Just a quickie

There's a quote that's floating around that , if substantial, makes me sick.

"The implicaton that there was something wrong with the war plan is amusing"

How a human being can find anything about the unneeded deaths of thousands of any living creature amusing is beyond me. That it's one of the most powerful people on the planet makes be scared. That they are stupid enough to say this in pubilc is rather sad.

Oh, it was Donald Rumsfeld that is purported to have said this.

Just "Get it"

I started this a while ago, and saved it as a draft about 10 times, but it's turned into a bit of a rant, and I don't have the energy or inclination to continue at the moment, so you can have it for all it's worth. Maybe I'll proper it up later. Doubt it though.

A little background. I have a list of sites that I spend time wandering around on this here internet thingy, reading maybe 15-20 articles a day, skimming maybe another 15-20 and skipping over 30-40 without finding anything in their titles or summary in NetNewsWire, NewsGator or FeedDemon to make me want to follow their link. I have 31 regular feeds, of which only 4 are nothing to do with technology.

Another thing about me, I use a Mac at home, and Windows at work. I have an iPod, and use it to listen to music and podcasts. If my partner mentioned the idea of buying a portable digital music player, I would think less of them if they bought anything other than an iPod (until the prospect of sex came up, then they would, of course, have been right all along!).

I could be considered an advocate of Apple, having recommended their products to more people than I have recommended similar products by other companies. Some may even want to use the derogatory "Fanboi", though I think that's probably taking it a bit too far as I would recommend a rival product over an Apple one if it was more appropriate.

What am I on about all this for? Well, it just lets anyone who reads this know where I am coming from in the following rant.

Spattered around the comments of the sites I visit on a daily basis is what I call the Apple noise. This is, luckily, a small contingent of comment makers who post negative and/or derogatory remarks about either the original article or about another comment when Apple or one of their products is mentioned in a positive way. These usually consist of a choice of a long dispelled rumor, myth or fact that's no longer true, or just some plain, blatant lies, mixed in with a hint that the person they are responding to is an Apple Fanboy, sucking on the cock of Stephen P Jobs or unable to see the grit of the world outside the fabled Reality Distortion Field.

I wouldn't mind if these people actually understood what they are talking about, but most of them are like me, blinded by their techie view of computers and how they are used. To us, a "user" is someone way down there at the level where they are just about capable of reformatting the hard drive of thier home computer, installing Windows, connecting to the internet and downloading the latest set of drivers and troubleshooting them until they all work, all without help from an actual techie.

What they don't understand, and the reason they should be publicly dismissed in the most derisory manner possibe, is that Apple don't see a user in the same way.

There are many ways that people refer to the users that people think Apple is aimed at. "Ma & Pa", "Mom & Pop", "Granny & Grandad", "Artistic" as in "he's too artistic to understand these technical things".

The thing is, they are all right, but they don't have the whole picture. You see, Apple is aiming at everyone. Well, everyone except the big corporates with their integrated infrastructures...they will come later.

In among that "everyone" are people with every level of understanding of the technology, and Apple are trying to make it so that all of them have the same degree of productivity and as good an experience as all the others. Think about that for a few minutes. Think about all of the things you currently know about technology, then imagine what it would be like not knowing each of those things. Forget all of the confidence you have in using that technology. You are now one of these target users.

Now think about the person you know with the greatest technical knowledge. No, not that kind of technical knowledge - I mean writers, business analysts, architects, designers, graphic artists, pharmaceutical scientists, theoretical mathematicians, network designers, nurses, doctors, dentists, photographers, structural engineers. In a nutshell, people who have a massive amount of technical knowledge; people who make the Noise Makers look rather insignificant. These people are also target users.

Now, think about all those people who do know the technology, but mostly just need to use it to get their job or hobby done...you guessed it.


apple fanboi
linux & windows people just don't get what it is that apple users do get
the level to which an apple user shouldn't have to think about all that crap
windows & linux people can scoff and sneer all they want, but if you put them next to most apple users in a sphere the apple users are interested in, they start looking like the slime that first oozed from the primordial soup. The apple users really don't care.

Double vision.

I always like to find new ways to relegate my stereotypes to the landfill they belong in. Unfortunately, the world does not give me many opportunities.

I just spent a week in New York, NY and Jersey City, NJ. Almost every interaction I had managed to invoke a stereotype. Most were fairly innocuous

• The twenty-something hurrying out of a gym into a lunchtime crowd with mobile phone to his ear yelling into it something about something that was obviously very important, oblivious to everyone in his way and within ear-shot.


• The middle-ager in exercise clothing and bright white running shoes walking down the river path with arms swinging and a look of determination staring straight through anything in the way of loosing that trim, fit look or those extra ounces


• The obese mid-states tourist, a baggy t-shirt tucked into a high-belted pair of stonewashed denim jeans, with the ubiquitous pair of brand new, stunningly white sports shoes and at least four others with the exact same...maybe a different pastel colour stripe on the sports shoes, and two wearing oversized glasses.

So, what am I supposed to do with my stereotypes?

These are just a sample, there was a myriad of loud New Jersey-ites in sports clothing, a plethora of effeminate shop assistants and more dog-wielding loudmouthed New Yorkers than you could shake a stick at...where was a boy supposed to look to avoid leaping to conclusions and, of course, falling into being my own stuffy, stiff-upper-lipped Englishman stereotype?