Online shared intelligence

Hell has its privileges

So, another day went by, and I am still trying to recover from the mess I described in my last post, about upgrading to Apple OS X Leopard (or was it Leper?) 10.5.2. I have by now gone through the typical curve Stress vs. Time, that goes from suspended disbelief (I am sure this is something minor) to the oh shit moment, to increasing exasperation caudes by the idiocy of brands and the power of the large corporations (that component seems to always be there), to gradual understanding of the causes of the problem, and finally to the sweet and sour process of fixing the mess, with increasing confidence, and (I never did, and I will never do it again) some level of realization of the personal responsibility in the disaster.

 So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

1. That I should always always always run Disk Utility regularly, and *specially* before touching the OS. Think about this: as DU was scanning my system disk (a disk where I intentionally don’t put music collections, or photo collections, or large backups), it reported that it had over 1,009,000 files. That is mind-boggling. Of course, a couple power glitches, a couple dead ends where I turned off the machine, a couple of applications killed while they were processing files, a couple of unplagging of external disks before totally being ejected, and so on, *have to* have caused some damage to the file system. Installing on anything but a pristine disk is calling for trouble. Mea culpa…
2. That I should never trust the brands — Yep, this is not news. But somehow, I still remember the times when the Mac used to find things and fix them before I found out they were broken. I remember messages coming from apps that sometimes made me feel like there HAD to be a little dwarf looking at me from the other side of the screen, or else HOW could the machine know so exactly what I was about to do, or wanted to do? The mac spoiled me, made me feel like I didn’t need to nderstand its complexity, “the rest of us” were not hackers, were just normal people who need the computer, just like me… But something has happenned in the last few years. We gradually gave for granted that the massive complexity of a system that, in minimum loaded state, has 1 Million files, was *managed*, not swept under the rug. Sure, OS X is a great OS, but mother, is it complex. Does that mean that I should just bite the bit and learn all of its details? Not really: for that I have already Windows (and Linux). If Disk Utility is something I need to run before upgrading, please don’t bury that fact in some obscure Read Me file that I am sure is part of the 10.5 DVD. Just run it transparently in the background, fix what you’ve got to fix, so what ya need to do, and be a MAC!
3. iPods and Macs from the same company is a bad idea. I’ve had five iPods so far (gave them all away except the Shuffle, which sits in one of my stereos). The first, I gave away because the second (and a beautiful PC clone that is still my favorite, from creative) made it look clunky. The cost, the use, the mind set of the iPod was so “consumerish” that I didn’t even think about it (the guilt of being a spoiled privileged imperial guard is a different issue). I felt a little screwed by the battery thing, but I didn’t care about been screwed by Apple, after all this was mostly a whim device. I felt a little sour when the useful life of the battery (and the glossy cover) came and went fast. So what, this is just a transitional device…

But the Mac is a different thing altogether. I have tens of thousands of pictures in my Aperture library, all of them dear to me. I have files that go back to Mac Pluses and HP LX 100’s. Thousands of digitized CD’s of which at least 20% I have lost originals for. And so on and so forth. When I work in it, the huge visual real estate of the two 30″ Cinemas is used up to the last corner (I showed my desk to a colleague, who visited me while I was running a market research. He said that the two monitors were an exageration, so I asked him to point me to a screen that did not need to be simultaneously open with the others –or that it wouldn’t distract me hunting for it if it weren’t–, or one that could be made smaller, or one of the visible apps that could be hidden without sacrificing context and awareness, and he couldn’t find waste). The computer is the mirror of my mind, where I manipulate my thoughts as a proxy. It costs a fortune (just the video card that drives the monitors does, an obscene amount of money) because it’s worth a fortune. I don’t want Apple to treat it like an iPod, but unfortunately, more and more, Apple does.

When I bought the laptop from hell, the one that was so hot that even Satan would burn his fingers on it, I ended up returning it for a 15% loss. Talk about a rip off… I challenged the “genius” at the store to keep it on for an hour, and then keep his fingers on top of the upper bar for one minute without raising them, and he declined… “It’s supposed to run hot [Verbatim]“. To add insult to injury, all posts on the Apple support forums that mentioned the word heat, hot, burn, etc, would disappear in less than 2 minutes. Censor a message that says that cover of the iPod gets easily scratched, but don’t hide the ball from the next buyer of a mind mirror…

I don’t know if I will be able to fix the Mac. But I have already invested almost three days (plus the ones I will probably need to invest to reinstall apps, plus data that will disappear, plus the confusion of one more backup that I will never get to delete, etc.). Sure, it’s more powerful, but it’s not a Mac any more.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:20 am and is filed under desktop tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.