What I learned from iTunes

Many many many years ago, I divided my computer time between an Apple and one running Windows (I don't remember who made the computer, because frankly I don't care that much.)  Despite the fact that the two computers were of the same age, the Apple was horribly slow and cumbersome, and while I had to use it, I really didn't enjoy it much.

But, I assumed that things had changed.  So many people, many of whom otherwise seem like reasonable human beings, seem to verge on orgasm when the name of this company is mentioned, that I assumed that things had turned around (and given that now Apple products cost twice as much as everybody else's, people must be buying them for a reason).

So, after many years of avoiding Apple stuff, partly thanks to the above mentioned shit experience, and partly because I hate evangelism of all kinds (even in the massively unlikely offchance that I read an issue of watchtower and felt like it had opened my eyes to how things really were, I wouldn't admit that to a Jehovah's Witness, until they stopped with their ridiculously annoying policy of going round raving about it).  And Apple evangelism seems to me to be of the absolutely worse variety - it's not even of the religious type that aims to save one, it's of the type that ejaculates over a vast multinational corporation enriching itself further.

Bit anyway, I digress (and anyway I've already done that rant). After the Apple avoidance, I ended up, a couple of years ago, acquiring an iPod Touch.  And, I have to say, it was a really good gadget.  Did what it should have done, was very attractive, user friendly, well designed, and frankly - as far as pieces of electronic equipment go - great.  The headphones that came with it were rubbish, which given the price was a bit of a let down, but aside from that I have to say that I liked it.  Very very much in fact.  Perhaps things had changed, and Apple were actually producing good stuff now, and the cult members, while being a bit simple in many ways, were actually raving about something that they believed in.  In hardware terms this mini-computer (which is effectively what it is), was really good.  And, its operating system was also good.

But (let's face it you knew there was a but, didn't you?), there was a problem.  Not just a small problem, but a large massive elephant in the room.  The one thing that the Applecultists don't mention, because to do so, would presumably bring their carefully crafted illusions collapsing on their head like a house of cards or a really badly mixed metaphor.  This elephant is called iTunes.  iTunes, is, without doubt, the worst piece of software I've been exposed to for years (and I had Windows Vista for a while).

How do I loathe iTunes?  Let me count the ways:

1. It's slow.  I mean incredibly slow. I'd click a tab, and I could go off and make a cup of tea in the time it took for that tab to actually open.  Even the simplest of operations took half an hour minimum.
2. It has weird default settings which mean that it always opens up in an area which you never use.  These defaults seem impossible to change and personalise.  (Coupled with 1 above this adds more time as you then have to click through to get to where you'd like to start from)
3. It seems to occupy vast quantities of hard drive space. I know many modern pieces of software are often referred to as "bloatware" these days but iTunes is less bloatware than massivelyobeseware.
4. Because of 3, it not only is slow itself, but it slows everything else down to a crawl. I had to plan times when I didn't want to do anything else so I could spend an hour doing what I needed (eg downloading podcasts and "syncing" them to the iPod), because I knew when iTunes was open nothing else would work at a reasonable speed.  The day I finally uninstalled the bloody thing, my computer suddenly took on a new lease of life, like I'd untethered it from a massive cartoon anvil.
5. Because of Apple's frankly insane policy of making everything they do linked to everything else they do (you have to use their operating system, you have to have this one inviolable whole), iTunes is pretty much impossible to not use if you want to have an Apple product playing music. Having been used to the fact that with other OSs, if you don't like something you get rid of it and replace it with something better (and often open source), this was a really big shock to the system.  Working around iTunes is a lot of work, and a lot of hassle.  And it is enough to piss one off, massively.
6. Even if you just want to use iTunes to download free podcasts (which is basically what I did use it for) you still have to input your credit card details.  Why?  They won't say.  But it is seriously annoying.  And then this got more annoying, because...
7. After I had uninstalled the bloody thing, somehow my account got hacked, and someone started trying to use iTunes to buy things in my name.  Luckily my bank noticed this and stopped it, and replaced my credit card for me, but it could have been a real problem.  How often do you hear about security problems with iTunes?  But do a search and it seems that this is a genuine and real problem and that the security of iTunes is paper thin at best.  The media love-in with Apple seems to extend even to here.  
8. Did I mention how infuriatingly, maddeningly, horribly SLOW it bloody is?

Seriously, how is it that people are not tearing their hair out and complaining in their droves to Apple?  Is it that having spent so much money on the hardware they don't want to admit that the software is shit?  Is it that they think because it's not all over the media that it must just be them?  I'm here to tell you that no, it isn't you.  It's the software.  It's absolutely rubbish.  You can do it, you can admit it, it doesn't reflect badly on you, it reflects badly on them. Stand up and say it proudly:  "iTunes is an absolute piece of utter dogshit".

There now, I bet you feel better don't you?

(But still, within an hour there'll be some Jobs's Witnesses in the comments section saying how none of this is true.  It is, and the thing is, YOU KNOW IT IS)

How many Romanians does it take to change a light bulb?

I have been changing light bulbs for the best part of 30 years, now, and for around 20 of those I have been the primary light-bulb-replacer in my place of residence. I have, it is fair to say, changed a fair few light bulbs in my lifetime. I have changed light bulbs in 10 countries (Romania is the 10th country I have lived in), including in an underdeveloped tropical island nation, and a place which was living under an illegal and brutal occupation in which power cuts were the norm. I include this background not to brag about my lightbulb changing past - on the contrary, I presume I have changed no more lightbulbs than most adults - but to make it clear that I have some normal levels of experience in replacing bulbs.

However, in all my years of lightbulb changing, I have never really had a problem with the assignment. Unscrew burned out bulb, screw in new bulb. It's not an especially challenging task. Except, that is, in Romania. Here it is a minefield of potential problems, and I have no idea why. When you unscrew a lightbulb here you have to be prepared for this simple act to go horribly wrong - either the bulb itself falls to pieces or the fitting does. I've unscrewed bulbs and ended up with the glass bit in my hand and the metal screw in bit left in the socket. I've unscrewed bulbs which leave behind a metal sleeve of some kind in the socket. I've unscrewed bulbs that bring with them the threaded metal sleeve that lines the bakelite fitting itself. I've unscrewed bulbs that have left the bakelite fitting (is it bakelite?) crumbling into little pieces. It's important to note here, that I live in Romania now, in the 21st century, in the European Union, not in Romania in the 1980s under a regime in which most things were made poorly.

I would say on about 50% percent of occasions when I change a bulb in this country, this simple operation goes horribly wrong and leaves me standing on a chair with a pair of pliers in danger of electrocution trying to extract something from something else that shouldn't be locked together. Truly, light bulbs and the fittings in this country are bloody awful. In all my previous years of changing bulbs I had never once had any difficulty with the act. Here, I feel grateful if it goes smoothly. Now some of the fittings and even possibly one or two of the bulbs probably predate 1989, but even the ones which I know to be new tend to suffer from the same problem. It's really, really crap. I bet most people in this country don't even know that it should be a simple task every time, hence the lack of protest movements and people out on the street with banners reading "Forget Graft, Start by Fixing the Sodding Lightbulbs" or "Hai Romania, Hai Lightbulbs"

Le Tour du Monde

Way back when the Internet was new to me, I happened upon a website which was following something called the Whitbread Round the World Race. This was back in 97/98 for what it's worth. At that time, it was by far and away the very best website I'd ever seen - it was interactive, it was well designed and it was addictive. Every day I went back to see how far the boats had gone, which one was leading, whether they'd become becalmed in the doldrums, etc. It successfully made a sport which is completely spectator unfriendly (since it takes place in the middle of the ocean between boats separated by hundreds of miles) into one which was gripping and involving and watchable. [By the way, I remembered the name of the company which had created and designed and maintained the site - Quokka Sports - but a quick web search would suggest that they went bust once the mainstream corporate media caught up with what they were doing and copied it, which is, I suspect, how these things go. But anyway, I digress...]

