Death of a Computer

(I feel like my previous post needs to be balanced somewhat. Here at Tilt Lock, we're equal opportunity, and given that most of my computer experience has been with Windows, it seemed only appropriate to devote a post or two to it. Enjoy.)

Before our house went Apple, I had a desktop running Windows XP in my room. For some time, it worked flawlessly––lightning-fast and error-free, simply a joy to use. Computer Nirvana. Then, on a cool autumn day a few years ago, it declared war on my sanity.

I logged on one day and was faced with an ominous message: "An error occurred at address 0x0ADF2845 -- The memory could not be 'read.'" For those of you who don't speak hexadecimal, allow me to translate for you: "Oh, fuck."

From that day on, my poor little Dell desktop was never the same. It became irritable and morose, prone to mood swings and schizophrenic hallucinations. Sadly, they don't make Prozac for computers. Every morning, it would greet me with the same message: "An error occurred at address 0x0ADF2845. I don't understand. Why is this happening to me?"

I actually felt sorry for the thing. You could hear the hard drive grinding in frustration whenever I tried to open a report, and occasionally a depressed thumping sound would emanate from the case, as if the CPU had begun banging its virtual head against a wall. The CD drive would occasionally open, a moment of blind rebellion, then close again as if to say, "What's the point?" 

All my pictures stuck to the top of my documents. Smiley toolbars invaded my browsers. Everything slowed to a crawl. It was obvious the machine was trying, but it just wasn't enough, and soon a veritable chorus of other messages joined the original error. Soon, there was a 50/50 chance that the machine simply wouldn't start up, and even when it did, twenty minutes of confused beeping and whirring was usually enough to convince me to shut it off again.

In the computer's final days, it announced "Microsoft Error Reporting Service has encountered a problem and needs to close." The error reporter had caused an error. The ultimate in recursive failure. That week, we put it out of its misery; we pulled the plug on my confused, depressed little computer, which to this day sits on a high shelf in the basement, gathering dust.

In Which iRage Some More

At this moment, our house contains the following Apple-made devices:

• one (1) 28" iMac, on which I am typing this post
• one (1) iPad
• three (3) iPhone 4s
• one (1) iPod Touch (first-generation)
• three (3) iPod Touches (second-generation)
• one (1) iPod Nano (sixth-generation)
• one (1) iPod Nano (third-generation)
• one (1) iPod Nano (second-generation)
• one (1) iPod Shuffle (second-generation)
• one (1) Apple TV

This last, purchased only months ago, brings our total Apple device count to 14, 11 of which are iPods, officially qualifying us for classification as an iHousehold. The reason for this is obvious. The three people whom I share a home with, despite being quite intelligent, are technologically...impaired. Apple's well-deserved reputation for ease of use -- "computers for people who hate computers," so to speak -- was a natural fit. 

Though I was (at the time) a devoted Windows fanboy, I was happy about the change, anticipating a much lighter load as our family's unofficial tech support. Even more so when Dad purchased a ridiculously expensive AppleCare extended warranty. And then I discovered the truth.

When Apple products work, they're wonderful. And, 99 percent of the time, they do work. But when they break, and they will eventually break for no real reason, good luck fixing them.

Case in point: one day, Mom mentioned to me that her contacts weren't syncing from her computer to her iPod Touch. Here follows a brief explanation of how we fixed this problem.

11:00 AM: We make sure all the relevant boxes are checked, uncheck them just for the hell of it, then check them again.

11:30 AM: No luck.

12:15 PM: 45 minutes of Google searching finds us only Apple support articles, which we follow to the letter. Nothing. We try rebooting things.

12:30 PM: The obscenely long iPod diagnostic startup is finally finished. It fixes nothing. We try updating iTunes and the iPod firmware.

1:00 PM: The updates have finally downloaded and installed. They fix nothing, but while you're here, would you like to consider an absolutely free 30-day trial subscription to MobileMe?

1:30 PM: We finally give in and call Apple tech support, brandishing the extended warranty.

1:45 PM: "You are number...NINE. THOUSAND. ELEVEN. In line. Please continue to hold. Your call is very important to us."

2:00 PM: We finally get a real person on the line. He tells us to make sure the boxes are checked, reboot everything, update our software...

2:30 PM: Having run out of the standard script, the Apple guy puts us on hold again.

2:40 PM: *sounds of low-quality Bruce Springsteen accompanied by the repeated sound of a forehead meeting a glass table*

2:50 PM: The Apple guy is back on the line again. "Are you sure the Sync Contacts box is checked?"

3:00 PM: We give up on AppleIsStupidAndDoesn'tCare and go back to Google.

3:30 PM: After discovering the location of the ultra-secret hidden debug console, we open it and begin looking for a relevant error message.

3:50 PM: After scrolling through thousands of incredibly helpful and detailed messages like "Tue Nov 29 18:25:07 Martinez-Family-iMac.local loginwindow[33] <Warning>: CGSDisplayServerShutdown: Detaching display subsystem from window server com.apple.loginwindow[33]," we (I) finally manage to determine that, out of Mom's over 700 contacts, exactly one is corrupted and is halting the sync process.

4:30 PM: BUT WHICH ONE?

5:00 PM: We make an interesting discovery: There is absolutely no way to find out. Mom begins re-entering all of her contact data.


Somewhere, Steve Jobs laughs.

