who knew?

Backstory to a party I hosted:

It was 1977, revolution was seemingly imminent and Michael Kumfer was weeping, collapsed in a tiny corner of the den in his 2-story apartment with only a handful of recently emptied bottles of Colt 45 and a decorational katana to keep him company. He had been weeping for hours about many things: he had recently been fired, his girlfriend had left him and a general feeling of malaise had settled upon his pathetic existence. There was only one choice, really: the choice he should have made a long time ago. He took out the katana from its protective sheath and stared at the blade in wonder and awe. Could he do it? Could he really usher in his own fate?

But wait! On the ground, Michael spots a letter-size sheet of printer paper and an ordinary Bic pen! WOW! Michael drops the sword and begins to write his innermost thoughts onto the paper. A mere twenty hours later, his thoughts are now expressed and his spirits are immediately lifted. Michael got a new girlfriend and a better house, and is now an extremely wealthy dictator of a third-world country (hint: it’s not in Europe) under an assumed name. And he bought an XBox, which is pretty cool I guess.

Michael proved that the pen is mightier than a… a fucken katana. And this Friday night, in Bar Harbor, we won’t have katanas but we’ll kinda do the same thing, with the… drinking and the writing.

I’ve (somewhat unconsciously) looked up to Apple as a design mecca over the past couple of years. The problem is that whenever I see a pastel color palette, I want to punch somebody in the face, and guess what colors Apple chose for the new shuffles and nanos?

It definitely looks like Apple has aimed for a younger demographic in this update to their original iPod line: they’re all rounded corners and old-school-candybar aesthetic. The new interface supports this hypothesis: it’s much more graphically-oriented and almost feels dumbed-down to me, like those McDonald’s menus for illiterate people that only have pictures and stylized icons of the McDonald’s food but no descriptions of what the food contains. One could argue that they’re just trying to make the iPod interface resemble that of the iPhone’s. But with the iPhone, the interface change made sense: it’s hard to select tiny lines of text with your big stubby fingers, you need large icons to press. On the iPod, it just looks like they’ve dumbed it down.

The iPod touch, however, looks awesome. It’s pretty much an iPhone without the phone part (and the hefty AT&T contract fees). The main complaint I’m hearing seems to be about their capacity-to-price ratio ($299 for 8GB/$399 for 16GB).

I’m looking at the 8GB model, even though I have around 70GB of music. Why? Because about every six months my iPod stops working due to hard drive failure and I have to send it in to get replaced. Flash memory, the storage technology that the iPod touch is based on, doesn’t have this problem. Besides, the battery barely lasts a day - it’s not like I’m going to listen to a month’s worth of music until I return to my computer and replace the songs. I really like the idea of the Wireless iTunes Music Store as well - even if I wouldn’t buy much off of it, the ability to play 30-second previews of a song when someone recommends it to me is pretty priceless.