Category: Random

Random consumer-action week on plasticbag.org continues today with a shout-out to my colleague Matt Webb, who has been having considerable trouble with his no-longer quite so new Powerbook 12″. More specifically he’s having considerable trouble with Apple’s replacement and repair policies. He received the machine on Apil 30th, it went wrong on the 12th of May and he’s been trying to get it fixed pretty much ever since. That’s a full two months of effort during which he’s gone through Apple’s diagnostic tests, not had his computer picked up, had the machine kept by Apple for 28 days and then had it returned to him with precisely the same problem he started off with.

No. I’ve had people not call me back, an official complaint ignored, kept in the dark about time estimates, my machine sitting in a repair center for a month and not even picked up for 2 weeks. I’m not going through that again.

Customer services open at 9am Monday morning. I’ve talked with them before, they obey The System. They can’t do anything. In fact there’s no-one who can. If I don’t do what The System says, there’s nothing they can do. Enough. I’ve dealt with a broken product, tried to be a good Apple user and done what they asked. Enough. I’ve been writing down the time and length of phone calls to Apple, and what they’ve said, for the last month and a half. I’ve got the names of the people who haven’t called me back.

Enough with official channels.

I want a new computer, one that works, and I want it not in a month, but now, as it should have been to begin with. I want an apology. If it were possible, I’d want the days I’ve spent on this back, because the time this has cost me, on the phone to Apple, doing tests, moving things around,is now worth more than the machine itself.

Both Matt and I are tremendous fans of Apple computers, Apple UI and the innovation that comes out of Cupertino. But this has been happening now for months. Just from watching it happen, I’ve found myself turning from a rabid Mac evangelist to someone who wouldn’t want to risk inflicting this kind of insane process on anyone. My mother has been thinking of getting a new laptop – and I’ve been trying to move them to a Mac. But I can’t put them through this kind of thing? Do the right thing, Apple! Bloody sort yourselves out!

I linked to this the other day in the linklog, but it occurred to me that maybe I should do a kottke and pull out my contribution to Phil’s What Webloggers are reading post and stick it up here just in case anyone’s interested:

I’m currently reading Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, which I was slightly dreading but now would highly recommend. After that I was hoping to muster the enthusiasm to have another stab at the last half of Larry Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. The arguments aren’t new to me, but I thought I should probably go back and read the man himself. I really need to start reading more fiction again. For a start, I need to catch up with my Neal Stephenson — I’ve not read The Confusion or Quicksilver yet. But I’ll probably end up trawling through the various social software related bits of social science that I’ve been meaning to read for ages (Schelling, Goffman, Olson, Hall) and bunking off occasionally to grab a bit of Kim Philby’s My Silent War. I’ve become a bit obsessed with the whole Cambridge Spy thing since starting work at Broadcasting House.

So Ben and Mena and Loic have been in London for meetings and a few of us managed to get together and hang out with them for a bit. We’ve got Ben drinking warm flavoursome beer, Mena puffing away on cigarettes in pubs and Loic’s been trying to run over small children with his push trolley. We even got to roam around Television Centre with them a bit today – Mena making a particularly fetching weather presenter.

Loic took some pictures too:

• Arriving in London
• A really nasty picture of me looking like I have a comb-over
• Mena posing with cigarette
• Mena presenting the weather

Much-loved weblogger, ex-colleague, dim-sum consuming, ultra-tall super-geek Phil Gyford got a well-deserved high-five today from the Guardian today in the online supplement (Man of the Moment). Much deserved, old chap! You are the r0X0r!

“It hadn’t really bothered me until it launched and everyone kept telling me what a big commitment it was,” he says. At the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference last year, Clay Shirky, the respected web expert, said that he realised weblogs had a future because of Gyford’s 10-year commitment to the Pepys site. He seems taken aback that others might look to him as a shining example as what is good about the internet, but his admirers are legion. “Phil’s one of the few people in this industry who produces much more than he promises; the complete opposite of the loud new media bullshitter,” says one friend. “He not only has the savvy to understand and build complex projects … but the motivation to see them through and keep them going for years.”

Over the last two weeks I have bought 53 songs from the iTunes Music Store. I didn’t expect to buy any. I just get bored easily and then I’m there, mucking around, roaming around, desperately looking for some new exciting way to throw money away. And yes – it’s true that there’s a fairly limited selection of music on the store and that is a considerable problem (of the five hundred and fifty odd songs that my iTunes stash considers to be “Five Star”, only 135 are anywhere on the store that I can find (Music Store link: One Hundred Pounds of Plastic Perfection). But despite the limited selection, if you dig around it is more than possible to find some really good old classic stuff (The Slits: I Heard it Through the Grapevine) or stuff you’ve discovered from Audioscrobbler (Modest Mouse’s Float On) or really interesting cover versions (Ryan Adams’ Wonderwall or (for geeks) They Might be Giants’ Whe Does the Sun Shine). And then there’s all that stuff that you listened to when you were a teenager or a kid and realistically you can’t just go out and buy it because that would be really embarrassing, but you can just download it and – it’s not the same as buying it, OK. Which I think excuses some of the cheesier things that I’ve bought (cough – the shame). And then there’s the watching something on TV and just going, “Well I kind of like it, and it’s only 79p…” (Music from the OC How Good it Can Be). And the odds and sods of Classical Music that the store actually excels in providing… Like when I needed to listen to Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz about million times at work a couple of weeks back.

Okay – I admit it. The iTunes UK Music Store UK may have opened up a few really good songs for me, but it’s also almost forced me to download about a million really cheesy bits of crap. You guys have to save me. Have you found any hidden gems?

