The Cult of Apple is now the Cult of Moleskine

The first stationary was, appropriately, immobile.  Early Man used cave walls and ceilings to record pictures of Woolly Mammoth hunts and other cardio activities.  The first cave painting was probably followed by the first scathing review, possibly followed by the first critic being chased from the cave, and being trampled to death by a Woolly Mammoth.

Fast forward a few thousand years to dawn on the Nile, where Pharaoh has gathered his architects for the latest tomb project management meeting.  Folk are still putting stuff on walls, although this being a more modern society they carve as well as paint.  That’s progress.  Papyrus is the latest thing but wait, one of the younger architects has papyrus that is somehow thicker, creamier and of a heavier weight than the sheets of papyrus used by the other architects.  Surely, this fellow must be cleverer.  He gets to speak first and suggests that if they cut costs by making the tomb pointy instead of a cube as was originally suggested, Pharaoh can afford to take another two dozen handmaidens with him into the afterlife.  Good help is hard to find and so Pharaoh agrees, meeting adjourned, Pharaoh goes off to stand in profile for the rest of the day for his official portrait, and the rest of the architects know two things, that they too must get this papyrus of authority, and that this cocky kid will be crocodile fodder by sundown.

Vegetable matter continues to be pulped for paper to this very day.  There have, of course, been a couple of diversions along the way.  Velum is the writing surface of choice if you want to record something for posterity and really, really, don’t like goats.

Today, despite technological advances such as the Apple Newton, stationary and paper is more popular than ever.

Indeed, it’s reached cult status.  When Apple were opening up their new stores all over the planet, they were likened to temples, with all the staff dressed like members of a religious order and Apple users showing a devotion to the company’s products that is surely more faith based than reasoned.  Like the Church, Apple continues to rely on the devotion of its followers to get it through scandals or, as Apple prefers to call them, iOS updates.  I’m not saying that changing the interface on my iPhone is as bad as diddling choirboys, I’m just saying that at least the Church has acknowledged that that kind of behaviour is a problem.

The analogue equivalent of the Cult of Apple is the Cult of Moleskine, or stationaryphelia.

Over the last few years, the Moleskine has made something of a comeback.  For all I know, or care, the brand was invented in 2005 but the thing looks as though it has been in the pocket of the combat jacket of war correspondents everywhere from the Normandy landings to the bars of Saigon.  It is, it has to be said, a fabulous product, having a cover thick enough to act as a reasonable writing surface on its own, and bearing paper that can take the ink of a fountain pen without blotching like a teen in a titty bar.  I don’t think it could stop a bullet, blade or broken bottle but I do think it’s sturdy enough to beat off an enraged artist who has read your piece on her latest exhibition and is trying to pummel you screaming, unaccountably, ‘to the mammoths with you!’.

The value in a decent notebook is twofold.  The first is that even if you are writing ‘eggs, milk, foot cream’ during a meeting, it looks like you are the sort of person who is writing ‘synergy’.  A good notebook is, in business or art or recreation, a commitment to a serious attempt to do something.  Once it’s in there, it’s there forever.  This is not thermal fax paper, this is a cave wall.

The second is an extension of the first.  If you treat yourself to a decent notebook, you make a commitment to yourself to be worthy of those who the advertisers would have you think used this brand before you.

Or choose a new brand, and be the one others will follow.

The Right Tool for the Job

There is a school of thought that the medium makes, or helps make, the message.  For instance, a movie starring Tom Hanks released in ‘theatres’ (more likely multiplexes, places to buy cola and starch snack ‘meals’ with a projector booth or ten bolted on to the side, often located in a sort of leisure industrial estate) is better than a straight-to-video movie ‘starring’ ‘Tom Guttenberg’, which in turn is better than anything on Youtube, which in turn is oddly enough not better than your old home movies.

Which means good means film stock?  Maybe.  Just as the medium makes the message so there is a school of thought that the instrument making the message is important.  What else explains the continued existence of Mont Blanc pens in the age of the Bic?

Moreover, ‘stationary fetishism’ is a thing, and not the perverse desire to shag a statue you might think it is.  Rather, it’s the, in my opinion very reasonable, desire to use rather nice notebooks and so on for writing, well, notes on.

No doubt having a good notebook is important.  Anyone using one ‘in the field’ meaning surveyors, farmers, scarecrow spotters, appreciate a notebook with a good stiff cover that supports excited scribblings.

It’s when the notebook becomes a ‘journal’ that definitions become important.  A good stiff journal is invaluable if you are travelling somewhere that lacks wifi or Christianity.  You will need good quality paper that absorbs ink but repels damp, of sufficient weight to swat any winged pest but light enough to be portable and thick enough to stop a dart from a blowpipe.

Back in the day, foreign correspondents used to pound out copy on a vintage (or as they called it back in the day ‘a’) typewriter, and a manual one at that.  At least they did in the movies.  Hacks of all descriptions would hammer at the keys and the mechanical levers would pound the paper.  This, one thinks, is the sort of tool that you need to write about the rise of Hitler, the Blitz, the D-Day landings, the Moon landing, JFK’s rise and fall.  Not all such typewriters would come with optional ashtrays and beverage holders, but if they did it wouldn’t be a bad idea.  A serious instrument for a serious composer of prose, like a Wurlitzer of words.

The manual typewriter survived so long as field kit because, unlike its electronic cousin, it didn’t need to be plugged in.  And so things remained until the advent of the laptop.

Early laptops shared important characteristics with manual typewriters.  They weighed an immense amount and they could stop not just a dart from a blowpipe but just about everything short of a depleted uranium shell.

