g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

On My Blog Menu:

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Friday, March 12, 2004
12:26 - Portals to the Netherverse
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-03-12

(top) link
Don't miss today's Penny Arcade:



And Tycho is a pretty clear thinker. Reminds me of a few friends of mine:

If you want to coexist with different breeds of geeks, you need to adopt a value-neutral approach to the platforms. So, while there are many conversations one can have regarding different computing methods, I typically do not choose to have them. Gabriel and I no longer discuss God for the same reason - people express themselves via means as divergent as spirituality and operating systems, so as soon as the topic starts to get interesting it invariably becomes personal. Obviously, that has a tendency to occlude rational dialogue. There might have been a point where I had a surplus of energy to invest in philosophical cul-de-sacs. I no longer remember it.

The way Apple projects its brand, however, has nothing to do with the underlying technology. It could not be more divorced from it. So if they want to create largely empty stores staffed exclusively by young hardbodies in ill-fitting t-shirts, it's open season. Its possible that each manifestation of this chain does not resemble the others, that each one is not populated with the scrubbed, tousled young things of the sort one sees in serious teen dramas. You'll forgive me if I don't believe that. I'd say it's far more likely that there is a single Apple Store, connected by a serious of geographically distinct portals.

Got it in one.

Anyway, the dichotomy between how I feel about Apple and how I feel about politics-- the respective philosophies are just about dead opposites, leading me to believe that maybe I like Macs so as to feed my repressed inner activist-- is something that's bugged me under the surface for years now. Naturally I've found myself getting a lot less extreme in my Apple boostering over the past year or two, though it occasionally bubbles up beyond my control. I've had a number of deep conversations with friends about just what it is that I think I'm doing by supporting Apple, while at the same time stumping for free-market industry and natural competitive forces. And honestly I don't know. All the anguished car metaphors or petulant demonstrations of technical superiority don't matter a whit in the absence of market evidence supporting my position. But that hasn't stopped me, and after all the essays and e-mail conversations I'm no closer to understanding it than I was before.

I will note, however, on a pseudo-tangent, that most of the Mac guys I know today used to be big PC gearheads, Linux junkies, Windows gurus, and so on. They loved tinkering around in PC cases-- they lived for it. They knew all the stats of all the video cards and hard drives and motherboards and RAM buses and everything that was on the market; they read AnandTech and Ars Technica and always could be counted on to reel off a ream of advice on putting together a new machine, or whip one up themselves from parts at Fry's in the matter of an afternoon. ...But eventually, the magic and the fun just sort of went out of it; there's only so much fulfillment to be had from overclocking a Celeron or picking jumpers out of the dark cavity of a motherboard under a rat's nest of power connectors or slicing your thumb open on a stamped-sheet-steel case from the dumpster outside the office. Moreover there's only so much romance in hacking the Registry, running virus scanners, tweaking all the interactive desktop settings to come up with the perfect purple-text-on-black gothic color scheme in GNOME or Windows. Eventually one just gets sick of it. And more than one, it seems, has.

Nowadays my friends tend to either buy off-the-shelf PCs from Dell or AlienWare, or buy Macs. I think there's more significance in that than in fussing over brand identity, or even agonizing over whether I'm being politically consistent in all my doings. It's more like, "Well, yeah, we were both right all along. Let's stop all the fussin' and the feudin'."

"...And let's go to the opening of that new Apple Store down at the mall!"


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