Once again, someone makes the fatal mistake of taking 4chan seriously and a new meme is born.
Monthly Archive for September, 2008
This is the first I’ve heard of any “brick”
I suspect the device is an iPhone with a large enough battery to placate whining tech journos, the name derived from the resulting dimensions.
(0)At least, I think she’s called Lola?
Ok, I don’t think she’s called Lola, I think she’s probably a Doris or a Marjory or something.
Or, I could start at the beginning.
I periodically find myself with a job that requires me to not only wake up but also leave the house at oh-shit-hundred-hours. The last few weeks have been as such, seeing me careening down the motorway, elbowing my fellow commuters out of the way in the mad race to sit at a desk all day.
I’m sure a lot of you see the same things or people every day on your way to work or school or college. I remember I’d see the same beetroot-red sunburned guy every morning waiting for the school bus (I was waiting for the bus, no the beetroot-red guy). He had the most ridiculous seventies porno moustache but the really striking thing about him was that he was perpetually this bright red “whoops, I fell asleep in the sun” colour all year round. This being in the heart of Derbyshire it was one hell of a mystery as to how he kept his lobster complexion through all four seasons.
Well, with this I-never-thought-there-were-two-seven-o’clocks job I find myself seeing a very odd sight on a daily basis. Not a mile from my house, daily and without exception, I see a skinny, no… scrawny, woman in her forties, dressed respectably for some kind of office work, running at full pelt down the pavement in sensible shoes and clutching her bag to her chest. She’s red of face and wrinkled of neck and quite honestly looks like she might fall over and die at any moment. The day I don’t see her, huffing and puffing her way to… to what? To work? Well, the day I don’t see her is either the day she’s finally been sacked for being constantly late, or she actually has had a coronary and keeled over, somewhere along Mansfield Road.
The oddest thing about this is that I would see her in the mornings the last time I had an up-at-the-crack-of-sparrow-fart commute, only this time I was heading in the opposite direction and so was she… dressed the same, still running like the clappers, just running the opposite direction up the road.
Seriously though, I used to run to work when I had a job nearby and was running late, but this was when I was a young and sprightly 21. This old bird could well be someone’s grandmother. Old enough to know better, at any rate.
Today I shall ape Stephen Fry by prefacing a rant about something that makes me angry with an apology for resorting to such a base excuse for content. In my defence, nothing’s passed through this blog besides shared news items and tweets for several weeks so any content is good content.
In my further defence, this isn’t really a rant about how people are stupid, more about how people do strange things and I’m a goddamn weirdo for caring. Nevertheless I do care, I care very deeply and I want you all to stop. You know who you are.
So yes, I’m sorry. Mostly I’m sorry that you all suck so much, partly I’m sorry I’m still awake this late, and I’m a little bit sorry for what happened to that stray cat. Only a little bit though, he was asking for it.
On with the list! Ten blisteringly annoying things that people probably only do when they know I’m watching~
- The ridiculous habit of making windows fill the whole screen. Back in the old days of cramped 12″ monitors you filled the screen with one application at a time so you could actually get work done. Today though, when working on a 20″ iMac, say, all this means is that your app windows are full of white space. Even if someone does send you an email that didn’t get horribly line-wrapped along the way, you’re trying to read 12pt text out of lines over a foot long.
- Leaving apps open when they’re not being used. Now, OK, maybe I’m a bit obsessive about this, having spent a lot of time with a memory-poor Powerbook as my main machine, but with Apple’s cheapest still shipping with just 1GB of RAM the odds are that you’ve not got memory to splash about either. It really pains me then, when I am called to the aid of some poor Mac that’s acting funky, to find the entire MS Office suite, twenty browser tabs, two IM clients and a half-dozen file viewers all open and doing nothing. Most apps launch pretty damn quick – you’re not saving any time by keeping them open for six hours until you need them again, and you’re slowing down the apps you are using.
- Running things from disk images. I will admit that installing software this way is probably the most obtuse part of using a mac. The clue is in the name though: it behaves just like a disk. Plug it in, install the files, unplug it. Only, you know, substitute “plug” for “mount”. How retarded would it be to just double-click the file on a CD and run it from there, having to find the CD for a given app every time you wanted to run it again? That’s right, very retarded.
- In a similar vein to #2 – leaving your Mac running for days and days without a reboot as it just gets slower and slower. I know, I know, a modern OS ought to be able to run for weeks, nay months without a reboot. Sorry boys and girls, but OS X can’t stay up longer than a week, even in its sixth iteration. More to the point, don’t we all know by now that the first thing to do when you computer’s acting strange (whatever kind it is) is to turn it off and on again?
- Filling your desktop, your downloads folder, your documents folder or anyfolder, with a meaningless pile of files. How are you supposed to find anything in that goddamn mess, hmmm? I bet your bedroom floor is covered in clothes too, clothes that lie where they fell, undisturbed by time’s passing.
- Not using shortcuts. Maybe not everybody knows that cmd-alt-D toggles Dock hiding, or that ctrl-eject brings up the shut-down dialogue, but if I see one more person copying and pasting by using a contextual menu or worse… the edit menu then someone is going to suffer a mischief. And not the fun kind of mischief like Dennis the Menace used to get up to. Why is using the edit menu worse? Click the edit menu right now, I dare you. See, all the keyboard shortcuts are listed right there next to what they do. It’s the same for almost every command an application has – are you really so averse to saving yourself time?
- Keeping all your bookmarks in the bookmarks bar… and not even shortening the names. There’s even a little box headed “type a name for your bookmark” that comes up when you click the bookmark button (or type cmd-D, of course). The name field is even already highlighted, you just have to start typing – how mind-numbingly easy do you want it to be?
- Dragging windows out of the way to hunt for other windows. This one pains me so much, mostly because of all the man-hours that have gone into Exposé and the Dock, and more recently Spaces, providing us all with efficient (even elegant) ways to switch between applications. There’s even cmd-tab for all you windows holdovers (for an extra treat, invoke Exposé with windows from several different applications, then hit tab; I’ll wait). It is for this reason that a desktop cluttered with windows just barely visible, a corner poking into view here and there, all brushed hurriedly aside in search of something else… is surely the biggest “fuck you” to Apple’s brilliant developers?
- Wipe your bloody screen every now and then. Why are you even touching it with your grubby little fingers in the first place?
- Anti-virus software. Now, this one is very, very rare but it obviously still happens, as evidenced by continued sales of Norton’s (god-awful) Mac product. Would you put anti-virus software in your lawnmower? How’s about your microwave or your toaster? Maybe one day Mac viruses will be a credible threat, but until then I refuse to bog down my computer with restrictive, pre-emptive snake oil.