Month: July 2010

I just read a really, really stupid article about how everyone is clamoring for touchpads (you know, those nasty little inaccurate panels on notebooks) and how nobody likes using a mouse and they’ll be obsolete soon because somebody came out with a NEW even more amazing touchpad. The future, he posited, will be 100% touchpads. It was so smug and wrong-headed I’m not even gonna link to it. The site that it was on doesn’t deserve the six views they would get from me. I used to read their site for occasional tech news, but forget it. They’re dead to me now. If you were to read it, you’d agree with me that it was the dumbest damn article in the history of everything.

And yet the horrible truth is that this guy is a professional writer. He draws a salary for posting that crap. How? Why? Where? (San Francisco, I already knew that one.) This is yet another example of controversy for its own sake, plus the commoditization of writing. Hooray, the site owners cry, we’re making lots of the moneys! Idiocy sells advertising! More stupid! Turn up the dumb!

And LORD is it depressing. Good bloggers are starving in the streets and yet this bozo is suckling happily at the teat of Big Blog. Now there’s a sentence I bet you didn’t expect to read when you got up this morning.

I need to start a website for good writers and responsible journalists. They’ll all starve, of course, but at least they’ll all starve together.

This is a test of me posting to my blog using only my voice in wordpress for my google android phone. Hey not bad. Punctuation could use some work though. Ah well.

One of the “perks” (short for “perrrrks”) of having my own blog is that I can respond to chwads like this guy without having to sign into their site and give them ad revenue, as described in my previous blogging adventure.

So. Already casting aspersions on Google’s incredibly generous ability for people to self-program their smartphones, huh, Mister Big Shot Getting Paid to Spout Stupid Blog Posts Like a Big Smelly Blogwhale? Look. We have incredibly powerful computing devices in our pockets these days, and yet the entry fee to be able to program them for our own use is still pretty darn high (like installing Eclipse, getting the SDK, and having to actually learn and use Java [shudder], among other considerations). Now Google is giving away, for free, a simple system which will bring this ability closer to the realm of less techie users. It’s friendly. It’s easy. It’s almost … Apple, except for the whole thing with “openness” and “giving useful things away” and “selling phones you can touch.” (Ha ha. Zing!)

Anyway, sorry if you can’t see the amazing things this can open up for the future of smartphones. Also, sorry you had trouble learning LOGO. That darn turtle sure can get away from you, can’t it. LEFT 45? More like LEFT BEHIND! (More seriously: LOGO isn’t meant to “turn kids into programmers;” you were asked to play with it to give you a taste of programming so you could see if you liked it. You know, like when you take classes in English and math and science, so you can make an informed decision about whether becoming a journalist is a better fit for you than becoming a janitor, or a sewer worker, or a horse semen taster. [INSERT OBVIOUS JOKE HERE])

I’m a web developer/designer by trade, which in practice means I create sites from concept to planning to development to deployment. That makes me kinda weird all in all, because it means I have to be both a big froo-froo right-brained graphic designer and a heartless technology wonk.

Thus am I a pariah. For instance, I use Windows (XP at work and 7 at home) because it’s loaded with free programming stuff and conversion software undreamt of in the halls of Apple. This simple fact alone makes me some sort of genetic enemy of all the real graphic designers out there. Oh the thin smiles and sad little shakes of the head I get when I talk to designers. They don’t say anything, but you get the undercurrent: You poor, poor man.

I do remember when Adobe was snugly in Apple’s armpit and the designers were justifiably smug about having the best software, and then Adobe deigned to come out with a PC version of their software which was actually more “bugs” than “program.” Apple had the upper hand then for sure. Hey guess when that was. 1996! It’s been 14 years! Adobe actually works great on PC now! Photoshop never crashes! There’s literally no difference between our workflow experiences except that when I maximize a window it actually maximizes, which I prefer anyway because I don’t want to stare at my “hang in there” kitty wallpaper all day.

Meanwhile: since I work in the IT department, I’m the butt of endless jokes about having all this “extraneous” design software on my computer. “Upgrade from CS3?” they scoff. “What sort of self-respecting programmer wants to waste his time making purty pitchers?” Then they hitch up their pocket protectors and swagger out of the room, guffawing, to help someone who somehow managed to run an entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich through their printer.

Aah, I don’t mind. I chose this niche, odd as it is, because I would become extremely bored doing one or the other. A steady diet of programming would grind my brain to a nub, and a constant stream of graphic design or interface design work would suck away my love for life. So I’m a one-man traveling show, able to take a blank computer and return to you a web server full of keeno sites. Hey presto!