Obviously things have changed on the internet, and there are now loads of well-designed and interesting sites (and a hundred times more which are neither), but I still remember looking at that site and being able to marvel at not only the content but the concept and the technology that went into the site itself. So, it was kind of a nostalgic moment when I discovered that as well as hosting me last week, Alacant was also hosting the beginning of the 2008/2009 version of this race (and there were signs and ads all round town directing one to the race village - and significantly fewer such signs directing one to the author of Csikszereda Musings, for some reason)

The race, now no longer the Whitbread Round the World race, since a not-very-good brand of beer only available in the UK was an illogical sponsorship partner for such an event, is now called, much more logically, the Volvo Ocean Race (I suppose Volvo are at least a global brand, though that's about as close a link as I can work out. The race will stop briefly in Sweden I believe, so that's another tenuous link). It starts on October 11th, but the race village opening party was on Friday, and everything's gearing up for the off - there are sponsors buildings where you can play games and look at stuff about Volvo, Puma, Telefonica and so on, should you be completely at a loose end and have finished counting the grains of sand on Alicante beach or any other more interesting activities. You can go and look at the boats, and see what kind of conditions that the race takes place under - there are 11 people on each boat, and let me tell you, they're not very big, and there are no showers, and you could be away from port for 35 days at a time, and you might even get swept overboard. I was left with the impression that the people who participate in this race are both extremely brave and somewhat mentally deranged.

Anyway, it's no longer run by the innovative Quokka Sports, but I'm guessing the website for the race will be worth watching once it gets under way. We were staying in the same hotel as the Eriksson 4 team, so I'm "supporting" them (by which I mean, I'll keep a vague eye out for their position in the race).
The race village as seen from the castle - the bit with the white tent like things at the top left of the jetty is it.

The Puma and Telefonica boats. 11 people in those things. For weeks at a time. Nutters.

Modern Life is Rubbish

Recently the interphone in our building was replaced. I'm not entirely sure what the word in English is for interphone despite my native speaker status, since I've never lived anywhere in an English speaking country that needed one, but in case it's not interphone, I'm talking about the system through which a visitor to someone in a block of flats rings up to that flat, so that the resident can talk to them, make sure that they are the kind of visitor they want to have, and then press a button to open the door on the ground floor. You know what I'm on about, right?

Anyway, for well over a year now we've gone without one, since the old one had broken and nobody had thought to get it repaired. Or something. The ways of living in a block of flats are a bit incomprehensible to me - we have someone who is "responsible" for our building, whose role seems to be to pop round once a month to read the water meter. We also pay a monthly "common expenses" fee, which I assume covers things like repairs to the bits of the building which are not the individual flats, and for the salary of the cleaning woman who cleans the place on occasion. But aside from that I'm not sure how things work exactly. If the lift breaks down, for example, who does one call to get it sorted? I have no clue. For a year, in fact there was a window missing between the ground and the first floor (I think someone had nicked it - really). Obviously if you live in a climate with a winter as cold as this one, that's quite a serious problem.

So, the interphone was buggered, and the door was just open to anyone. This wasn't really a problem, except when you walk downstairs in the morning and find yourself struggling to negotiate a drunk lying on the landing, but this was a very rare occurrence. But recently, there was sudden activity, and one days some blokes came round and installed a new handset/button system in our flat (and, I assume, in everybody else's too). A few weeks later, they showed up again (not sure what they were doing in the intervening time period, but there you go) and installed a new box thingy and lock down at ground level. Then a week or so after that, the whole thing went live and the system was finally in place.

It's all very fancy - it works, for a start, which is a definite improvement on the previous system. It also has a codepad which means that one doesn't actually have a key to get in and out of the building one just types in ones code, and voila, the door opens. There are one or two little quibbles - like the fact that the ringing inside the flat is very loud, and it wakes everyone up. As we live in flat number 1, that is the one that the postman rings in the morning to get in and give everyone their mail. Obviously this wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that we have kids and its the summer holiday and they really don't need to be waking up at half past seven. So, anyway, now one of my nightly rituals is to turn it off, so that our phone doesn't ring at all in the morning until I turn it back on again.

The big flaw with the new system was revealed last Friday though. As we trundled home from work we noticed that the people who work in the shop in the next building were all sitting outside (perhaps enjoying the sun, we mused). When we arrived at our building though it became clear what was going on. There was a powercut. All the buildings in the block were out. And of course we don't have a key, we just have a code to type on a keypad which (you might have guessed) runs on electricity. So there was no way into the building...

