Thinking aloud

I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and unresponsive conglomerate that’s cruising more on astonishing marketing than satisfying customers.

Lest it be said I never have a nice word for Apple (as is often said about me and Microsoft, to whom I will shortly return to bashing like Niyazov’s beloved melons dropped off a roof), I gotta say my new 80GB iPod’s audio quality simply blows me away.

I have two kids. A teenager and a tween. As you might imagine, they are hard on iPods, destroying an average of one every 18 months. That’s OK, because the stinkin’ batteries don’t last that long anyway.

(Roger Greene, for whom I used to work at Ipswitch, is apparently as inveterate a heat-seeker as I am. When he upgraded years ago to, I think, a 4G iPod, he asked me if I wanted his 20GB 1G unit. Even though I already had a 10GB 1G iPod, I was glad to have the spare unit – my kids had already started eating iPods. Today, neither his nor my 1G iPod can last the two minutes it takes to play The Doors’ Hello, I Love You. And the $15 Apple sent me to make up for the short battery life buys about 4% of the 5.5G 80GB iPod. Thanks so much, Apple. At least you could honestly assert every successive iPod had better battery life than the previous generation.)

In what is probably a self-serving justification for satisfying my toy habit, the way it works here is that the kids get my latest iPod as a hand-me-down when they kill one of theirs. I get the new one. (-:

This time, I was really worried about passing along my 60GB 5G black iPod video when Becca came home and said:

“Dad, the iPod broke.”

“You mean you dropped it? Treated it like a bookmark between your 500 page history and math books in your backpack?”

“C’mon, Dad! Do you have to be so annoying? It just broke.”

The audio quality of that 5G iPod was superior, delivering vastly better performance than Bill Machrone heard on the 4G iPod. If you are willing to make slightly larger MP3’s using LAME’s VBR mode (I use 320 kbps as the maximum bit rate) and something like EAC (troublesome as it is to use) to really get them bits off the disc cleanly, you can produce MP3’s I defy you to differentiate from the uncompressed WAV file. With my Sennheiser PX100 phones, the 60GB iPod sounded sublime. Sure…purists will complain about “artifacts” and other inventions normal people cannot hear. But with this unit, there were times I would be running and would have to stop dead just to listen to the music. It was just that sublime.

But I am happy to report that the 5.5G 80GB unit I bought to replace the 60GB unit I gave my kid sounds even better. I wonder if the improvement is due to better decoding. But increasingly, I have come to think that the 5.5G unit sounds so good because Apple reduced noise in the amplifier.

Unlike nearly every MP3 player I’ve heard, this 5.5G unit says completely silent as you crank up the volume in phones with no program material. No hiss, no pops. Just silence. When used with the Logic7 audio system (13 speakers, 450 watts) in my car, the sound is simply astonishing.

This thing is so good it’s almost worth the price Apple makes me pay for a scratch-seeking, astonishingly fragile, non Vista-compatible MP3 player.

</Turkmen-apple-bashi>

Hello…Apple? Could you please please pretty please ship the freakin’ update of iTunes for Windows Vista?

I know – I just know – you have the thing finished. After all, if nearly everybody else could have their products somewhat ready for Vista, couldn’t you? I mean you own the whole MP3 marketplace, right? Surely someone on the iTunes team had access to MSDN and copies of Vista since frikin’ November, when it shipped to businesses.

You’re just waiting to inflict suffering on Vista early adopters, right? I don’t care if it’s spite or callousness. You’ve had your fun. Now, you gotta get over it, move on and ship the damn thing.

Seriously, you’ve made the point: Vista is hard to upgrade to. But is it really necessary to make the point by killing my iPod? I can’t sync pictures (I left the darn computer on overnight), music and podcasts syncing is a mess and takes forever. My library is a disaster. If you can ship a fix to play iTunes store purchases, you can ship the whole thing.

C’mon now…you’ve made the point? How about acting like you like the customers who bought iPods to use with Windows.

