Naked Mac-bashing

alternateorg on August 22, 2003

When will the Mac-bashing ever end? Why do my ‘friends’ feel the need to send me random emails telling me I’m a moron for using a Mac? I get my work done on it, and you use a PC. Great. Fuck off.

Santos L. Barbara

alternateorg on August 16, 2003

So, my recent trip to California went well. I got the contract and the work should last for quite a while. Everyone say yay. Got to see the place where Tai’s eCafe used to reside (named, coincidentally, The eCafe). Everything in Santa Barbara went as planned. LA on the other hand was another story. To quote Deathcab For Cutie:


the vessel keeps pumping us through this entropic place
in the belly of the beast that is californ-i-a,

i drank from a faucet and i kept my receipts

for when they weigh me on my way out

(here nothing is free).

and i can’t see why you’d want to live here.



I don’t normally see California this way, but damn is LA un-fucking-standable. The San- cities are much nicer (San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco).

BuyMusic Problems

alternateorg on July 30, 2003

It’s the user, stupid. For those of you who haven’t used the iTunes Music Store, let’s just say that Apple’s user experience far exceeds that described above. She had to click every single song she downloaded.. including ones purchased as albums. On iTMS, they just download automatically. It works transparently. You can even go and play other music in your Library.. don’t worry about finding your new tracks when they’re done: they’re automatically downlaoded to and sorted in the filesystem by your iTunes preferences, and also automatically added to a Smart Playlist called “Purchased Music.” Also, she talks about multiple types of licenses, including a “secondary license” that doesn’t allow her to burn her new music to a CD, which her husband’s computer was limited to because it was a secondary machine, and her primary machine crashed when using the Roxio plugin that’s apparently required to burn BM’s purchased musoc. iTMS has no such alternative licensing; every song has the same priveliges on every authenticated machine, Despite BuyMusic’s purported $0.79/song, most of them are $0.99, with a bunch as high as $1.29. Oh and don’t forget the identical commercials. Sounds like we have another Microsoft on our hands, in terms of copying Apple.

Read this awful message hidden inside a privacy policy: “we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent”

Fuck that. Glad I own a Mac.