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From the Dept. of Transcendence Still working on this piece about operating systems, and wondering about Beauty. In a few days I'll be checking out Apple's OS X up close, along with the hardware that flatters it best. This OS looks like it's the first to bridge the vastly different interests of command line-based and GUI-based computing — in the sense that it comes from both. (Okay, we can argue that, but let's not.) But right now I'm wondering about the concept that Apple embedded in our consciousness a long time ago: look and feel. And the larger matter of how both those nouns serve as adjectives for beautiful. I just ran across a great quote that gave me a new appreciation for the Art that has always been an obsession for both Steve Jobs and his companies. Here it is:
Somehow that makes me feel better about facing OS X's UNIX innards with a one-button mouse. But I want to go deeper than that. So feel free to help me out here. I'm not looking for the usual __ sucks stuff (which I'll get anyway), but for thoughtful stuff about the aesthetics of operating systems, good software... and anything else that fancies your suit. Thanks. Deconcessions If ever there was an election I gladly denied what little partisanship I could muster, this presidential one — the most asymptotic in history — is it. The best I could do was publicly deny my endorsement to Ralph Nader, who, like Jerry Brown, appears to be angry on a full-time basis. I hate to say that I still don't care very much about which side wins this thing, but I don't. I agree with Willie Brown that the choice was between the incompetent and the insufferable. I do care that there's been far too little "callin' bullshit" — as we say in the South — throughout this thing, except by partisans, and always on their enemies. Herewith, my own few observations:
This election isn't over by a long shot, either. It never will be. Just wait until those ballots are finally counted by The Media and everybody else with troubletropic tendencies. I hope they'll find that Bush "really" won; but we know they won't, for the simple reason that the Bush People did their best to oppose recounts at every turn. There is something creepy about the way this thing went down, and it'll do nothing but ugly-up every institution it touches, including the presidency, the electoral process, the courts and the Constitution. I've got a feeling that pretty soon the whole country will look like Florida: a place with a lot of unhappy factions, run by a Bush who's in way over his head. Hope I'm wrong. In case blogs don't already explain themselves well enough Seems I'm spending more time lately explaining what blogs are about. Surprising to me that their nature isn't more obvious, but I guess it just isn't self-manifesty enough. As I recall months went by before I understood it myself. (Hmm. I just realized that I've been doing this one for over a year now.) Anyway, a good place to look for help is Media Web Logs For Fun and No Profit, by the enjoyably crankyKen Layne, in the Online Journalism Review, which is produced by the Annenberg School at USC. Not exactly a lightweight organization. Oddly, the page does strange layout stuff in IE 5.0 on my Macs, but not on IE 5.5 in Windows or on Netscapes in various Linux, Mac and Windows incarnations. There are responses to this message:
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