Just when you think you’ve outgrown all sense of fashion, peer pressure and have resigned yourself to your own middle-aged individuality, along comes a jolting reminder than your cohort’s tastes may change, but the pressure to conform doesn’t.

I was scanning a newsletter for a client and ran across this amazing story: BMW owners love HDTV’s. Then I downloaded the entire report and discovered that I am doing precisely what I am being told to do by the marketing machines of several technology and automotive companies.

I took comfort in that. At least if I am not original, I am cooperative.

A cold that I brought back from Europe resulted this week in a cough nasty enough to remind me of the incessant hacking, phlegm-ing and general mucous-ness of a smoker I once had the misfortune to sit across from. Yech.

But in the “better living through chemistry” department: my doctor gave me a prescription to retard the near disgorging of my lungs through my throat: a codeine-laced “cough syrup.” Man, when you pick up this stuff at the pharmacy, they look at you like you’re some time-machined refugee from an 18^th century opium den. I couldn’t figure out why…until I took one tiny little teaspoon full.

Maybe I am just easily intoxicated. But this stuff not only stopped my urge to cough – it took me off the planet. To a planet where nobody coughs…nobody speaks…and nobody can hear the colors in your mind.

People who know me know I’m not a big drinker…and drugs never appealed to me. So maybe it’s just low tolerance, but as soon as I finish this post (delayed for hours by hacking my brains out)…there’s a spoonful calling me.

I know that in the torrent of comment, wailing and teeth-gnashing the blogosphere, podosphere and ipodo-universe will generate about Steve Job’s comments on digital-rights management, my little post here will live in obscurity. Still, I can’t help myself: I’m blue in the face with envy…Envy of Apple’s marketing brilliance. And the power they have to call the kettle black.

Face it, this diatribe is as self-serving, as blind to reality, as any piece of propaganda written during the Cultural Revolution. Apple doesn’t give a damn — not a freakin’ blob of spittle — about “openness” or “accessibility.”

But, by putting the onus on the record companies for the big, bad DRM Apple is “forced” to use (against its will!), they neatly avoid the real issue: they’d rather die than open iPod to anyone.

But the world will applaud Jobs for taking this stance. Apple has neatly deflected the fact that its near monopoly of digital music players and downloads gives it market power it refuses to use. And by smearing everyone from Microsoft to the big record companies, Apple brilliantly panders to the conventional wisdom while adding luster to its brand.

Man, these guys are good…really, really good. I only wish I could stop feeling like Winston Smith.

Every now and then, even the best of us does really stupid stuff. Thursday, February 1 was my day.

I was headed home from Paris after a good set of meetings…all I had to do was get to the airport on time.

We were booked on Air France 332, leaving CDG at 1:15pm. The instructions said the check-in deadline was 12:15pm. I’ve even got proof. Here’s a snippet from the itinerary:

1:15 PM Paris, Charles de Gaulle (CDG) - France - Terminal 2E
Deadline for check-in : 12:15 PM
3:00 PM Boston, Logan Intl (BOS) MA - Usa

So, when does stuff run on time in France? Apparently only when the taxi you ordered for 10am shows up at 11:05am when you have to get from the Eiffel Tower to CDG in 70 minutes. We saw the taxi arrive just as we were running to the Metro to take the train.

It took us exactly 73 minutes…we arrived breathless at the gate at 12:18pm and were denied boarding. Worse, we were told that the real deadline was 11am…that the reservation system was wrong. Who knew?

That 3 minute miss cost me another 24 hours in Paris…and the searing crticism of my client who pronounced the whole episode “bush league.”

Ouch. Frickin’ mega OUCH.

I pride myself on being a wizened world-traveler. Though this was the first time I’ve missed a plane in over 20 years, it still makes you feel stupid.

The next day the check-in agents appeared to have pity on us. The plane wasn’t full and they put us upstairs (AF has economy-class seats upstairs on its 747-400s. That quiet, spacious upper deck is usually business class on other airlines.) I had a whole row to myself…and 7 hours 45 minutes of time to consider how expensive three minutes can be.