Budaeli

Sport talk has always bored me. Between the excessive stats of baseball, the bizarre rules of football, and the mythical stature of soccer/football stars – it just didn’t excite me like it does for many people. An unintended side effect is my hampered ability at small talk due to the fact that I know embarrassingly little of team standings, history, or how well anyone is doing for the current season – not to mention I still don’t quite get the rules of football. And probably never will.

That said, I am beginning to see how people can get very involved in the myths of their favorite team. Why?

Because Apple is my sports team.

I root for them every chance that I get. The sport is hard to follow because there is lots of speculation on what plays Apple will make, and the equivalent to actual games are the Macworld Expo, the WWDC, and the occasional official announcement events scattered throughout the year. The team has a very restrictive block-out period for games, so us fans have to rely on text-based announcers physically at the event. But boy is it exciting! Who knows what moves Apple’s star quarterback, Steve Jobs, will make!

I became involved with the team late in its history – they were making a strong comeback and kicking serious ass. But despite all the hype that Apple gets in the press, the company is less like the Yankees and more like the Red Sox – they had a long, embarrassing losing streak, but have come back and whipping everyone’s ass*. To extend the analogy, Microsoft more like the Yankees – they were killing everyone for a while but now can’t get their act together, while still being the biggest money-making club (it’s not a perfect analogy, of course – a technology company can’t win an equivalent to a World Series, they can just get lots of users, and the fan base for Apple outweighs the fan base for Microsoft so much it’s absurd – OK, well I wouldn’t call that last link absurd but you get the idea :) ).

The sports analogy is getting carried away, so I’ll wrap this up. While I don’t decorate my bedroom with Apple-branded stuff, the majority of my electronics are made by them (iMac, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and if everything works out a Mac as my work machine) and I have more of those logo stickers than I can possibly use. And my talking about what the company is up to with my friends borders on annoyance.

So maybe I can relate.

*I should point out that it’s impossible to live in Boston and not adore the Red Sox, even if just a little.

Technorati Tags: apple, apple fanboy, mac, machead, fan, red sox analogy, sports fan, steve jobs

About once every two weeks I get an email from Facebook telling me someone wants me to be their friend and create an account. I’m told that this is because when you first set up a Facebook account, it asks for email addresses of your friends and checks to see if they have an account.

So far I’ve ignored every request, as well as peer pressure from other friends to get a page up.

To be honest, originally I didn’t want an account on any social site because I was afraid it’d show how pitifully few friends I really have (I have a problem with keeping up with others and general self-centeredness). But the longer I held out the more I realized that these sites had disadvantages that I didn’t like. One of my heroes, Cory Doctorow, just wrote an article articulating what I’ve been feeling about these sites. The crux of his argument is that these sites don’t help you to segment what you tell your friends – either you show them everything or show everyone nothing. In addition, you may ‘friend’ people that are really ‘acquaintances’ rather than ‘friends’ – those words seem to be interchangeable nowadays but there’s a whole spectrum of how we relate to others – from the coworker who occasionally goes out for drinks to the person you know from college who knows all the right things to irritate you and can generally pick out thoughtful gifts for you…all the way to the guy who grew up down the street from you who listens to the same music and likes the same movies and can guess how you would react to certain situations. This range of relationships isn’t really supported by most, if not all, of the social sites.

And don’t get me started on MySpace. How people came to use that to connect with friends is beyond my comprehension. MySpace makes it too easy to connect to others, too easy to become friends, too easy to show your bad taste to everyone.

So, if you want to be my friend, email me and let’s strike up a conversation. But don’t make Facebook try to get me to join.

Update: Technically, I’m actually on exactly one social site: Last.fm. But that’s because I’m always looking for new music…and I’m obsessed with the play counts of the music I listen to. Here’s my page.

Update 2: OK, things have changed. I’m on Facebook now – turns out Facebook is quite useful to track down old friends. And I have a Twitter account as well – which is great for finding new and interesting people.

Amazon released their Kindle ebook reader yesterday. And for a while I was excited: Amazon’s product is one step closer to the ideal ultra-portable super-library that had a user interface close to that of a dead-tree-book – even closer than the sleek ebook reader from Sony. I even was OK with the rather jagged design of the machine because of the cool box it came in and the device’s status as a first-generation device (here are some pictures of an unboxing).

But my interest died when I discovered two things:

1. Amazon is making it very hard for the user to add their own content – and more importantly copyrighted documents not available from Amazon directly. Buried in Amazon’s help site for the Kindle are instructions for getting other documents onto the device – you have to email them to Amazon directly where they will convert the document into a Kindle-compatible format (unless it’s an ASCII text file). The manual even states that Amazon will charge for this service!

2. Even though I haven’t bothered with hacking my iPhone to use third-party apps, I can use my iPhone as an ebook reader. While Safari will only work with web pages, the Mail app can read PDF and Word attachments. Even better, it’ll remember the page you were on and return to it later. So as a test I downloaded an ebook from manybooks.net that was a PDF formatted for the iPhone and emailed it to myself. And it worked beautifully! It even switched to landscape mode when I turned my iPhone on its side. So I’m happy…although I’ll have to get my non-public domain books in a more dubious manner than I’d like.

Despite my successful convincing of myself to not get a Kindle, I still think the device is very important in our march toward an improvement over the book as a technology for the written form. And eink was a brilliant invention – I hope more devices use this technology.