Aside: a quick math lesson for those of you who haven't already figured this out: 11 iPods / 4 people = 2.75 ipp (iPods per person). Well, actually, considering I own exactly one of these devices, the iPod Nano 2G (the exact circumstances leading to my current state of iPhonelessness are left to the imagination), a more accurate equation is 10 iPods / 3 people = 3.33 ipp. Hopefully, you don't need me to explain why this is WRONG.

E-reader Rage

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, received an e-reader for Christmas. As a professional skeptic, I was wary of the device. Then I noticed the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy preview in the Books list, preloaded onto the reader, and my skepticism was gone. "I can read Hitchhiker's Guide on this," I said. "This is the single greatest invention in human history."

Eager to test out my new e-reader after devouring the Hitchhiker's preview (and scratching my head at the multiple German books also preloaded), I was happy to discover that our local library had ebooks available for download through MyMediaMall. Upon signing into this system, I told it to display all available titles. It displayed 20 books, the most interesting of which was Window Treatments and Slipcovers for Dummies, though Divorce ran a close second.

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, received an e-reader for Christmas.

Ebooks are still a developing technology, and evidently people are still clinging to the old ideas of distribution. In particular, I am stunned by MyMediaMall's decision to set finite limits on the number of copies of a book a library can carry. For our local library, every book has at most 2 copies. Combine this with the rush of people with e-readers, and there are no books left -- with very few exceptions, in particular the hundreds of elementary math workbooks.

I imagine technology-haters feel rather vindicated by this. "See," they say, "these fancy Kindles will never replace paper books." And the worst part is, I can't really argue with them.


Aside: I am "fortunate" enough [see my fingers?] to own the Sony Reader Pocket Edition PRS-300. I will not whine about its lack of Wi-Fi, lack of a keyboard, lack of conveniently located page turn buttons, lack of annotation capabilities, lack of PDF resizing, legendarily slow loading times, low-contrast screen, disproportionate power consumption while in sleep mode, or the utterly crippled manager software. Not here, at least. What I will whine about is the fact that you can't have PDF and EPUB library ebooks on the device at the same time. No, even that isn't so bad. What bothers me is that Sony refuses to acknowledge this as a glitch, instead explaining it away with "Load all the books of one type, then go back to your computer after reading all of them and load all the books of the other type." After the Playstation Move, I suppose this is just par for the course.


(To be fair, Nook support for library ebooks is also garbage from what I've heard, and the Kindle...well, the Kindle has an entirely different set of problems.)

Hmm. How did that happen?

RE: The Psychology of Minecraft

EDIT: I am done screwing around with Blogger's Youtube embedding. Nothing I do can make this look right on Safari. Then again, it's Safari, so I can't entirely blame Blogger. The video is here. Pretend it was embedded into the page in an easy-to-access way.

Just a quick addendum. I don't know about you, but when I get up in the morning one of the first things I think is "I will make a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise in a video game."

Proving once again that well-adjusted human beings are still capable of achieving logic-defying levels of insanity. The amount of work that went into this structure is probably comparable to constructing the actual Starship Enterprise. Oh, Minecraft. We love you.

The Psychology of Minecraft

Upon first starting up Minecraft, the Internet's latest viral game, you are placed in a randomly generated world. Everything is made of giant blocks. You can see vaguely blocky mountains in the distance. The world stretches off in every direction, as far as you can see your computer can render. And you're armed, though perhaps "armed" is the wrong word, as you appear to be the only person in this vast, pixelated world. with nothing but your wits and a (blocky) fist. So, naturally, you start punching trees.

Hours later, you look up and realize it's 3:00 AM. You have spent most of your day building a fortress, wandering through dark caverns looking for rare minerals (going through hundreds of pickaxes in the process), grilling pork, rigging elaborate traps and generally refusing to do anything productive. Oh, and you've been killed by exploding zombies at least twice...but that coal isn't going to mine itself.

Such is life in the world of Minecraft.

There are two ways to look at Minecraft. On one hand, it's a game based on human creativity and ingenuity. On the other hand, it's a game based on the basic human need to shape the world to our will. This darker side becomes apparent when you realize that the beautiful, lush world you started in has, after a week or so, turned into a "cobblestone jungle," every last natural element destroyed...or, when you realize you don't have any trees left. (This is a lot more common than you would think. Wood is absolutely critical in almost every aspect of Minecraft, thus creating a compulsive desire to seek out and cut down trees.) Whatever the reason, the normal response is to build a boat and to sail to a place you haven't destroyed yet...maybe you'll do a better job next time.

The other dark side of Minecraft shows itself when you take the game online. Notch, Minecraft's developer, added online play fairly recently, and servers sprang up in no time. Every server contains a separate world, free for anyone to jump in and build.

Or, at least, that was the idea. Now, Minecraft online play is openly hostile towards new players. Most servers are blocked off with a "whitelist," meaning that you have to apply before you're allowed into the server. Others have constructed indestructible holding cells for new players, a way for the moderators (think of them as the police) to keep an eye on new citizens. Still others have constructed elaborate systems to prevent new players from affecting the world in any way. Those few servers that are open and unrestricted are plagued by "griefers," named for the emotions they inspire in fellow players. Covering buildings in sand, flooding cities with lava, or simply blowing up everything they see, these players are responsible for the electronic gated communities that characterize Minecraft.

I'd like to chalk that up to the anonymity of the Internet. No matter what they're called, malicious Internet users have been around for as long as the Internet itself. But maybe it's something more. Maybe the chaos of open online play reflects something about human nature. Maybe destruction comes easier than creation.

I won't dwell on it for too long. I've got iron to mine.