – the “put tinfoil on your windows and never leave your apartment for years” type. The hardcore type.
Wanting to be on an “island in the sun” isn’t just about a holiday week in the tropics. When he sings “We’ll never feel bad anymore,” it’s his deepest wish as well as one of life’s most impossible tasks.
How can you never feel bad any more? Truth is, you can’t.
I’m not actually here to critically re-evaluate mid-period Weezer. Earlier this week I wrote a short (for me) blog post about the first real day of spring – sunny, warm, flowers blooming, leaves finally on the trees.
Walking down a lovely sun-dappled street with tree limbs sagging with blossoms, it just felt good. I wanted to write about that. So, I did.
I caught some good-natured guff from friends about “what have you done with the real Putney!?” And, no, my site wasn’t hacked by Pollyanna.
Hopefully the people who read it were on metaphor alert because it feels like, at least for now, winter is over.
For me, 2014 was an extremely rough year. I won’t bore you with details, but I came out of it thinking differently about happiness.
Namely, that happiness isn’t a state, but something that you get for a while. You don’t really own it. It’s like it’s on loan, but it’s not even that, really.
I liken it to money.
Twelve-year-old David couldn’t imagine the amount of money I have in my bank account on payday. Middle-aged me can’t imagine how little of that is left right before the next payday rolls around.
I don’t “have” money. I just passes my way temporarily.
That’s happiness for most people. You get it … for a while. You get to use it while you’ve got it.
And, the only way you can enjoy it – really enjoy it – is to traverse the tough times. After Boston’s cold, frozen wasteland of a winter, that bursting, blooming street somehow feels more special, like it was earned.
Right now just feels like a moment for me – an ephemeral spring day.
