Remiel

Friday, Rebecca Black, and celebrity hate

I love “Friday”. Unabashedly. I hope Rebecca Black makes a million dollars from it, her debut album is a Gaga-caliber hit, and she marries her dreamboat, Justin Bieber.

When I first heard “Friday”

I thought “This is quite possibly the worst song ever!” Every pop musician who pays attention now has to contend with “Friday”. It’s a critical line in the sand. Pop is easy, yes, but say something, at least. Or risk ridicule. Weird Al himself couldn’t write something this hilarious and damning.

I imagined Black wrote the song herself; always a silly assumption to make about pop music. Purportedly, both Rebecca and her mother had doubts about the quality of the lyrics, but the 13-year old did what the vanity studio told her to do.

Whether any artists notice or not (pop is exceptionally poor at “noticing”), Rebecca Black and Ark Music Factory have given us something necessary. Finally, we have a pop song that is loudly, perfectly, about nothing.

On the other hand: who hasn’t fetishized Friday? It’s the beginning of the weekend! And goddammit if the song wasn’t stuck in my head after only one listen.

Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards

Rebecca Black is a privileged, teenage girl who probably wouldn’t know good music if it bit her on the ass. 13-year old Remiel made a mix tape for his girlfriend featuring Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love”.

Teenagers are idiots. That’s their job. They think having a dream is the same as deserving it, and eventually either give up, or make the enormous effort to make the vision real. But sometimes, they win the lottery, and have their goals delivered on a silver platter. And we hate that.

We we we so excited, we so excited

Celebrity hate is the lamest hate.

What’s the difference between a death threat against the pedophile next door, and one posted on a Paris Hilton YouTube video? The differences are vigor and intent. Despite her massive exposure, Hilton exists relatively free of the loathing we’d feel about an active sexual abuser in our own neighborhood.

But somehow, the rhetoric is the same. “Worthless piece of trash”. “Die you stupid fuck”.

Like a snot rubbed off on a public restroom wall, celebrity hate is fueled by anonymity, not malice. You wouldn’t leave a booger on your own wall any more than you’d actually take a swing at Chris Tucker if you met him in person.

George Carlin wrote:

I love and treasure individuals as I meet them. I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

What has Rebecca Black done to you? Why not celebrate the fact that it’s possible to become famous just by being a “professional socialite” like Paris Hilton?

Hate Monsanto, if you want. And if you’re willing to do a little legwork and figure out who’s truly responsible, you can hate those guys, too. Even though you’ve never met them, and they’ve probably never personally hurt you the way the guy who ran over your dog did.

Money is just money. Fame is just fame. They’re numbers. Metrics. Piles of stuff somebody got because they multiplied a talent by an opportunity.

If the opportunity seems undeserved relative to their talent, why not celebrate the success of a fellow human being and politely encourage them to use their influence benignly, instead of tearing down a stranger to impress your friends and whitewash your jealousy?

Posthumously ghost-written

Forget laboring for years, honing my writer’s craft, struggling with dialogue and other pretentious shit. I’m just going to buy an old-fashioned, lockable desk. One of those deep brown ones with antique-style slots along the top for “correspondence”.

A desk with a key.

Then I’m going to hire a ghostwriter to pen me some novelicious shit. Something about hubris and railroad empires and dogs finding their way home.

I will not publish this novel. I will lock it away in my writer’s desk, with coffee stains and dust obscuring it, Old Werther’s Originals wrappers partially clinging, and the corners of the pages blunted by casually shoved objects.

Then I will die.

And someone will find “my” novel. They’ll be amazed. ”We had no idea!”

The newspapers will rally. “Character development!” “A story with a beginning, middle, and end!” “Man who could barely write a coherent email apparently had competent understanding of basic story structure, after all!”

Postumously ghost-written.

What bugs me about Yelp (and how to fix it)

I think I finally put my finger on it. I used to hate Yelp because the reviewers are so often unreasonably whiney. But hey, all reviewers are like that, right?

Now I’ve come around. Yelp is a great resource. By digging into the reviews and using my judgment to filter out the jerks, I’ve found some great places: Ethiopian food, LASIK, and a decent haircut.

