Dear Apple,
Tell ya what:
Just sit down for an entire year, meet in a board room every day, and decide on every possible improvement that you are capable of making to iTunes (in light of technology that would develop in a year). After that happens, and ONLY then...
...release a new version of iTunes.
Look, I know it's free, but why am I downloading a new version every other week? It's a bit ridiculous.
Thanks.
Mark
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
It's Easy to Talk
Sure, being a million dollar athlete really gives you no reason to miserable.
Not much excuse when you voluntarily put yourself in the spotlight either.
Of course, when you want to get out of the spotlight and can't, maybe you have no one to blame but yourself.
But you know what really doesn't help?
When the media really won't stop harassing you.
Celebrity or not, when your privacy disappears, life is going to be HELL.
Let me make it clear: I don't like Terrell Owens.
I think he's either an asshole or a tool of Drew Rosenhaus. If you were either of these things, it'd be hard to say which way your life would be worse.
I don't have much sympathy for him...
...but everyone is capable of being depressed.
And it's so much worse when no privacy is left.
Want a possible reason that Terrell Owens would kill himself?
Maybe because he can't get away.
Maybe because even when he doesn't intend it, he's headline news.
Evidenced by this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
Would you be able to live if everything you did was in the media, and you were unable to live your own life?
Not much excuse when you voluntarily put yourself in the spotlight either.
Of course, when you want to get out of the spotlight and can't, maybe you have no one to blame but yourself.
But you know what really doesn't help?
When the media really won't stop harassing you.
Celebrity or not, when your privacy disappears, life is going to be HELL.
Let me make it clear: I don't like Terrell Owens.
I think he's either an asshole or a tool of Drew Rosenhaus. If you were either of these things, it'd be hard to say which way your life would be worse.
I don't have much sympathy for him...
...but everyone is capable of being depressed.
And it's so much worse when no privacy is left.
Want a possible reason that Terrell Owens would kill himself?
Maybe because he can't get away.
Maybe because even when he doesn't intend it, he's headline news.
Evidenced by this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
And this.
Would you be able to live if everything you did was in the media, and you were unable to live your own life?
Friday, September 22, 2006
Well...
This story is kinda bad...
...And certainly I don't condone this kid's actions...
...And the kid is stupid for not following the directions, which were apparently clear.
On the other hand, the pug is now at least nationally famous...for real.
So in other words, the kid's idea worked. Perfectly.
It went outside the bounds of the assignment, and drew the ire of animal rights' groups everywhere...
...But, I mean, it's kind of hard to argue with results, isn't it?
...And certainly I don't condone this kid's actions...
...And the kid is stupid for not following the directions, which were apparently clear.
On the other hand, the pug is now at least nationally famous...for real.
So in other words, the kid's idea worked. Perfectly.
It went outside the bounds of the assignment, and drew the ire of animal rights' groups everywhere...
...But, I mean, it's kind of hard to argue with results, isn't it?
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
OU Fans...
Okay, I'm so sick of hearing about stories like these.
All right, the man made a bad call.
All right, the Sooners lost the game.
Yet, somehow, inexplicably, life...goes on.
IT'S JUST A SPORT.
IT'S JUST FOR FUN.
IT'S JUST A GAME.
GET A GRIP.
AND GET...THE FUCK...OVER IT!
There's never, NEVER any reason to threaten a guy's family.
Geez...
All right, the man made a bad call.
All right, the Sooners lost the game.
Yet, somehow, inexplicably, life...goes on.
IT'S JUST A SPORT.
IT'S JUST FOR FUN.
IT'S JUST A GAME.
GET A GRIP.
AND GET...THE FUCK...OVER IT!
There's never, NEVER any reason to threaten a guy's family.
Geez...
Friday, September 15, 2006
Dear Kids in America Today...Redux
As my good pal Shultzy pointed out recently, I don't get as many hits here on Blogspot as I did on Xanga.
I'd still like to believe I reach some people.
Just in case, this next post will be seen on both my Xanga and Blogspot because I think it needs to be said again, in light of the recent shootings in Montreal, and another Columbine-like plot uncovered in Green Bay, WI.
If there are any kids reading out there, please pay attention to this post. I cannot stand reading about these situations and wondering when someone's going to get smart and succeed like the Columbine shooters did. I worry more because my father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and soon, my sister...are all teachers.
I think the saddest part about this post is that it wasn't that long ago that I wrote it because of a similar story.
Dear kids in America today,
For the love of God, stop picking on each other in school.
Look, I'm not saying this just because I was sometimes the picked-on kid in grade school. I'm saying this because this day in age, you might just get killed for doing it.
