Impostor

So, I went to the Apple store today to get a car charger and case for my iPod. Every time I’m in there, I feel like I’m perpetrating a lie. I feel like an impostor. I feel like somehow they’re going to know that I’m not really a Mac user. Somehow they’re going to know that I’m really a Windows user and that usually, I can be called on to defend Windows and attack Macs. Then, they’ll either try to convert me or maim me. I know Mac users are supposed to be the happy, think “different” people, enjoying their iLives to the fullest with their pristine white computers and matching peripherals, but seriously, they’re frightening fanaticism about Macs sometimes leads me to believe that if given the right provocation, they will attack.

Of course, there’s part of me that’s almost asking for it. I’m in there, I’m buying accessories, I’m blending in and then I have to shoot my mouth off as if to prove to anybody who might have thought otherwise that I am not a Mac fanatic or a even a Mac user. “Uh, iPod for WINDOWS please. That’s right– I am not a subscriber to your grammatically incorrect mantra of ‘think different’!”

Case in point: my conversation with the guy at the register.

“You have the old iPod, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, just making sure because these accessories only work with the old iPod.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just trying to buy them up before they’re not available anymore.”

“I know what you mean, but hey, it’s okay. It still works right?” (smiles at me to communicate that it’s okay I have the decrepit, clunky, not-so-mini first generation 5 GB iPod as long as it still works)

“Yeah, it works. You know, my battery still works.”

I don’t know why I needed to point out (passive aggressively) that they’ve managed to screw over so many people with their shoddy batteries on the second generation iPods, but there you go, I did it. I can’t help myself. Maybe Windows users really are evil.

RIAA continues fight while new company tries paradigm shift

Here’s two interesting articles. The first is on the newest wave of lawsuits the RIAA has filed against alleged copyright infringers:

Music Industry Sues Hundreds Over Piracy

ISPs and the RIAA go head to head yet again. Interestingly enough, there hasn’t been much news about lawsuits against college students– and subpoenas for universities– lately. Perhaps picking on young, college students and non-profit educational institutions wasn’t doing much for the RIAA’s warm and fuzzy appeal?

The second article is on a new company called Magnatune. When you do a Google search on the name, you get their Web site as the top hit with the tag line “try before you buy MP3 music.” I swear to God I said the same thing the other day. And when you read more about the company, it gets even spookier:

Apple’s iTunes might not be only answer to ending piracy

Oh, and by the way, if the RIAA is losing so much money from illegal file-sharing, how do they have so much money to be filing so many subpoenas and lawsuits in so many different states?

Breasts

Breasts. Our culture is fascinated with them. Small, large, real, fake. There are a thousand reasons by which we try to explain our fascination with them– our early attachment to the breasts of our mothers, our obsession with sex– but, how do you explain the special relationship women feel with their own breasts? As much as my own breasts bother me sometimes– they make it difficult to find clothes that fit, they make my back hurt, they often bring uninvited attention on me– they are mine and they are part of who I am, what I am. Whether fairly or unfairly, they have shaped who I am and what I am. On good days, I flaunt them proudly and rest assured in the fact that they are real and big and beautiful. On bad days, I cross my arms over them and hope that no one notices and struggle through back aches and the never-ending search for clothes that fit. It is a strange love/hate relationship I have with these silly breasts.

And in some ways, breasts really are silly. In this modern day of baby formula and bottles and plastic nipples, breasts are, for the most part, non-essential and most of the time, non-functional. If anything, society places an unwarranted value on breast size and beauty, encouraging both men and women to judge women (and the men they are associated with) by them and women to place their own self-esteem in them. They are, at the end of the day, purely cosmetic and yet, a woman’s breasts hold an incredible place in her definition of who she is and how she carries herself, whether consciously or subconsciously. And perhaps this is why the threat of breast cancer haunts us. While there are countless life-threatening diseases that affect both men and women, including breast cancer, the effect of breast cancer on women is such a peculiar phenomenon because of the special relationship women have with their own breasts. In America, a woman dies of breast cancer every twelve minutes– a tragedy that we must work and fight against because everyday, more and more women experience the shock of finding that first lump or the anxiety of having a biopsy or the pain of hearing an unfortunate diagnosis. Everyday, how many women are faced with the loss of one or both of their breasts?

