March 2012 Archives

Dear Mr. Selak,

Please stay away from me.

Sincerely yours, Bill

“$100 billion is a lot of money. It’s so much money that we have decided to give everybody in the U.S. an iPod Touch. Nah. Just kidding.

“It’s so much money we could give every Apple employee about $6 million and close the company down. Ha! That’s a good one. Still just kidding.

“It’s so much money that we have decided to move all of our manufacturing capacity back into the United States. We intend to slowly transition the manufacturing from manual workers to robots where possible and intend to form a new school specifically for the training of the workers who will program and maintain them. We will also be teaching engineers at this school how to design for manufacturability using domestic labor, skillsets and robots.

And any company can send students to our school. This step will help them move their production back to the United States, too.

“We expect that this dividend will be far more substantial in value than a one-time cash gift to our already-on-paper-richer-than-God shareholders.

“Thank you, and have a nice day.”

I wonder if Lucky Charms’ claim of being magically delicious has been evaluated by the FDA.

At least when I bought a TV, it was compatible with all networks. Now, my TV is only compatible with whatever box is plugged into it, and with that, whatever client player happens to be on that box.

The day is coming when we have to have one box for iTunes content, one box for Amazon content, one box for Vudu content, one for Hulu, one for…

It’s time for this madness to stop.

I think cereal dust is probably better than pixie dust.

Especially if it makes up for lost sleep.

I’ve had enough.

Today, I unsubscribed from DaringFireball.net, John Gruber’s platform for superb Apple analysis which he, alas, unabashedly hijacks too often for support of non-tech, political ideals.

Instead, I’m throwing my support behind an Apple-centric tech blog by Shawn Blanc by subscribing with an annual membership. Whether I may agree with Shawn’s ideals or not, I appreciate that he works just as hard as Gruber, produces commentary just as insightful as Gruber’s, has made no attempt at promoting his not-related-to-tech ideals on his tech blog, and has a first name. He has even gone so far as to separate his largely non-tech Tools and Toys blog from his main blog as it doesn’t really pertain to the main themes of ShawnBlanc.net.

My hat’s off to Shawn for this level of professionalism and self-restraint. God knows it’s only too easy to (ahem) start a blog for one purpose and (ahem) use it for all kinds of other stuff (ahem). (At least I’m obvious about it. It says it right there in the header, “A curious mix of conservative values and liberal computing.”)

I’ve read Gruber’s writings for a long time and he made no promises to me not to push unrelated garbage out with the good stuff. But like others, I’ve gotten tired of the non-tech content of DaringFireball.net. Granted, having paid nothing to Gruber for his content, I got a pretty good deal. But the feeling like he’s joined the Hollywood bimbos and blowhards who use the gift of fame for promotion of their own ideologies leaves me feeling just a bit more disappointed each time a new ad for Obama appears on DF.net.

And yes, it would bother me just as much if he suddenly promoted conservative ideals, too. The same goes for Shawn.

That having been said:

If you want superb Apple analysis with a touch of Kubrick worship, font snobbery (in a good way), and unabashed support of liberal ideals, John Gruber’s your guy.

But if you want superb Apple analysis with a side helping of insightful tech observations and a dash of (yes, I’ll admit it: unrelated) cute baby pictures, go visit ShawnBlanc.net, and throw the guy a few bucks.

And if you want random commentary on random things interspersed with random rants on… anything, keep reading this blog, and spread the word.