I’ve spent years reading and listening to the Mac experience. I’ve never actually bought a Mac, but I was interested in some of its software and how cool it looked. The exercise was mostly academic; I didn’t care for paying for the privilege of Mac ownership, and the Windows alternatives worked well enough despite the clunkier interface.
When I jumped over to LOLapps, I figured it may be time to try my hand on the supposedly superior system (). I almost bought one for myself, but abruptly realized that I don’t need multiple personal computers in addition to a work laptop. Plus, my gaming needs still demand more-flexible PC-compatiable hardware.
Yet another lesson in the law of unintended consequences, the malleability of statistics, and the stupidity of robots.
Courtesy of the Counterize II plugin for Wordpress, I’ve been trying to analyze traffic charts like this for the past few months:
Could it be that, in addition to the lack of coherence embodying this site’s namesake, I’m also providing five times more value to my readers? Maybe MSN Live () is providing subtle commentary on the value of incoherence?
I’m moving up the software ladder. Nine months ago I was writing desktop applications for Factset; three months ago I was writing websites for Tagged; and now, I write Facebook applications for LOLApps. This trajectory predicts a soon to-be career in creating tiny web widgets and, inevitably, living off of single lines of code.
With every shift up the ladder, it seems like the pace kicks up a notch, and change comes about much more rapidly. The programmin’ is also a bit easier, but there are more technologies and layers of software to worry about, out here on the guzzlin’ edge of the web. And of course, the competition gets heavier and stiffer.
I had recently finished the Hong Kong drama series The Drive of Life (歲月風雲). An epic 60-episode production (each show is an hour long), the shooting primarily done in a trio of cities - Hong Kong, Beijing, and Vancouver - previously unheard of for a television series. It covers the multi-decade history of a wealthy business family through the Asian and dotcom financial crises to modern times, through relationships and business successes and failures, and the complex character interplay during tough times.
The show also spends significant time celebrating Chinese ingenuity; not a surprise considering it is sponsored by the Chinese government to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to sovereign Chinese rule, but some of its influence is blatant and distasteful propaganda and tarnishes an otherwise excellent show. I wonder if anybody watching the show really believes in the stated convection of the characters’ patriotism and love of all things Chinese.
It has been a while since I got hooked to a Chinese drama series, so it took only a week (something like 7-8 shows a day) for me to fly through the DVD’s. While the story was captivating and acting superb, I can’t help but be reminded of all the clichés by drama series since the beginning of time, plot devices overused to the point of being offensive in their dismissal of viewer intelligence:
Sometimes the world spins just a little too fast.
And we’re all here playing catchup. Well, that’s what I thought anyway: the faster I go through life, the easier it is to make up for lost time and experience everything - enrichment through efficiency.
Except it’s not all about efficiency, and I’m slowly learning the folly of rushing through things. It’s not necessarily a cliched argument that I “can’t spend the time to appreciate the finer things in life”, but it’s simply that a lot of things just can’t be rushed. In an ideal world, going twice as fast means finishing in half the time, but in the real world going twice as fast means spending twice the time fixing whatever you screwed up the first time around.
RMA’s are such a hassle; spend hours convincing a customer rep. the product you bought in pristine condition imploded, and many shipping adventures later hope that you get a working replacement which isn’t too worn out from its previously unsatisfied owner (i.e., refurbished).
Sometimes, though, the process is so easy you wonder just how much they’re making selling it to you the first time around.
The last time this happened, I spent a few dollars on a cheapo flying saucer thingy which did not take crashes well; the styrofoam split after a particularly vicious encounter with a cubicle closet. Fortunately, customer service turned out to be a pleasant experience as they immediately offered to send out a new one on 3-day shipping at no charge and to trash the broken one since it was, after all, around $1 of construction material and electronics.