Don't believe me? Check this link.
Yes, these kids were caught because they were dumb enough to put their plans on MySpace
Yes, their putting it on MySpace was, in all likelihood, an obvious cry for help.
Yes, they probably have severe emotional issues (partly the result of bullying, no doubt).
None of these things really make any difference. Remember Columbine? No, you kids probably don't because you were too young to know or care at the time. Well, I believe today is the 7th anniversary of the massacre there. To fill you in, what happened was, two kids came into the school loaded with guns and bombs, and they killed a bunch of people. No one could stop them. The authorities couldn't come in time.
People made fun of these kids. People shoved them around in the halls. They responded with guns. Big, murderous guns. They started shooting almost everyone, and if they hadn't killed themselves, who knows when they would have stopped.
To fill you kids in some more, I can tell you that the media made a much bigger deal about violence in schools after the Columbine tragedy. They reported almost any incident where a kid brought a gun to school and threatened to kill someone.
The strange thing is, after Columbine, the reported incidents where kids brought guns into school threatening to kill people seemed to grow. It seemed like the only thing that bullied and taunted kids learned from Columbine was, "Hey, my parent has a gun in the front closet...I could that!"
The reports had younger kids every time too. A sad example is in the movie "Bowling for Columbine," Watch the movie, even if you hate Michael Moore. You'll see that, in Flint, Michigan, there was an incident where a 1st grader was shot in school by a classmate. 1st grade!!!!!!! And the little girl/victim DIDN'T pick on the shooting kid!
Today, apparently, the threats have moved to the internet. Fortunately, people read some of these websites where these threats are located, and action is taken on a much quicker scale. Still, I have a feeling that one smart kid or group of kids is going to come along, pass messages to each other on the internet, carry through with a plan, and that will be the end of it.
And then everyone will remember Columbine and forget its lessons all over again.
Please, tell me, kids of America today, why, in light of all this, you would taunt and tease one of your classmates today? Why would you take such a risk? How do you know that the kid you taunt and tease doesn't have a gun at home, and that all he needs is to find the cartridge and a way to bring it to school? How do you know that he isn't ready to snap inside and that he wants you to be his first victim?
And hey, whoever you are, if you've got problems at home, talk to someone outside your home. If you're having trouble in school, talk to your teacher. Do something, do ANYTHING to make yourselves feel more confident, just DON'T PICK ON OTHER KIDS!
You just might save your life.
I'd still like to believe I reach some people.
Just in case, this next post will be seen on both my Xanga and Blogspot because I think it needs to be said again, in light of the recent shootings in Montreal, and another Columbine-like plot uncovered in Green Bay, WI.
If there are any kids reading out there, please pay attention to this post. I cannot stand reading about these situations and wondering when someone's going to get smart and succeed like the Columbine shooters did. I worry more because my father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and soon, my sister...are all teachers.
I think the saddest part about this post is that it wasn't that long ago that I wrote it because of a similar story.
Dear kids in America today,
For the love of God, stop picking on each other in school.
Look, I'm not saying this just because I was sometimes the picked-on kid in grade school. I'm saying this because this day in age, you might just get killed for doing it.
Don't believe me? Check this link.
Yes, these kids were caught because they were dumb enough to put their plans on MySpace
Yes, their putting it on MySpace was, in all likelihood, an obvious cry for help.
Yes, they probably have severe emotional issues (partly the result of bullying, no doubt).
None of these things really make any difference. Remember Columbine? No, you kids probably don't because you were too young to know or care at the time. Well, I believe today is the 7th anniversary of the massacre there. To fill you in, what happened was, two kids came into the school loaded with guns and bombs, and they killed a bunch of people. No one could stop them. The authorities couldn't come in time.
People made fun of these kids. People shoved them around in the halls. They responded with guns. Big, murderous guns. They started shooting almost everyone, and if they hadn't killed themselves, who knows when they would have stopped.
To fill you kids in some more, I can tell you that the media made a much bigger deal about violence in schools after the Columbine tragedy. They reported almost any incident where a kid brought a gun to school and threatened to kill someone.
The strange thing is, after Columbine, the reported incidents where kids brought guns into school threatening to kill people seemed to grow. It seemed like the only thing that bullied and taunted kids learned from Columbine was, "Hey, my parent has a gun in the front closet...I could that!"
The reports had younger kids every time too. A sad example is in the movie "Bowling for Columbine," Watch the movie, even if you hate Michael Moore. You'll see that, in Flint, Michigan, there was an incident where a 1st grader was shot in school by a classmate. 1st grade!!!!!!! And the little girl/victim DIDN'T pick on the shooting kid!