But I still don’t like the whiny jerks. And now I know why. I used to work in food service, and I can tell you this: in the five years I waited tables, I was the worst server you could ever get, and also the best server you’ve ever had. Sometimes even both on the same day. It’s hard, it’s unpredictable, and sometimes: shit goes wrong.

You can’t properly review a restaurant (or service establishments in general) in just one visit. You go, you order one meal, you eat it, it’s great or it sucks, and the same is true for the service.

Here’s what I’d prefer. How about “Visit Reports” instead of “Reviews”?

You log in, you write about your most recent visit, including a star rating, and it gets attached and aggregated into your general review of the place.

I log in, search for Ethiopian food, click a restaurant, and there, as usual, is the list of reviews. But each review is actually the aggregated experience report of one particular user.

The best part is, now I can sort by things like descending number of visits, so if I want to favor users who are “regulars” instead of one-time tourists, I can do that.

Meanwhile, Yelp sees the amount of user-contributed content increase as users vie to log the most visit reports to their favorite places. And since Yelp has recently “Foursquared” their site with a geo-app, you could even highlight the number of “verified visits” each user has logged. This increases everybody’s credibility, and helps Yelp promote its mobile app.

Making the leap to SSD on a MacBook

It used to take 28 seconds for my 13-inch MacBook Pro to load the folders on my desktop after I logged in. Now it takes five seconds.

Large-footprint apps like Photoshop and Dreamweaver now load near-instantly.

The machine now has 1.16 terabytes (1,160 gigabytes) of hard drive space, 160 gigs of which is on a solid state disk (SSD) drive. It has also cured my MacBook Air lust, as I now feel that I’m getting a ridiculous amount of value out of that extra two pounds of weight.

I opted to completely replace my optical drive with MCE Technology’s OptiBay hard drive chassis. Hence the extra space for the additional 1TB hard drive. 

There’s lots of geek-centric commentary out there about whether the time is right yet for SSD (it is), and which of the many available drives on the market will actually give you the benefits the technology promises.

This post is intended for the pseudo-technical, “I’m sold; what do I do?” crowd that doesn’t care about the nuances, and just wants to get cracking with a credit card and a screwdriver.

I’m running a mid-2009 style aluminum unibody MacBook Pro 13-inch. Much of what you read here probably applies to other models, but do your homework.

UPDATE 7-Feb-2011: Speaking of doing your homework, some people are having wake-from-sleep trouble with OWC Mercury Extreme drives. This article discusses my experiences with Intel’s X25-M series.

What I bought

• Intel X25-M 160GB SSD Drive
  SSD is still expensive, and prices haven’t come down the way many had hoped they would. They will soon, of course, but the pace could be better. The market changes quickly, and as of this writing, Intel’s X25-M may already no longer be the sweet spot. Again: do a little homework before you buy, and be particularly sure to check out current SandForce-based offerings.
  
  That said, the performance gains are so great even now (a RAM upgrade’s got nothing on this), that even at over $400, the price/performance ratio feels totally worth it… provided you buy the right drive. Intel’s X25-M series is the real deal. 
  
  There’s also a 80GB version  available for less than half the price, but you’ll be hard-pressed to get by if that’s your only drive.
  
  Update: @zuhl has written a nice piece on how to Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD if that’s your thing.  

• MCE Technology’s OptiBay hard drive chassis
  The extra speed of SSD comes at a price, and not just in dollars. You’re also sacrificing a lot of capacity. In order to have your cake and eat it too, you need to find a way to get another hard drive in there for data and media storage. (The Mac OS should, of course, be installed on the SSD.)
  
  The OptiBay replaces your optical (CD/DVD) drive so you can have two hard drives: one fast, one large capacity.
  
  It also includes a “free” external enclosure for your optical drive and a USB cable, so you can still pop in a CD or DVD when needed.

• Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drive  (optional)
  This is optional, since you could just use your existing, platter-based hard drive for secondary storage instead. But I wanted more space.

• Vantec NexStar 3 external drive enclosure  (optional)
  I put my old notebook hard drive into this. I now use it as an external backup.

• Syba 12-Piece Extensible Precision Screwdriver Set  (optional)
  If you plan to replace your existing hard drive, you’ll need to remove four Torx T6 screws. These tiny, star-shaped screws cannot be removed with a regular screwdriver.
  
  The beauty of this thing is that it’s not really a “set”. It’s a single drive shaft with a chamber in the handle for storing the collection of bits. I bought it on a whim because my tools are in storage, but now I’m completely in love with this little gadget. It includes both flat and philips-style bits in many sizes, as well as an assortment of Torx bits. 

What I did

1. Temporarily installed the new 1TB drive in the Vantec external enclosure.
2. Connected the 1TB drive via USB, formatted it (HFS+) with Disk Utility, then used Carbon Copy Cloner to back up everything on my MacBook to it.
3. Installed the SSD into the OptiBay enclosure.
4. Opened up my MacBook and installed the OptiBay+SSD, using the provided instructions. 
5. Started the machine with the new SSD installed, and formatted it with Disk Utility.
6. Deleted everything from the original internal hard drive that I didn’t want on the SSD, then used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the OS and apps to the SSD. (It’s important to note that everything is still backed up to the new 1TB hard drive at this point.)
7. Used System Preferences>Startup Disk to change the MacBook to boot from the SSD.
8. Rebooted from the SSD and made sure everything worked OK.
9. Powered off the MacBook, opened it back up, and replaced the original hard drive with the new 1TB drive. I used ifixit’s guide to replacing a MacBook Pro hard drive.
10. Screwed the MacBook shut for the final time, and started it with both new drives in place. Upon confirming everything looked OK, I installed my old hard drive in the Vantec enclosure; its new home.
11. Deleted the now-redundant system files from the new 1TB drive.
12. Changed my system hibernation mode settings. See below.

New hibernation settings
Ever since the PowerBook G4, Apple notebooks use a system called Safe Sleep to restore your computer to working order after being left unattended for a while. With Safe Sleep, the current session is written to both RAM and your hard disk — RAM because waking up is faster that way, and the hard disk so that the system can safely go into hibernation if the battery drains while it’s asleep.

You can save some space on your SSD by disabling Safe Sleep, and removing the sleep image. You’ll still be able to sleep your computer, but there’s no zero-battery safety net anymore. Your MacBook can go a very long time in RAM-only sleep mode on a full battery, so this should rarely affect your life. But keep in mind that if the battery does run out, you’ll lose any unsaved work.

This Macworld article goes into greater detail about Safe Sleep, but for our purposes, the short version is this:

1. Open up Terminal.
2. Type “sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0” without the quotes, and hit Enter.
3. Enter your password when prompted.
4. You are now using RAM-only / “old school” sleep mode.
5. Now type “cd /var/vm” and hit Enter.
6. Finally: “sudo rm sleepimage”
7. This will delete the existing sleep image file on your hard drive, reclaiming that space for future use.

Why not install the SSD in the regular hard drive bay?

Good idea! The only problem is that the regular hard drive bay is the only bay that features sudden motion protection. If you drop your MacBook, it’s smart enough to safely park your non-SSD hard drive so it won’t be damaged by the impact. The optical bay interface has no such feature. This is harmless to your shiny new SSD because it has no moving parts, but any spinning platter-based drive will be at risk if installed in the optical bay.

You can have it both ways if your secondary hard drive has its own native sudden motion detection (the Western Digital Scorpio Blue does not, nor does your factory-installed MacBook hard drive). In that case, you’d install the SSD in the MacBook’s regular hard drive bay, put the spinny drive in the MCE OptiBay chassis, and disable OS X’s native sudden motion detection (or risk conflicts). 

Life without an optical drive

Since the MCE OptiBay includes a basic USB-powered enclosure for your old SuperDrive, you won’t be completely without an optical drive.

But who wants to carry that thing around? I sure don’t.

Here’s what I did:

1. Used Disk Utility to add a 160GB partition to my old hard drive (now in the Vantec enclosure).
2. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of my 160GB SSD.
3. Backed up all my other important files (and some CD/DVD software images) to the other partition.