Men have no real counterpart through which they may understand this phenomenon– this phenomenon of a cosmetic loss that can be so life-changing. Yes, men can and do contract breast cancer as well, but even after a mastectomy, the change is not nearly as pronounced as for women and a man’s breasts do not hold nearly as dear a place for a man as they do for women. And so, once again, we are reminded that men and women are equal, but still different.

Outside of the threat to our actual lives, when we are faced with breast cancer and the prospect of losing one or both breasts, we are faced with a greater loss than just to our physical appearance. Even if a woman was to opt for reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy and thus, not be faced with a significant change in physical appearance, the loss of one or both breasts is a deeply personal and psychologically traumatizing experience. It is the loss of a part of ourselves that has shaped how others have looked at us and how we have looked at ourselves and how we have defined ourselves, even if it is just to say that my body looks like this and this is how my body moves and this is how I move in my body and when you look at me, you see this. Suddenly, we are different and it doesn’t not affect us in the same way that losing a functional part of us would– if we were to lose a limb or a sense– but it does affect us deeply and truly.

Things I learned at MacWorld

I managed to make it to the final day of MacWorld in San Francisco and after a day of walking around and looking at all the exhibits, if I never see the new iPod mini ad again, it will be too soon. I mean, they only released it a few days ago, but somehow all of San Francisco is plastered with the ads. And the whole time I was at MacWorld, I never actually managed to see the stupid thing. (I personally think it’s a rip off– for $50 more and a negligibly larger footprint, you can get more than three times the storage capacity.)

But I did learn a few things after wandering around the exhibit halls of Moscone Center:

Apple Locks. If Apple is going to continue to target the education market, this is important. Higher education institutions (colleges and universities) face the unique predicament of providing public, but still secure computer clusters and because of Apple’s big love affair with educational institutions, many of these clusters are stocked with Macs. At Stanford, personal computer theft is extremely low (it usually only occurs when somebody leaves a computer out in the open with an invisible bow and sign saying “Take Me”), but public computer theft is a frequent problem. Universities all over the country have been hacking together solutions, from a combination of padlocks and bike chains to actual custom computer locks, but they often either A) don’t work that well and/or B) require damaging the equipment’s casing to attach them (by fusing metal plates onto the casing) and/or C) don’t secure peripherals. Stolen mice and keyboards are probably our biggest problem at Stanford, but there are plenty of cases where somebody puts in the sizable amount of time and effort to pry off metal plates and cut cables. These little Apple Locks are custom built for the Mac towers, securing each computer and the peripherals without damaging the case, and are relatively inexpensive as well.

Continuity of design. I usually believe that it shouldn’t matter what vendor/company you buy a particular gadget from– you should simply buy the best gadget for you and your price range. But, I have to admit that if you were so inclined and ended up buying all of your gadgets from Apple, while you’re home or office might look like it’s out of Space Odyssey 2001, you would have continuity of design. On top of the gadgets, you could also get come Mac-compatible furniture (when did furniture become platform specific?), like this desk for the new iMac.

Apple is still a little confused. They have so little of the market share in most of their product lines, but the people at Apple are still trying to make products for a thousand different markets– consumer electronics (iPod), personal computers (iMac), commercial servers (XServ), and more. I get that they’re trying to create this whole “iLife” concept (and can I just mention how much I am annoyed by things that are named after the medium through which they are delivered– “i” or “e” anything), but the whole conflicted hype around Mac OS X reflects their confusion. Macs have historically been appealing to the computer novice, the not-so-technically savvy, because they were, theoretically, supposed to be easier to use, easier to maintain, more secure (kind of), etc. With OS X, the people at Apple have basically thrown on a shiny new interface to Unix to make it accessible to everyone. While cool initially, people who appreciate and/or know how to use Unix end up opening up a terminal window or X session most of the time anyway and people who don’t know how to use Unix never end up using any of the useful Unix features and end up having to re-learn how to use a Mac anyway.

In any case, at the end of the day, I guess it’s nice to see that despite having less than ten percent of the market share, Mac users are still just so excited to be Mac users. Part of me believes that a lot of that enthusiasm is really just about rooting for the underdog. Nevetheless, even in the face of all that Mac-frenzy, I proudly broke out my Dell laptop in the middle of the MacWorld Internet cafe to check my email and surf the Web.