Man Machine

This Onion piece perfectly captures Apple users' love/hate relationship with their machines. Apple products are beautiful, and clearly the best thing going, and yet.... their flagship programs (such as iTunes and iPhoto) are riddled with usability issues. And the stuff is not built to last. On Christmas Eve my latest iPod died on me. This is probably the fourth one I've had that has done this. I took it in to the Mac store on appointment with one of their condescending "geniuses" and he told me they're basically good for a year. I said, "This little mp3 player was $300. That's a lot of money to pay for something that's not built to last longer than a year." "Yeahhhhh," he said.

On a happier note, I experienced a triumph of Man vs. Machine last night sometime after midnight when, after much therapy and involved negotiations, I convinced Battery (my beat-making and sampler program) to talk to the volume faders on my AKAI MPD24 midi controller pad. This basically means I can turn the volume up and down on my samples when performing live. It took everything in me not to cry out in rejoicing and wake Kirsten up (though I did raise my fists to the sky and shake them). I've been trying to make that happen for a solid week.




Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard