the things we think but do not say

Guess my Visa’s staying in my wallet after all. What the hell happened guys? As someone mentioned to me, I’d hate to see this turn into a case of emperor’s new clothes, since just about everyone loves Apple’s products. But isn’t this one a little weird looking? They’ve taken a centre speaker from a home theatre system and then stuck the iPod into the top of it? Is that it?

After all the excitement and rumours since Jan, this is a disappointing release. Mainly because they’ve always been so remarkably consistent with their design logic. Each product stripped away all unnecessary parts while unifying all the details with such care that it always felt that it should have been there all along. They’ve pretty much never missed a step. Except maybe now.

The latest iMac; the most elegant tilt mechanism I’ve ever seen.
The latest cinema displays; slim, sleek and exuding professionalism.
The iSight built into the bezel of the latest iBook Pro; of course it should go there. It made all other webcams feel so ‘third party’.

With the new HiFi I’ve got some questions:

Why isn’t there a rechargeable battery inside? You have to get some clunky ass D Cell batteries if you want to take it out? Part of the beauty and allure of the iPod versus any other mp3 player is that you never ever opened up the product. It would spoil the mystique and make it feel like just another electronic device. At least they’ve considered it and molded decent white battery bays. I guess you’d never really move it since the handles are clearly intended for two handed use.

Isn’t $350 a bit much even for the most devoted Mac zealot?

Is the Apple Airport Express the only way to stream music from your Mac to your Hifi?

Does it really need to look so freaking huge?!

As a tech blogger once wrote, I’m an easy lay when it’s comes to Apple’s products, but this one is not getting a call back, no matter how much it wants it.

Go visit the Apple site for more images and info.

It’s less than two hours now until Apple releases news of a number of rumoured new products.

I doubt that a brand new iPod will be released since it’s been so soon since the new 5th generation iPod with video was announced but that’s not to say that special editions of it won’t come out (similar to the red/black U2 model). And by new iPod, I mean one with a new interface/design architecture like a huge touch screen. It’s not that they couldn’t, but it’s just that it’s uncharacteristic of them to bust out a new device when the sales of the previous generation are still so strong.

The one thing I’m hoping to read about is the fabled iPod boombox thingy. The one thing that’s currently a huge pain in the ass is being able to access my iTunes from my PC and get it routed into my home theatre set up in the living room. Wirelessly or not, this is only being addressed by the a couple of things, the Roku soundbridges and the Slim Devices Squeezebox.

By the way, if they don’t release it, then I’d happily recommend the Altec Lansing iM7, voted iLounge’s speaker system of the year 2005. Of course, the fact that it was designed in my studio does not influence my opinion of it in any way

If Apple releases something like these two products, my Visa number would be tapped as fast as my Firefox autofill feature handle.

Damn you Apple!
Damn you Steve Jobs!
Damn you Jonathan Ive!

Why do you tease me so?

I live a fairly modern life and I rely on the structural integrity of hundreds of devices to make my day go straight. In fact my digital life is so pervasive, when I read a headline on the BBC news website, “Amazon shrinking at 25% in a year” I immediately thought that the stock price of the online retailer was down. How sad.

But the one thing that I rely on, the thing that’s now more vaulable than almost any other object, is my hard drive. It’s got all my photos, all my music, tons of my work it’s all taken years of careful curation/creation.

And so my ‘deep in the back of my head’ worry is that one day my drive will just spontaneously and castrophically die. And I’ll be totally screwed.

So I finally bought a back up drive to my main back up drive. A second level of redundency as it were. And what’s the only hard drive out there? Why the Lacie Brick drives, designed by Ora Ito, of course.

250Gb for under $150. Sweet.

Is there anything in your life that if you could keep a perfect back up of, you would?

After a long week and a half in Palo Alto/San Francisco (where the weather was crap incidentally) I’m home and back in full effect.

Flying over Chicago’s city grid lines on Friday night reminded me how much I love this city. From the neighborhoods, to the afforable housing (a very relative term), to my friends and my work, it’s the place I call home and it’s also the longest place I’ve lived in the since I left my mum’s house.

And yes. The weather can be cold as a mofo. But the summer makes up for it as the city comes to life like no other place I’ve ever seen. Strangley, when I lived in London, I used to say the same thing: “If only the weather was a little better, then this place would be be best place in the world…”

I think that New York might now be the only place that’ll make me leave this town…

If you love Chicago, leave a comment and let me know why.

My apologies to my many tens of loyal readers for not writing much recently. I’m in a work induced flood with project levees breaking all around me, while deadline watching FEMA officials ineffectually flap their arms at the devastation. (That was some weird Katrina inspired imagery there…)

I’m in Palo Alto CA, pumping CAD and rendering my face off, all for the sake of more soft drink consumption. Yeah!

I’ll try to write a little more often and even try to not make each post quite so precious. I might try out posting a few links to things that are funny (mainly to me), and less about making such a big, long winded point. I need to get off my blogging horse sometimes and being such a pretentious twat.

So, thanks for coming and being so patient.

Last week I left Chicago for a project out here in California. I’m working Palo Alto and thankfully staying in San Francisco. Palo Alto still sucks ass. One morning though while standing in Peets Coffee, waiting for my ’small-mocha-no-whip’, I saw the local rag that passes as a newspaper around here, the Palo Alto Daily News. The headlines run like, “Local patron buys more shitty art to hang on wall already used for self conscious party conversation.” or “Sometimes bad things happen to good/rich people”.

But a little gem of an advert for calendars caught my eye, with it’s catchy uplifting tone:

“It’s not too late to start the year off right! Your favourite calendars are here. Step by and pick up a couple.”

Brought to you by your good friends at Roller Hapgood and Tinney, Funeral Directors.