Well, this is not entirely true, because we just called (via mobile phone) a neighbour to come downstairs and open the door for us, which we then jammed open for whoever came next. This is one of those modern-technology-saves-the-day-when-modern- technology-has-failed-you moments. There must be a word for that, since it seems like much of the world is relying on it to be the answer to global warming in some massive world-ending game of chicken (well, let's not bother trying to step back from the brink, somebody's bound to invent something soon which can reverse global warming sooner or later, so we can keep on polluting to our hearts' content)

Oh for the days of the simple key which you insert into a lock and turn.

When there in’t a ‘net

Occasionally the Internet goes off in Csíkszereda. Today is one of those days. I suspect there are places in town that have it, because these days there is more than one provider - when I first arrived here we just had Astral and that was it, so if their server went down, we lost the Internet across the whole town – this was fairly common during thunderstorms and blizzards. Today there are no thunderstorms (yet anyway, there might be one later), and certainly no blizzards (since we are in the middle of a roasting hot June), but the server seems to be down and has cut off large swathes of the town. [Obviously by the time you read this, the Internet has come back, since until that happens I can’t actually post it anyway.]

Now I am old enough to remember a time when there was no such thing as the Internet, and doing stuff didn’t involve being online. Now obviously there are things I could be doing which don’t entail being connected to the world wide web, but I can’t remember what they are. I have gone through my list of things to do and done all of the things that I can feasibly do offline, and am now waiting to go back online in order to finish them off. Some things I can’t even get started on since they necessitate me working in a place which is (I believe) actually located on a server in London. It is quite astonishing the pace at which the world has changed.

I remember when I first encountered the Internet...

[Screen goes wibbly wobbly, music effects suggest going back in time, screen clears to reveal people in unfashionable haircuts, living in a time before the invasion of Iraq, before the 11^th of September 2001, to a day when Sheffield Wednesday were in the top division, when the most up to date platform was Windows 3.1, and to before the election of Tony Blair, when he was seen as someone who would be good.]

I was living on the island of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia. I often think it’s quite odd that I was living somewhere so remote when the Internet appeared to me, but then again it is a tool which is at its best when you live somewhere remote. Like a small island in the Pacific or a small town 700m up in the Carpathians. My new boss, had (just before my arrival) signed up for something called “Compuserve” (remember them?) and through a dial up modem we could call the US and get emails. The connection was slow (I think it was 14.4kbps) and the cost of the call was such that only emails were worth bothering with. If somebody sent you one with pictures in, it took ages to get. Someone sent him that early dancing baby video thing and it must have taken over an hour to get it. Mind you, at the time, it did seem worth it - I mean it was a sort of computer generated baby, which danced. Stuff didn’t get much better than that.

One of the guys who worked for FSM Telecom was really enthused by the possibilities of this Internet stuff and how it could radically change life on an island which got three planes a week landing and every now and then a ship full of food. So he started working on it big time and soon set up the country’s own Internet server and connected it to the rest of the world by means of a massive great satellite dish set up outside the Telecom HQ. I was one of the first people in the country to get connected as he asked for 10 or so volunteers to test the whole thing out. I had the classic email address andy (at) mail.fm – those were the days. (By the way that last.fm domain? Now you now where it comes from)

So all of a sudden we were connected to the world. I could do things like finding out football scores in England, or chat to people I’d never met about nothing in particular. You know the really useful stuff that has made the Internet what it is today. I even, towards the end of my stay, kept a blog before the term blog had even been invented, complaining about the fact that I was laid up with a broken leg, unable to watch the World Cup in France because it wasn’t on TV there. (The real value of the net back then in that place came when Amazon started and suddenly you could browse and order books)

Those were the days. Now everybody and her uncle is on the Internet with their myspace pages and their youtube clips, and I am now bringing up the rear, trying desperately to understand what the point of “web 2.0” is (and indeed why it is called Web 2.0 at all). I used to be hip you know. On the cutting edge of the web. Now I’m just struggling to keep up. I don’t even download music, let alone entire films or episodes of the Sopranos. Anyway, I think I’ll go out for a coffee. I believe one can do that in the real world, and you don’t even need a Second Life avatar to do it for you.