Month: January 2006

Enter Sanatorium

EditorialsLeave a comment

It’s no secret that I absolutely hated some aspects of my high school education. I have even written letters to former teachers condemning them as terrible examples of educators and stating how I will never forgive them for it either. On one occasion I even had the opportunity to tell them in person just how much of a genius I am today and how their failing me on more than one occasion did nothing to discourage me, but only proved their failure to recognize my superior intellect. I am not saying that all my teachers were hugely inadequate but that many were in fact lacking. In college, I learned just how bad my situation had been, because my school was talked about in Jonathan Kozol’s book: Savage Inequalities. It was nothing short of amazing to have it all in a published book and know that your accusations and rebellious thoughts as a teenager were all vindicated by someone who not only wrote it down but made it available for the world to see. This was my proof of all the crap I put up with in school: the four long years of high school imprisonment. But as good as I felt about being vindicated, I started to feel even angrier about it, because this showed me that people knew exactly what was going on with the Chicago Public School System, and had done nothing about it!

Now today I am a parent, and I still mistrust the school system and its teachers, even though my kids have a better school system. I still associate schools with sanitariums and prisons. When I think of public education I think of brainwashing children. This is the image I get and I can’t help feeling that I am right about this.

Some of my friends tell me that it does not matter cause I have made it and I am better for it. After all I am articulate, intellectual, and damm right knowledgeable. It should not matter. But it does.

Recently I read Paul Graham’s essay: Why Nerds Are Unpopular and it made so much sense. Why I resent teachers and the school system and why I am conflicted between being an intellectual and being a rebellious anarchist.

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I certainly now realize why even kids that have more opportunities than I did, are no better off than I was back in high school. The situations are still the same, it may have been that I had it a little worse than some of the kids I see today, but we both entered the same sanatorium, and we all have to get out of it someday.

Feeling Like A Chick on iTunes

MusicLeave a comment

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

FirefoxLeave a comment

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.