Today, apparently, the threats have moved to the internet. Fortunately, people read some of these websites where these threats are located, and action is taken on a much quicker scale. Still, I have a feeling that one smart kid or group of kids is going to come along, pass messages to each other on the internet, carry through with a plan, and that will be the end of it.
And then everyone will remember Columbine and forget its lessons all over again.
Please, tell me, kids of America today, why, in light of all this, you would taunt and tease one of your classmates today? Why would you take such a risk? How do you know that the kid you taunt and tease doesn't have a gun at home, and that all he needs is to find the cartridge and a way to bring it to school? How do you know that he isn't ready to snap inside and that he wants you to be his first victim?
And hey, whoever you are, if you've got problems at home, talk to someone outside your home. If you're having trouble in school, talk to your teacher. Do something, do ANYTHING to make yourselves feel more confident, just DON'T PICK ON OTHER KIDS!
You just might save your life.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
Facebook's Woes and Other Problems
I have seldom seen so much anger out of college and high school students than I have over the new Facebook News Feed.
For those unfamiliar with Facebook, or if you just haven't logged on in a while, Facebook News Feed pretty much lets you know EVERYTHING that happens with all your Facebook friends, and I do mean EVERYTHING. You know what groups your friends joined, who they became friends with (which is kind of silly, considering you don't know half the people your friends know at other colleges), and you know when they change something on their profile or "status."
The final result was, as so many people put it, "stalker-esque." People didn't want to know what some of their friends were doing, and more people didn't want others to know what they were doing. The resulting anger spawned countless groups on Facebook, including one that sent a petition to Facebook demanding changes.
The outcry sparked an apologetic letter from Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg that appeared on my Facebook homepage this morning. Here are some excerpts:
"We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now..."
"...We didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over."
I personally admit to joining the petition group: "Students Against Facebook News Feed." With all due respect to my law school colleague Evan, who does make a valid point ("My mantra - don't put or say anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want physically posted in your University's Union bulletin boards. Now that you are suddenly aware of what a dedicated person (stalker, employer, professor) could have - and now any person instantly can- found out about you, change it."), I still must protest these changes.
My reasoning: unfortunately, in both high school and college, there will be occasional stalker-esque boys and girls, and tensions among friends, couples, and certain social groups will run high. This being the case, these tensions might boil over if one friend sees his/her friend join a group or befriend an individual that the original friend cannot agree with. Bad things, especially if dealing with stalker-esque boys or girls, may follow from this. It seems silly that tensions should start over things on Facebook, but the reality is...it happens. There are certain innocent things that could cause enormous fights, and Facebook's lack of privacy features for News Feed seems to set the stage for such conflicts. If, on the off chance someone would be emotionally or physically hurt, or even killed over such things (in this day and age, I cannot say definitively that it wouldn't happen), I think the outcry at Facebook would be even greater, even though probably undeserved. For this reason, I cannot agree with Facebook's changes; inevitably, Facebook must do more to protect people's privacy.
That said, I think this decision was not thought out very well on Facebook's part. I understand where Facebook was coming from though, being that they are losing much ground to MySpace and maybe other websites in terms of users and features. The pressure to keep pace with these sites inevitably forced Facebook to brainstorm new, unwise ideas, and add a new feature quicker than it probably should have. At the very least, it looks as if Facebook panicked facing such competition. I cannot sympathize because Facebook's creators make much more money than I do, but on the same token, I cannot say that if I were Facebook's creators, I wouldn't have felt the same pressure to do the same thing.
Regardless, the one thing I wish more than anything else in the world is that the people on Facebook who protested these changes so boisterously put half as much passion and effort into other national and world causes as they did protesting Facebook. It speaks volumes about the current generation that Yahoo! wrote in an article (follow the link at the top), "Generation Y had previously been shockingly devil-may-care in its attitude towards privacy, but News Feed seems to be the last straw."
I cannot help but wonder if much of Generation Y felt remotely the same way about President Bush's wiretapping policies. I also cannot help but wonder if they even knew that a District Court judge ruled against the President's power to do this.
In that regard, perhaps this fury over Facebook's new feature highlights a bigger problem among Generation Y: the nearly complete inability to see beyond their own private worlds. If there IS such tunnel vision on the part of Generation Y, I fear for the future. This nation and this world cannot continue to espouse the attitude, "Nothing is important enough to make me care unless it directly affects me and my immediate surroundings."
I fear that such an apathetic and isolationist attitude could elect another President Bush, and such thinking seems even more dangerous as we approach the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I believe that it was partly the casual, "They'd never attack on American soil" dismissal of terrorist threats by our own leaders that led to the attacks. We cannot afford to have another generation thinking this way.
