Talking to Tom a couple of days ago, I said, “I’ve been spending so much time with your former students, it’s starting to warp the way I think.”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“I mean,” I said, “I find myself thinking things like, ‘I could wire my coffee pot so it turns itself on when I hit ‘sleep’ on my alarm clock.’”
“Yep,” he said. “That’s what happens.”
MacBoo
Part of the pleasure of working with industrial designers is watching the way they interact with stuff — people who make physical products think about those products very differently than most, in the same way I obsess over details of interfaces. I’ve learned so much about how the world around me is made, in the most basic ways, from working with them, listening to them, asking them questions. So it was a delight for me to have my MacBook get delivered to the office and watch the industrial design team examine it like doctors doing a physical.
I did refuse to let the mechanical engineer open it up, even though I count the day that her boss took apart an iPod nano among the more mind-bending experiences I’ve had at this job. But I wanted to take my new computer home in one piece, and I did. I’ve spent the weekend catching up on errands and sleep, and playing with the cool toys on the new computer. Unexpectedly, I have some UI complaints — the new iPhoto I find harder to use than the older version, and switching states in PhotoBooth is totally unintuitive — but overall it’s a pleasure to use.
Best of all, I think the built-in iSight could change the way people interact with their computers: it’s almost impossible not to have fun with it, to want to play with it, and once you get enough of an installed userbase, the opportunities for networked interactions get a whole lot richer. For now, though, I think it makes the relationship with the computer both more intimate and more performative — you want to watch it watching you. And of course it opens up whole new vistas of procrastination…
Further signs of the times
An RSS tool created by an English geek lets me track my new computer, designed in Cupertino, from its origin in China to its destination in New York. And it does so with something resembling grace:
What I love best about the intarweb is, in the end, its humanity — the little touches of humor or elegance in which you see the atavistic traces of the maker’s hand.
(Also, you know, new MacBook. Whoooo!)
What I love best about the intarweb is, in the end, its humanity — the little touches of humor or elegance in which you see the atavistic traces of the maker’s hand.
(Also, you know, new MacBook. Whoooo!)Signs of the times
Said to self, while struggling with a friend’s Kodak PhotoShare post — “Goddammit, why can’t she just use Flickr like a normal person?!?”
There’s a Stein quote for every occasion
Hunting down the airplane quote from yesterday in Everybody’s Autobiography, I found another passage I’d marked out of sheer homesickness when I lived in Ann Arbor:
I also lectured in Brooklyn and that was interesting… because I met Marianne Moore and because an attentive young man accidentally closed the door on my thumb and we had to go into a drugstore to have it fixed. It was dirty the drugstore, one of the few things in America that are dirty are the drugstores but the people in them sitting up and eating and drinking coffee and milk that part of the drugstore that was clean that fascinated me. After that I was always going in to buy a detective novel just to watch the people sitting on the stools. It was like a piece of provincial life in a real city. The people sitting on the stools and eating in the drugstore all looked and acted as if they lived in a small country town. You could not imagine them ever being out in the streets of New York nor the drugstore itself being in New York. I never had enough of going into them.