Whisky Van Gogh Go

Last summer I cited Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe to illustrate the concept of a “newspaper columnist,” the pre-Internet incarnation of a troll, the intellectual equivalent of a child who throws feces at the walls in a desperate cry for attention and pageviews. 

Along a similar vein, Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post declared that the man who co-invented the personal computer, which put the computing power of NASA on every desk in the world*, and twenty years later put even greater power in every pocket* — Robert Samuelson calls this person a historical footnote.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Robert Samuelson believes that the ability to have any knowledge in the world, at any time, with an interface that my two-year-old nephew has mastered, is trivial. Siddhartha might have agreed. And if Robert Samuelson is of the opinion that the Internet and Western Civilization will collapse in a hundred years and even Henry Ford shall be as Ozymandius, well that’s a valid belief too, I should give him a pass.

But if Robert Samuelson is not ignorant of the transformative power of personal computers, and he believes that our society is not going to revert to a nation of farmers, then he is a 65-year-old economist who has not been toilet trained.

* yes I’m being hyperbolic

“Okay after a decade we’ve finally got solid progress on web fonts. Awesome. And CSS transitions are like hey wow neat-o. Can we turn the focus to CSS filters now? Just some basic stuff like desaturate and multiply, maybe a gaussian blur?” — a post I’ve been meaning to make Omg.

I didn’t want to add yet another “what Steve means to me” to the noise but it’s on my mind so here are some unstructured thoughts.

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There were always computers around my household. I grew up on MS-DOS. I had some friends with Apple //’s and didn’t see what the big deal was. (I still don’t.)

I used a Mac in junior high for desktop publishing and “it felt like the future.” That’s a cliche that I’ve never really considered before just now. Stop for a minute and think about the last time you felt it.

A notion that something is both magical and will soon be commonplace. That the world will be different, and in a good way. It is an optimistic message about the future. Nobody has ever said “this feels like the future” and meant something dystopian.

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Before his return, I heard a story from a guy who knew a guy at Apple. He said that Steve Jobs was the kind of person who would walk into a random room and say, “There should be a door here!” The people would scramble to get the door made, and then he’d come back a week later and ask “Why the hell is there a door here?”

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I was one of those kids who was constantly tearing down and rebuilding his own computer, saving lawn-mowing money for new video card upgrades and processor bumps. It was like owning a classic car and tinkering with the engine. 

At one point I had a pretty slick 2ghz box, and acquired a 400mhz iMac for testing. It could run OS X 10.1 — horribly. And I found that I liked working on this crappy, slow plastic toy better than the bewilderingly fast and responsive Windows computer next to it. The iMac felt like the future.

I wasn’t interested in tinkering with my tools anymore. I had lost sight of the idea that a computer is a tool and a tool is not an end to itself. I wanted to be in the future and doing something there.

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A tool is not an end to itself, unless you’re in the business of making tools, of course.

Steve had a reputation for being a tyrant and a crank. Yet his stage presence was always gentle and confident. The reality distortion field even works over a video stream. 

That moment of touching the future, what would it be like to live in that moment all the time? To have a clear vision of it, and to have access to the talent and ability necessary to achieve it? To occasionally be thwarted but also be just successful enough to keep going?

I think it would turn a person a bit mad at times. I suppose being a Buddhist would help. 

I’m more familiar with the gentle Steve who reached into the coin pocket of his Levi’s to show the world the iPod Nano, but my favorite Steve is the crazy one who demanded doors where doors were not. 

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Steve eventually became a bona fide celebrity. I wonder if he hated that, or secretly loved it, or couldn’t care less. Or all three. 

Too many of our celebrities are entertainers. We need more heroes like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. (of note: both charismatic and slightly crazy control freaks)

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Some people say Apple won’t be the same after Jobs. Others counter that Jobs’ greatest invention was Apple, and the talent that he collected. A few people wonder if Jonathan Ives will ever graduate to CEO. They want a strong personality at the helm. 

Underlying all of this is a wish for a charismatic genius magician in our culture.

Upon getting a new computer, the first thing I do is set up a small number number of interface tweaks:

• Bottom-left hot corner: no sleep mode. I throw the cursor down there when I’m watching a movie, or doing some important operation, and don’t want the computer to dim the screen or enter sleep mode absolutely no matter what.
• Top-right hot corner: Exposé Desktop. Which a flick of the wrist I can see the desktop, grab and hold a file, flick again to bring back my apps, and drop that file wherever.
• Remap Launchpad key (F4) to TotalTerminal, a Quake-style Terminal HUD. (used Eject before switching to an Air)
• Remap keyboard backlighting keys (F5-F6) to screen brightness keys (F1-F2), so that I can…
• Remap screen brightness (F1-F2) to left-right tab navigation in tabbed applications. (The backlit keyboard keys are too far from the home keys to be useful, screen brightness only gets adjusted a couple times a day, and anyway backlit keyboard controls are useless because christ learn how to touch-type already.)

When other people use my computers, their reaction to these unexpected behaviors often verges on anger. Especially the Exposè Desktop thing, because it’s so disorienting when they’re not expecting it. Even when I explain, the response is usually “why the fuck would you do that?” (Because it’s a Personal Computer, bitch.)

Interface tweaks seemed more common back when everyone was a power user. Then an asteroid collided with the WordPerfect office and they went the way of those little plastic ribbons you affixed to F-keys listing a thousand keyboard shortcuts in microscopic type. Now we huddle around the fire and whisper tales of custom macros and ignore Automator as it whimpers at the edge of the camp.

How do you customize your computer?

I know when the retarded, bad-ideas lobe of my brain is talking.

The bad-ideas mind was wondering if we could hit 120mph coming downhill from Park City. We hit 112. The bad-ideas mind wondered if we could climb a twenty story vertical fire escape at 2am. We did. 

The bad-ideas mind has always, always wondered what it would be like to be in a hurricane.

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Fighting the urge to run out and buy a GF1. The morning after is going to be very interesting.