You go away for two days and all hell breaks loose. But then again, who cares – it’s someone else’s hell, right? Completely randomly and spontaneously on Wednesday I decided that I’d go up and visit my family for a couple of days to try and get some mental perspective. Two days with my brother and beautiful views and use of a car and some decent food and totally quiet sleeping environments. Terrifyingly calming. See if you can guess the common feature of the following photos:

That’s right! They don’t have any bloody fucking people in them! Arriving back in London on a Saturday afternoon in Midsummer was like being stuck in a bloody battery farm after being free range. I’m finding it harder and harder to deal with all .. the .. bloody .. morons .. milling around London at two miles an hour, holding hands while walking about three feet apart from each other, glancing in each other’s eyes longingly and casually swinging their pastel shopping bags around while behind them fifty or sixty people are stuck at their pedestrian snail’s pace – each and everyone thinking so loud it must be practically audible, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?! And would there be a jury in the land who would convict me if I pulled out a sword right now and ran you all through?!”

Weird day. Really good bits. Really tiring bits. Feel slightly washed out and exhausted. Can’t tell if I’m a big drama queen or not. Met the new Director General of the BBC today. Launched a site and stuff. More on the important bits tomorrow. Question of the moment: Should you be stressed in stressful situations or should you be calm through them? Personal theory – stress gives you power and if corralled and put into your service is fairly useful. Not sure I’m correct. If I’m wrong, I’m going to have to restructure my belief system a lot. Other question: What do people do when they’re not working?

Guess what! Light at the end of the tunnel! Give me a few more days… Just a few more days… Then I can do stuff again! Like write things on my weblog, look after my community, take days off, have a haircut, clean up my flat, organise a holiday! Just had my first weekend in about two months where I don’t feel under pressure or stressed, and it’s practically over and I don’t feel anywhere near calm or relaxed, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did this time last week and I’m thinking that maybe it’s the beginning of a less frantic period. I’m looking forward to being part of the world again.

So anyway, I signed up for Gmail a while back and basically I don’t really use it even though it’s pretty well assembled and has some nice features and now I’ve been given three invitations but everyone who I know who wants an account already has one. I imagine the big craze for offering people enormous gifts and proposing amorous liasons in exchange for One Gigabyte of Full-On E-mail Pleasure has passed, but if you can think of a reason why I should invite you rather than just making three new accounts with funny names, then post a comment below or chuck me an e-mail to my fairly guessable normal e-mail address (hint: it starts tom@) and I’ll see what I can do…

[Update: I’m afraid all three invitations have now gone. As soon as I get any others I will post them up and people can make a case for why they should get one. Sorry if I didn’t send one to you. It’s not personal…]

Second update: I got another five invitations this morning and have given away four of them to some of the other people who contacted me about them either on this post or by e-mail. That means I have one more left if anyone out there wants it. Yet again – make a good case and I’ll give it to you. I’m adding one condition now – if you get an account and eventually get the ability to give out invitations, you have to give away at least one of those invitations to someone who says something funny on the internet. You can’t give em all to friends. I have no way of enforcing this, of course, but I will consider you a person without honour if I found out you have wilfully ignored your obligations.

That period before a launch is always stressful. This time is no exception. It’s occupying my entire head almost 24/7 no matter whether I try and leave work on time or whether I’m there for twelve or fourteen hour days. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s just there in my head and it probably will be until a couple of weeks after it’s finally launched. C’est la vie. It’s the nature of the beast.

In real life, of course, people can sense when you’re busy and don’t feel particularly upset if you aren’t able to give them the time that you would like to. They might not be thrilled about it of course, but they understand. But the signals that I can give off in public through my weblog are less clear. Has he just abandoned the thing? No. Why doesn’t he have anything interesting to say anymore? Well, I do! Probably more than ever at the moment. I just can’t find the headspace to work with to write them down. Why isn’t he commenting on that thing that’s so obviously one of his core interests? Well, it’s because I’m not commenting on anything – the only creative thing I’m able to do outside work at the moment is doodle in Illustrator.

What I need is some way of actually ambiently reflecting my personal weather – without all that clunkiness of actively choosing states of mind. What I actually need is some way of representing that I’m just really really behind… A first suggestion – some way of representing the number of unread posts I have in NetNewsWire at any given moment (currently way over six hundred). Except that my path of posting tends to be more circuitous than that. NetNewsWire posts get opened in browser tabs if they look interesting, read thoroughly and then (if they’re not something I want to follow-up upon) they get immediately closed. The number of open tabs reflects pretty much exactly the number of things I actively want to talk about at any given moment. If there are lots open, it probably means that I have a lot I want to write about and no time to do it in. Except that doesn’t work either, because in addition to the six hundred things in NetNewsWire I haven’t filtered and the fifty tabs I have open at the moment, I also have four folders in my bookmarks called “State of Play 1-4” that were the sum total of all the things I wanted to talk about and had open in Safari but then had to store quickly so that I could install a Max OSX update. That’s another two hundred discussions I really want to get involved in – that I want to contribute to. And then there’s the four or five little projects I have on the side that I’ve been trying to write up but have been incapable of doing so.

So six hundred unfiltered posts, fifty open tabs representing fifty filtered posts to talk about, two hundred bookmarks representing two hundred even more filtered conversations to get into, plus four or five multi-page documents (one around 6,000 words) that have been growing in the sidelines that I’m unable to push out into the world in any effective way. That is the index of how busy and behind I feel. That is the measure of my total absence of cerebral RAM. Do you now understand why I’m not posting that much?