When we find them, we will wonder

Dark 1

Dark 2

Dark 3

The photographs were taken on March 16th.

I have been commuting by bicycle this week. It is much lighter and somewhat faster now, thanks to not having to use studded winter tires. The commute time has dropped to 45 minutes in one direction, even though there is quite a lot of gravel on the asphalt. Also, roadworks are slowing the way, as I need to take a detour through two sets of traffic lights, and cross a busy road without traffic lights.

(Posting title is from the poem Common Blue by Melissa Kwasny.)

Dawn to dusk - and damning Apple (or not!)

Dawn, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Freezing, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Frosty, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Here are three photographs from today, dawn to dusk. The work day was in between; length of day is now 8 h 4 min. Here is a quote which I think fits these views, seen practically every day: "The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Haven't checked who has said this; found it in a book today.)

Andreas Manessinger wrote a posting on the iPad (and related devices), in which he managed both praise and damn Apple. Here is a quote concerning the iPad: "There is simply some magic in this device. If you have never tried it, please do. Try to scroll with a flick of your finger and marvel at how responsive the iPad is, and how direct your control of it is. Marvelous! You conduct, the iPad sings."

And here is some of the criticism: "I am totally fascinated by something made by a company that I absolutely dislike for their totalitarian control of computer users, or as they see it, “customers”. I don’t want to be turned into a customer."

I don't have an iPhone or an iPad, and have never in fact used either of them, so I can't comment on this front. But my attitude towards Apple is quite different - I'm happy to be just a customer. I guess I'm not a tinkerer, I just want something that works (most of the time).

I have used Macs almost since they came out in mid-1980s. I bought my first - a Mac Plus - in 1987, and have used Macs ever since. However, if the Unix-based Mac OS X wouldn't have come out in 2001, I would probably be a Windows user by now. Fortunately this in not the case, I'm a happy Mac user still. (However, I view iPads and iPhones as unnecessary luxuries.)

I feel as if in the early 1980s there was a memo, which was read by the people at Apple (concerning Xerox PARC and such stuff), but which happened to lay down in the rain the the gutter and get smudgy and corrupted before reaching Microsoft. So, what Apple did, it worked; but what Microsoft did, more or less sucked, and at least was a slightly brain dead implementation of the good ideas in the memo.

And things have been like that for decades. Every time I have used Windows I feel there is a zombie-like thing happening somewhere, not a thing to enjoy in the long run. But this is just a personal feeling, I have nothing against Microsoft as a company - it is doing a good job as a company, the same as Apple is doing, being a company.

I guess what the real reason behind the "brain dead" thing is that Apple is a device company, Microsoft a software company. And software is something that mostly doesn't work as it should. There is something deeply wrong with the way we develop software, the way the software industry works. On the other hand, devices are something which is much more concrete, and thus they are not always as bad as they could be if you left software people in charge.