Author: Francisco

Feeling Like A Chick on iTunes

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Originally written on Apr 1st, 2005.

Tonight I sat down and spent some of my last free Pepsi iTunes and I have to say that one of the most addictive features of the iTunes Store is the iMixes. These are collections of songs that iTunes users have put together and shared. It’s a great way to find songs that you never would have known about otherwise, and it also feels personal. It reminds me of the days back in high school, where I would let a fellow classmate listen to what was playing on my Walkman. You know before the iPod, there were these things that played audio tapes. Yeah, it is kind of ancient. I’ve had at least 30 different Walkmans though and only one iPod, so I’m definitely Old School. Anyway, back to iMixes… it sort of does make MP3 personal, cause you share your tastes with complete strangers and is not that what enjoying music is suppose to be about, you know the tribal dance, the unity of the beat, the connection to the same notes.

I was listening to this one iMix, The Great Cover Up Conspiracy, and they were all coversongs done by mostly women and I thought of my friend KJ and how amazing Tori Amos is. Her version of Enjoy the Silence is just haunting, it gives the song more meaning than the original ever did for me. There is a similar rendition of Comfortably Numb that hits better than the Pink Floyd version too; it does not rock, but it feels really deep. Sheryl Crow’s Gold Dust Woman has some nice guitar work, but by now Stevie Nick’s tenaciously harsh vocal is so ingrained in me, that I can’t forget it even if I tried to.

Needless to say I feel like a chick after hearing this iMix, and that’s just a horrible feeling for a guy.

Firefox The New Standard

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In the last couple of weeks, there’s been much trash talking about how Firefox is doomed to lose to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Most of the talk has centered on things like Firefox not having enough servers to push automated patches and the way extensions and third-party add-ons break with nightly builds and so on, then there is the debate of opensource even being a real option for business use. There is also an urgency by the industry for big business to take over Firefox like IBM and other companies are pushing Linux, of course the most likely candidate is Google, who has both the money and the programmers to really take Firefox to new heights. But all this ignores the roots of Firefox and why millions of users are now running Firefox instead of IE, namely that Firefox is all about individual perfection.

For those pundits who like to marry Google and Firefox, think about Apple’s Safari and how different Firefox and Safari are evolving. It is no secret that Apple is working hard on Safari and that it is a fine browser, and surely Apple has both the programmers and the funds available to make Safari successful, but it is also apparent that Apple has very different definitions of what makes a browser successful, as would Google if they took over Firefox. Safari has to be a show piece of everything MacOS X can do, it has to integrate and use OS X technologies like the universal Address Book, Keychain, and Quartz. Even though Apple does take user feedback for Safari and the rendering engine for Safari is opensource, the rest of the browser is not, in essence the fate of Safari is clearly in Apple’s hands and no one elses. This is the same path that Microsoft has taken with Internet Explorer.

Firefox is opensource and with it so is the openness of not only the code, but the entire community around it. The extensions and add-on themes have enabled Firefox to be something which neither Safari or IE can be, a browser you can modify for your own personal use. This makes Firefox the most adoptable of all browsers and it also fills the needs of not only geeks who want to run beta software and theme their apps, but also businesses who have a vested interest in modifying the code they use. In the end, Firefox does not have to have 90% market share to be successful, it already is, because like MacOS X, like Photoshop, and like Microsoft Word, it fills a niche that it did not create, but which it clearly competes very well in. Having Google take over Firefox would only damage the project, because it would sidetrack it into being a competition of features with Microsoft, which it honestly can’t win. If we let Firefox progress on its own, we will have a browser that does what it is suppose to do, and with the added flexibility to customize as much as we want.

I doubt Microsoft or any other company for that matter could deliver such a product and be so open as to let its users try out nightly builds. Firefox already has a market and a user base, and that is what makes software successful.

There Is No Evil, Only Boredom

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It is part of my philosophical skepticism, that makes me doubt the existence of evil. I mean what really is evil? An act, a desire, a crime against humanity, or perhaps our own misguided ego who can’t phantom itself as being nothing more than the center of the universe? All things are relative. I can see myself as the world revolving around me, but if I could see myself from the outside, I know this conclusion to be false. This idea, that you can escape your self and see yourself as your true self, or see the truth that you are not the center of the universe is suppose to incite empathy toward others. The whole, I know truth, because truth is me, and I know my true self, so I now know truth, is both the start of enlightenment and in some cases the end of it.

Life is a constant battle with ourselves. I am my greatest enemy and my only savior. When I stop ignoring my ego and instead acknowledge it, I am no longer blind to the truth, but if I give in to it wholely I will no longer know truth.

Philosophy aside though, evil to me is when an act personifies selfishness or lack or empathy on such a degree, that there is little doubt that there was ever any positive intention.

Evil though does not just happen, it manifests itself as something else. Most of the time, idleness and boredom are the root of it. Almost everything that people today refer to as evil is really just selfishness or boredom, or both. It is a progression, we can think of the end result as evil, I suppose, but evil is not really the source.

Most of the time, we use the term to distance ourselves from things we no longer want to associate with. The opposite of empathy is often what we feel when we attach the term to someone or something. In a sense, evil is suppose to be alien, the thing we tell ourselves that we don’t know. It gives us comfort to feel this way.

However, this is not true, most of the time we do know, we do empathize, we do see how such a thing can be. Even if our ego refuses to see the world as anything but relative, we all know boredom, we know that feeling, and we know that situation, we can also see the progression of it.