If I ever need to reinstall, it’s a simple matter of using Carbon Copy Cloner to restore the complete backup.

And whenever I acquire a new piece of software on a disk, I make an image of it using Disk Utility’s CD/DVD Master option. Then I can simply mount the image from the external drive in the future. 

Does this void my warranty?

To my knowledge, unlike the regular hard drive, the optical drive is not considered a “user serviceable part”. So it probably does void your warranty.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t be too hard to simply put the optical drive back in before bringing the MacBook in for service. I didn’t have to remove any stickers or anything to get it out of there.

What about Boot Camp?

I have Windows XP installed on the larger, Western Digital drive, and it works fine both as a bootable partition and through VMWare Fusion. I’d recommend against installing it on your SSD, since it may prematurely shorten the life of your drive (and eat up some of that precious flash storage space). WinClone is an easy, free means of migrating your Windows installation on a Mac.

Informal, “real life” benchmarks

Time between pressing the Power button and seeing the login screen:
Old drive — 63 seconds
New SSD — 45 seconds

From pressing Enter at login to fully loaded Desktop:
Old drive — 28 seconds
New SSD — 5 seconds

From clicking Dreamweaver in the Dock to seeing the green DW Welcome screen:
Old drive — 45 seconds
New SSD — 7 seconds

I could go on. And those are the big things. Small operations are now truly instantaneous. The difference is night and day. Not only does my Mac now “just work”, it “just works NOW”.

Every time, “I’ll place the period after the double quote”.

I know it’s “supposed to look like this.”

But instead, I “do it like this”.

Because the way I see it, the thing being said by someone else is “inside” whatever I’m saying. 

THIS I could respect:
My friend said “I think bunnies are cute.”.
(Two periods, see?) 

That makes sense to me.

This makes sense to me, too:
My friend said “I think bunnies are cute”.

But this?
My friend said “I think bunnies are cute.”

As far as I’m concerned, you’ve left out the ending to your sentence. What else would you like to say in addition to quoting your friend? You’ve left me hanging.

The Tempest in a Teapot Effect of Twitter

At any given moment, Twitter broadcasts what millions of people are most inclined to comment on.

It does not broadcast what is most important to us.

It does not broadcast what is most “worth” commentary.

It does not filter or curate.

If I walk into a room full of people and sound an air horn, it will suddenly become the most popular topic of conversation, at least for a few seconds. That doesn’t mean anyone cares passionately about air horns. Nor does it mean people will still be talking about the air horn a week later.

Some will passionately decry the topic’s popularity. They will throw up their hands and ask “Why are we all so concerned with this air horn? Can’t we go back to talking about something that matters?”

Others will respond “Ah HA! But by commenting on the commentary, you too concern yourself with air horns!”

A few will say something really funny about air horns. There will even be a contingent that turns the air horn into an interesting metaphor for an issue that matters far more than the basic fact of a loud noise.

Others will retort “How dare you make light of this issue? Do you have any idea how many people are killed by air horns every single minute?”

Eventually, the echoes will fade, and life will go on. History will embrace the air horn as a noteworthy matter, or it won’t.

That the room was temporarily obsessed with it is less a statement about us, and more a simple affirmation that the noise was very loud.

Phrases Uttered While Playing Mario Galaxy 2 That Are Also What She Said

“Maybe try it while crouching?”

“Use the pipe in the back.”

“All my progress has been lost.”

“Starship Mario can now advance!”

“Dammit, I was just trying to reposition myself.”

“You’re terrible. Learn to read the signs.”

“I haven’t been this confused since playing Mario Galaxy 1.”

“I need more coins.”

“Wait, that’s not Mario. That’s his brother.”

“If you drill all the way through, you’ll come out the other end.”

“A good butt stomp can work wonders.”

“I want a hot, jizz-soaked four-way with Yoshi, Princess Peach, and that thing that wears an egg for a diaper.”

Bonus! Phrase actually uttered by Bowser Jr.:
“I won’t need my dad’s help to finish you off! I got a big surprise for you!”