Post Dean’s Date Blog Dump
Hmmm…I should be asleep. I have a final in ten hours. I haven’t said anything in a while. I need to yeah…that would be good.
So reading period is done and it’s finals time now. Yay finals…Right. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time working but well, I’ve written on that subject already. I have other things to talk about.
Firstly, Emily came up from Baltimore this past weekend. That was awesome. It had been over a year since we had last seen each other and it felt good just to spend time with her. It was also really surreal having Emily talking to my friends here. It’s just not something I would expect. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since we met in eighth grade.
Seeing Emily has made me realize how I haven’t seen some people in a long time. It’s been a year since I saw the guys from Michigan. Well, minus Joe and Dan. I miss everyone and it’s been too long since we’ve gotten together. I also haven’t seen D. Baum in a long time. It’s funny how just seeing one person makes you think about a lot of others. I was reading on Dan’s site about how he went and visited Rosie in London. Makes me want to travel around and visit friends. Maybe this spring break.
In other news, my iPod is quickly dying. My headphone jack is now getting pretty screwed up. This comes from a flaw in the old headphone design that didn’t make it totally stationary. I’m going to see how long I can go without getting a new one. I’d do it, but well…I don’t have any headphones either.
I am glad that I got the warranty though. The iPod is definitely not designed for longevity. It’s designed to last a while, but not longer than any other computer component these days. It’s unfortunate, because you get really used to having the little sucker, and then it stops working. It’s almost an evil trick. Fortunately, I will not fall to prey to it.
But seriously, I am really leery of the quality of modern day computer components. Most of them are crap. Hard drives aren’t guaranteed for more than a year? Mp3 players with lives of eighteen months? Shouldn’t the quality of the products be a little higher? If this were car equipment, people would be livid. Instead, they just shrug it off. People asked why I paid extra for scsi. I’ll tell you why, the quality of the drive. I don’t want to lose my data. It’s worth it for a drive with added quality. Shoot, I built a raid array based solely on the fact that it would protect data. You just can’t trust this equipment. My parents first computer lasted for six years. The next one lasted three years. A little over two years later, they were buying a new one because the old one was crapping out. I just don’t get it myself.
Speaking of computers, I can now firmly state that I find Apple Computers to be mind numbingly dumb. Sorry, not the hardware, well, a lot of it. The hardware is cool, It’s sleek, it’s shiny, it’s friggen wonderful (except for the mouse, that just has to go). What I can’t deal with is OS X. I just can’t do it. It’s just too aggravating. A semester of digital photo has taught me that the Apple platform really is just fruity and annoying.
First off, the idea of the taskbar is just friggen wonderful. Not the Dock, which is shit, but the Taskbar. Linux has it. Windows has it, Apple doesn’t. Why? They say it’s more intuitive not to. If anyone actually thinks that the Dock is intuitive, then they are obviously working on a different plane of being. I fail to see how not knowing exactly what is open at a quick glance is intuitive. On a taskbar, if a program is open, I see it clearly on the taskbar. On the dock, a small black arrow appears. That’s it. Now, I don’t know, maybe taskbar’s aren’t pretty, but at least I know what is friggen open.
And that’s another thing. What is intuitive about clicking an X on a window and having the program stay running? Nothing. Oh, you closed the document. Um…ok. So if I close all of the documents in a given program, doesn’t that insinuate that I want to close the program? I mean come on, long after all of my documents are close, I obviously want to keep Word open. And it’s such a great idea, keeping it open, especially because if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll still perform actions in a program that doesn’t have any visual representation on the screen beyond a word in the menu bar and a small black triangle on the dock. I’ve spent minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t get a brush in Photoshop to work, only to find out that I wasn’t in Photoshop, but the phantom shell of a program I thought was closed. What gets better, the curser for the Photoshop brush appeared, yet I couldn’t just click into Photoshop. Just stellar design.
What’s better, I know people are going to probably IM me and tell me how elegant the design of OS X is. I’ll be honest, there’s nothing particularly elegant about it. It has windows and title bars. It has some eye candy effects for basic operations. That’s really it. Otherwise, it’s no more elegant than Windows or any of the various Linux desktops. At this point, people who argue the elegance of Mac design are people grasping at straws for why the platform is better than any other platform. We’ve reached a point where all of the OS’s are the same. They all borrow ideas from the others. Well, according to Slashdot, it’s “steal” for Windows, “implement” for Linux”, and “design” for Mac. So yeah.
I’m currently tired, so I’m not going to go into why I hate Apple’s dvd writing feature. Let’s just say drag and drop is only cool if the formats that are used aren’t proprietary.
Alright, I’m out. Man that was long, But I had a lot to say. Anyway, night.
