'Bred Crumbs

Skipping the Jersey Exit

I got hooked by Clerks, and I've seen every Kevin Smith movie since then ASAP.

I ain't goin' anywhere near Jersey Girl. At least not until DVD.

While I doubt it's as awful as some critics say, I suspect it will make me cringe, despite Kevin's dialogue and his ability to make Ben Affleck watchable on-screen. But I barely go to the movies at all any more as it is. I have to really want to see a movie in a theater to put up with the cost, the previews, and the idiots in the audience.

I do not really want to see any movie that's tapping the sap tree that Jersey Girl does. Even if Kevin Smith writes and directs it.

Too many reviewers say that Smith's new flick will alienate his old fans because it lacks dick and fart jokes. That's not it. Frankly, I could use a few hundred less of those, too. But must minimizing the seventh-grade-gym-class humor require that we be subjected to a Cute Movie Moppet, or pummeled with the club of Fatherhood Is Wonderful And Important? I don't see why.

I haven't given up on Kevin. He still gives great interview, even when confronted by an unfavorable critic. And I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with The Green Hornet. But as long as he's so smitten with family life that he's eager to trade in cliché, he'll have to do it without me. And I'm sure he's OK with that.

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Thinking Out Loud (With Something Cool in My Ear)

Sometimes, you have to step back and take a hard look at what you're thinking. Especially if you're me. Which you're not.

For example: one of my many problems with the whole iTunes/iPod/iStore thing is that it promotes and relies on DRM. It burns my hide that, if I buy something from Apple's music store, there's this vast set of rules about what I can do with it after I supposedly own it – rules that, for all the talk about robbing the artist (which I used to believe), really only benefit the sleazy, ought-to-be-dead recording industry.

However, most commercial DVDs are encoded to keep you from taping off them or making other backup copies, even if you have purchased them. And that hasn't bothered me in the least.

So let's train the microscope on my whole view of Microsoft and Apple. It's not that I love the former; it's that my traditional hatred of the latter is far greater. Part of that's the psychology of self-esteem, a knee-jerk response to Mac evangelism. Recently on some message board, someone out of nowhere had inserted typical Mac snobbery into a discussion that had nothing to do with all that. Someone wrote back, "It's not Macs I hate. It's Mac users." Made me chuckle, in spite of having numerous Machead friends.

But my antipathy toward Macs is also built on my experience with the things. In the old days when I had to use them, they were far more crashtastic than Windows. The benchmark came when my employer got a few of Mac's hot new machine at the time, the Quadra. The first time I went to use one, I opened a document and tried to scroll down it, and the machine completely froze. That, for me, was the epitome of Macs. Big ol' pricey paperweights.

But for similar reasons, after all this time, I'm becoming impatient with Microsoft. My new home machine with Windows XP is far more temperamental than it should be. And my work system has been infected with the big-ticket virus called Office 2003. Meanwhile, Mac seems to have shaped up. It still has screwy UI (hype to the contrary), it still demands that you play its way in its sandbox more so than even Microsoft, and it still falls far short of its mythology. But OSX seems pretty damn stable from what little I've used it.

And what if Mac finally really came up with something that, while still annoyingly marketed and snobbishly overpriced, was actually a worthwhile thing, way ahead of anything out of Redmond or anywhere else?

That's how I've wound up buying my first Apple product ever – you know what's coming – the iPod.

My resistance was formidable: the price, the DRM, the only-really-works-with-iTunes bullcrap, and its very Mac-ness stood in the way. But then I found out that, with a simple cassette adapter, I could use an iPod as my car stereo, skipping over the CD stage in my old beast and going directly from tape to MP3 player.

So first I made myself get used to iTunes for Windows, overcoming my initial difficulties in figuring out how to use it, and looking past Mac's maddening refusal to honor the standard and simple Windows interface (um, Apple, what part of "maximize" do you not understand?). And I fell in love with the notion that I could have my entire music collection at my fingertips constantly, discarding the tracks I don't like, sorting the rest into playlists according to my mood or the weather, and shuffling at will.