I am optimistic when I see people joining different political causes on Facebook. I can only hope that these people carry those causes over to make a difference outside the "Facebook box."
**UPDATE**
Facebook, responding to the pressure, has upgraded their privacy features to allow an individual to remove all news and notes from the News Feed feature. The petition group applauded the move and thanked Facebook for responding so rapidly to the protests.
Time will tell if the damage is already done, and I can only reiterate the rest of my concerns.
For those unfamiliar with Facebook, or if you just haven't logged on in a while, Facebook News Feed pretty much lets you know EVERYTHING that happens with all your Facebook friends, and I do mean EVERYTHING. You know what groups your friends joined, who they became friends with (which is kind of silly, considering you don't know half the people your friends know at other colleges), and you know when they change something on their profile or "status."
The final result was, as so many people put it, "stalker-esque." People didn't want to know what some of their friends were doing, and more people didn't want others to know what they were doing. The resulting anger spawned countless groups on Facebook, including one that sent a petition to Facebook demanding changes.
The outcry sparked an apologetic letter from Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg that appeared on my Facebook homepage this morning. Here are some excerpts:
"We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now..."
"...We didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over."
I personally admit to joining the petition group: "Students Against Facebook News Feed." With all due respect to my law school colleague Evan, who does make a valid point ("My mantra - don't put or say anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want physically posted in your University's Union bulletin boards. Now that you are suddenly aware of what a dedicated person (stalker, employer, professor) could have - and now any person instantly can- found out about you, change it."), I still must protest these changes.
My reasoning: unfortunately, in both high school and college, there will be occasional stalker-esque boys and girls, and tensions among friends, couples, and certain social groups will run high. This being the case, these tensions might boil over if one friend sees his/her friend join a group or befriend an individual that the original friend cannot agree with. Bad things, especially if dealing with stalker-esque boys or girls, may follow from this. It seems silly that tensions should start over things on Facebook, but the reality is...it happens. There are certain innocent things that could cause enormous fights, and Facebook's lack of privacy features for News Feed seems to set the stage for such conflicts. If, on the off chance someone would be emotionally or physically hurt, or even killed over such things (in this day and age, I cannot say definitively that it wouldn't happen), I think the outcry at Facebook would be even greater, even though probably undeserved. For this reason, I cannot agree with Facebook's changes; inevitably, Facebook must do more to protect people's privacy.
That said, I think this decision was not thought out very well on Facebook's part. I understand where Facebook was coming from though, being that they are losing much ground to MySpace and maybe other websites in terms of users and features. The pressure to keep pace with these sites inevitably forced Facebook to brainstorm new, unwise ideas, and add a new feature quicker than it probably should have. At the very least, it looks as if Facebook panicked facing such competition. I cannot sympathize because Facebook's creators make much more money than I do, but on the same token, I cannot say that if I were Facebook's creators, I wouldn't have felt the same pressure to do the same thing.
Regardless, the one thing I wish more than anything else in the world is that the people on Facebook who protested these changes so boisterously put half as much passion and effort into other national and world causes as they did protesting Facebook. It speaks volumes about the current generation that Yahoo! wrote in an article (follow the link at the top), "Generation Y had previously been shockingly devil-may-care in its attitude towards privacy, but News Feed seems to be the last straw."
I cannot help but wonder if much of Generation Y felt remotely the same way about President Bush's wiretapping policies. I also cannot help but wonder if they even knew that a District Court judge ruled against the President's power to do this.
In that regard, perhaps this fury over Facebook's new feature highlights a bigger problem among Generation Y: the nearly complete inability to see beyond their own private worlds. If there IS such tunnel vision on the part of Generation Y, I fear for the future. This nation and this world cannot continue to espouse the attitude, "Nothing is important enough to make me care unless it directly affects me and my immediate surroundings."
I fear that such an apathetic and isolationist attitude could elect another President Bush, and such thinking seems even more dangerous as we approach the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I believe that it was partly the casual, "They'd never attack on American soil" dismissal of terrorist threats by our own leaders that led to the attacks. We cannot afford to have another generation thinking this way.
I am optimistic when I see people joining different political causes on Facebook. I can only hope that these people carry those causes over to make a difference outside the "Facebook box."
**UPDATE**
Facebook, responding to the pressure, has upgraded their privacy features to allow an individual to remove all news and notes from the News Feed feature. The petition group applauded the move and thanked Facebook for responding so rapidly to the protests.
Time will tell if the damage is already done, and I can only reiterate the rest of my concerns.
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