Err.. what? Hold on a sec.

Who in their right mind uses a calendar with a massive endorsement from a funeral home, stuck to their fridge? “Ok, wednesday is dinner with the Nussbaums, thursday is Karen’s recital… oh look, Roller Hapgood and Tinney are having a sale on caskets this Saturday!”

And what’s this in the ad copy about “your favourite calendars are here”? Does that mean that they had a bunch printed last year and they’re back by popular demand? Were “Puppies in a casket 2005″ a huge hit?

It feels like I’m watching Six Feet Under.

I walked into Reckless Records to get my copy of Donuts, the new LP from J Dilla and quite casually the sales assistant says “yeah, Dilla died today. I just heard an hour ago.”

I still can’t believe it. I just read a number of reports that are confirming his unexpected and sudden death. An interview given a few months back in XXL magazine, mentions that a ruptured liver caused him to go to hospital for an extended stay. He apparently worked on the Donuts album while still connected to various tubes, literally making beats from his bed. Rumours of his death sprung up then too. But today, I believe it’s all true. He was only 32.

I saw Dilla perform twice. Once in New York at BB Kings with Madlib and MF DOOM and the second time in Chicago with just Madlib (both times for the Jaylib/Madvillainy tours).

He was a remarkably unpretentious, perfectly cool guy that loved making music. He was genuinely excited that people were out to see him live. After the show in Chicago, I waited to speak to him and mentioned that I really loved his earlier instrumental albums. We talked some and I said that if he was ever in Chicago he should call me and I could show him around (who the fuck am I right? to show Jay Dee around?!) but I said it anyway. He then gave me his cell phone number and said that I should call when I pass through Detroit.

That’s nuts.

Name me a top hip hop artist that gives out their cell phone number to a fan? Crazy.

I’m so sorry to hear that he died today. He was a super talented producer.

I almost crashed my car driving home, listening to the show. I started laughing so hard, I started to cough, almost making me veer into on coming traffic.

These recordings are apparently the world’s most downloaded podcasts and are still running. There’s about two weeks left (of a total of 12 shows). I just found out though that only the last four podcasts from each week, so now, in week ten you can only go back as far as week six, which is a shame. And since it the whole thing is free, and they’re so good, I think I’ll put together all the shows when they’re finished and I’ll make them available. Somehow.

My previous, gushing post about Ricky, Steve and Karl can be found here.

I just watched a remarkable film, made in 2000, by Marc Singer, called “Dark Days”, with an mood setting score by DJ Shadow (Josh Davis). Filmed in a very graphic black and white, looking like an illustration at times, it tells the story of a number of men and women that lived under Penn Station in New York City. Dealing with the incessant roar of passing Amtrak trains, these people go about there lives in a pedestrian routine that showed me how people can adjust to just about any circumstance.

The reasons for why a homeless person might find themselves homeless one day are numerous and complicated, but crack coccaine playing a factor in these homeless people’s lives, featured heavily in this documentary.

The definition of homeless shown through living example, can mean a number of things. It can be a state of mind. It can be a situation that one isn’t willing to admit isn’t ‘temporary’ anymore. For some, it could just mean not having running water. A notable aspect of the film is the care to which a lot of the people shown took care of their humble surrounding and themselves. They went about their lives, eating, cooking, cleaning; doing common domestic chores as anyone would. Many said that they were glad to have a permanent shelter as they did, as opposed to other homeless that are living exposed, top side, in parks.

The film’s effectiveness at humanising the homeless in the movie was heart felt and it turns out that Marc Singer’s reasoning behind making the film was to provide some means to help directly those that he saw. A first time film maker, he enlisted the help of many of the subterranean Penn Station residents, to make an impromptu film crew of them. Begging favours for access to editing suites and shooting on borrowed 16mm stock, the film does ultimately help those featured. And it’s in the last few mintues of the film we hear with visible happiness, that these people considered those times living underground, to be dark days indeed.

I’ve been struggling with this the last few days, but it’s just too crazy to pass up.

A nice young woman comes to my studio for an interview. The first I hear of it is when I’m invited to lunch with her and a colleague of mine.

“Where do you want to go eat?”
“How about ***?” I suggest.
“Like Asian food?” I ask the interviewee. “Sure” she responds.

So we sit down, chat a little and we order; the woman and myself both order different maki roll dishes.

We start getting into the lunch interview and things are going well. She’s a very sweet girl but quite inexperienced. We get to a question about some of her course work and our food arrives. My friends food looks good, my dragon roll looks fab, and her dish looks equally appealing if a little large. Her maki have a dimeter of about 2.5″– 3″wide and she starts to answer our question.

I can see that she’s struggling a little trying to pick up the first piece with her chopsticks, but she manages it.

She got as far as… “Well I liked this this class about….”

And this is when she starts choking.

My eyes widen as hers does, and I start to realise that her pause isn’t a strategic moment of reflection, but a result of a blocked air passage.

I look around. I don’t know what to do.

Her mouth stays open the whole time.

She starts to gag a little and I’m already thinking “Please don’t die!”

She starts to gag with a little more effort and still nothing has changed. She still can’t breathe.

I move my hand to her face with my napkin and rub her back.

She stands up now. I’m now thinking “Please don’t throw up in an interview!”

Then, as tears are running down her face from the panic, she coughs up golf ball sized bolus of wet rice and fish which plops wetly into my hand. Air rushes into her lungs as I feel the weight of the soggy food.

We all sit back down and I put down the napkin and grab a fresh one.

To her credit, she was really, amazingly well composed for almost having died. I think she even managed to finish her lunch.

I’m so sorry that she had to go through that. I can’t imagine anything more embarrasing/awkward/traumatic to happen during an interview.