With a trip to L.A. looming, it all suddenly tantalized me like a vision of personal-radio heaven. Imagine, everything I enjoy from 15-plus years of CDs, at my fingertips – a few days' worth of tunes, surprisingly me constantly, but never displeasing me. Wait; I don't have to imagine it anymore. There it is, and it's amazing.

I researched alternatives, for in my contrarian way, I'd almost rather use anything besides Mac. But it's fairly clear nothing else cuts it.

We got the 15-gig version, and the whole personal-radio thing is playing out just as I'd hoped. I can hear, back to back, all kinds of clashing combos: Sublime and Darude, Cher and Cibo Matto, Rush and the Postal Service, "God Only Knows" and Bad Religion, ELO and "O.P.P.,", "Stacy's Mom" and "Gollum's Song," and thousands more I haven't thought of. I'm rediscovered tunes in my collection that I've ignored forever, because I wasn't interested enough in whatever CD contained them to ever drop the discs in the player. And the "sound check" feature neatly irons out the volume discrepancies between old tracks and new, which my CD player never did.

What I didn't see coming was how it all would hook into my increasingly (thanks to Robbie) high-tech home. The songs can stream from iTunes on my machine over our wireless network to iTunes on the PVR, and voila – that great custom-made, joyously random jukebox I enjoy in the car and on the subway is coming out of the livingroom stereo.

The diamond has flaws. I still object to the DRM; so, I'll mostly stay out of the music store. The iPod's battery-charge indicator, which in no way indicates the machine's remaining battery charge, may be the most useless thing this side of an appendix. And while the look of the device is fine, it's not worthy of the media drool – it's a cigarette case, people. Yes, the color ones are pretty – but, in the Mac tradition, they're way overpriced. We'll discontinue the 10-gig model for $250 and replace it with a 4-gig for $250. What a deal!

You see, I still don't like Apple. But at least it's getting better, as opposed to Windows' direction. And should my Applephobia keep me from supporting the one really good idea Mac has had? After all this time of accepting MicroCrap, isn't it time I paid at least a little tribute to the other Great Satan?

As I groove, non-hiply, to my wonderfully organized, massive-but-compact music collection, I do feel a little dirty (and not in the good way) with a Mac in my pocket. But sometimes, it makes sense to do something that doesn't make sense to you. Especially if you're me.

Which you're not. But you might give it some thought.

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And You Thought the Paper Clip Was Bad

On the "Bizarro" episode of Sealab 2021, there was a creature called Bizarro Quinn that inadvertently killed one of his evil colleagues, all the while exclaiming, with an electronic squawk, "I'm helping!" Ever since, Robbie and I, upon realizing we're doing something well-intentioned that is more of a hindrance than an assistance, will squawk, in that same peppy tone, "I'm helping!"

More than anything I've ever seen, Microsoft Office 2003 is constantly helping!

It clutters your screen with menus that will almost certainly be of no use. It assumes that the most space-wasting display is the best default. It offers you choices it will completely ignore (most notably the purely decorative No, and don't ask again button, which Adobe is also growing fond of), or it pretends to offer you a choice when there is none. All this while dragging your machine to a grinding halt.

It has exactly one cool feature: when you get an email, an alert with the subject and the beginning of the text appears on your screen, on top of all other windows, and after a few seconds it elegantly fades away on its own. Beyond that, everything about Office 2003 is assumption and bloat.

This is not merely venting; it is a minor prologue. Treatise to come.

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Fastest Answer Ever

Following Gina's link, I went to take the "What Pisses You Off?" quiz, and was greeted by this message:

(warning - works best in IE. Taking this in Netscape could prove very hazardous to your health, as in it might not work=p)

So I didn't even bother to take the quiz, 'cause you know what pisses me off?* Websites that only work in IE.

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* Besides, you know, everything.

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