Laptops endured even beyond the advent of tablets, with their fairy-weight and their Methuselah-like battery life because as soon as you bring up the keyboard on the tablet screen, you have more keyboard than screen and the space left is fit only for the composition of postcards of Haiku.  Or modern news reporting.

However, you can now purchase clip-on keyboards for your tablet.  In fairness, you have been able to purchase lightweight and long lasting laptops for some time now, but they are so svelte that they barely pass the ‘stiff enough to lean on to write a note’ test, never mind the all-important blowpipe dart test which is not only important but also the reason I am not allowed in any branch of PC World in the possession of a length of bamboo.  Such keyboards are marketed as ‘robust’, meaning designed for angry bloggers who hammer at the keys like an enraged gibbon.  Is means that when attached to your tablet they make the ensemble a comforting weight, but still about 1/10th of that of a vintage laptop.

Ultimately, it’s probably not the instrument that’s important, but the message.  the instrument and the medium should not prevent the message being recorded, and that’s about it.

That said, ink on paper has more prestige than pixels on screens so, unless the museums of the future exhibit the flash drives of the famous, notebooks will always have a place.

Improving your Broadband

Broadband has brought us many benefits.  Let’s take porn.  Back in the dial up days, your images would load slowly, from the top down and of course with porn, unless it was some really twisted stuff, it was only one third of the way down the image when things started to get in any way interesting.  Now, thanks to advances in technology, porn is right there, in your face, on demand.

Despite what the cretins at your IT support department would have you believe, technology is not magic.  However, self-appointed techno-wizzards do share a trait with priests and physicians and other professions that seek to create an air of mystery about their activities, that is, they have their own language.  And at least you have to credit those whose job is, let’s face it, half a rung up from being the guy who changes the toner cartridge for at least invention their own language (‘babble’), rather than the priests, who basically asked if anyone would mind if they used Latin because nobody else was anymore and, the Roman Empire not having as many branch offices as it did BCE, there were surprisingly no objections.

Maintaining technological infrastructure takes time and effort.  I recently learned that the internet is an actual physical thing, just like Roy and Moss’s box in ‘The IT crowd’, but bigger and more plural.  The internet is distributed among many many ‘server-farms’, that are kept in secret locations, but normally near water for, not power as you might think, but cooling.  And people have to lay fibre optic cables and so on and so forth.  Basically, there’s a lot more work requiring high-viz jackets in the technology industry than you might think.

None of this mattered when my broadband went off earlier in the week.  Even after power cycling the magic box, nada.  So, called up the company and got a message telling me that because of improvements they were making to their broadband, I might be experiencing problems with my broadband/’phone/telly, until three in the afternoon.

There is nothing quite like being told you can’t have something to turn an inconvenience into a raging desire.  Luckily, I used up all of my emotional energy fuming about the inconvenience and never got as far as desire.  An upgrade, in the middle of the day?  Really?  If I had been able to Google for my emotional state, I might have got ‘incredulous’ back as an adequate description.

Things could have been a lot worse.  First of all, the interruption was only for about 45 minutes, secondly, I was able to use this time to have lunch in front of the telly, which was working fine.  And thank God because you know what they say, mankind is only three lunches and one missed episode of ‘Loose Women’ away from savagery.

I was wondering what the hell they were doing that couldn’t be done overnight, and I have to say that I didn’t notice a hell of an improvement to the broadband speed although, really, what was expecting, that ‘House of Cards’ now plays at the same speed as the Keystone Kops?  And at least Virgin haven’t taken the Apple route of ‘upgrades’, by making sure that their customers know there’s been an upgrade because a) your iPhone home screen looks a bit different and b) your iPhone home screen is the only fucking thing that works on your iPhone now.

Still, I suppose that vital maintenance to ensure increased security and resilience, together with replacement or even modernisation of infrastructure will result in downtime.  Then again, so does turning the internet off and turning it on again if there’s a glitch and, frankly, the image of a bloke in a high-viz jacket and a hard hat standing next to a fuck off huge lever and counting slowly to ten before jacking it back upright again is one that’s surprisingly hard to shake.

Technology today - The Social Knotwork

As anyone who has put two steaks and a jar of bovril in a blender, then hit the 'blend like fuck!' button in an attempt to make a meat smoothie will know, technology is a marvellous thing but in the wrong hands it can be messy.  See also, smart-bombs.  The problem with the democratisation of technology, of putting more computing power than took man to the moon into a mobile 'phone, is that that technology is now in the hands of idiots rather than astronauts, who use it to sodcast tinny tedious music choices to a public who are devoutly wishing that the mobile 'phone owner was indeed in deep space, preferably without the benefit of a space suit, and where famously no one can hear you scream, nor presumably hear Rizzle Kicks played through a Lillyputian PA.

The use of technology can also have unintended consequences.  Social networking sites were probably not invented by peodos to allow them to groom children.  The socially responsible original intention of sites like 'Friends Reunited' was, I seem to recall, to wreck formally happy marriages by putting ex-boyfriends and girlfriends back in touch.  The only pictures of schoolchildren on Friends Reunited in the early days showed them sporting flares and a nylon tee shirt, and any peado arranging to meet with one on the basis of their photograph would be justly surprised when a 47 year old accountant turned up, no longer sporting the choirboy outfit, or full head of hair, that originally captured the predator's attention.

As social networks moved from connecting you with people you knew to people you didn't know but shared an interest in hob-nobs with to, via the arrival of Twitter, connecting you with people off the telly, one wonders if the next obvious step as we all carry our computers round with us now is going to be to put us in touch with people who may share some of our interests and may be sitting in the same coffee shop.  Perhaps an app that uses a personality quiz and a list of your top dozen interests, combined with an honest assessment of 'how desperate are you to make friends?' with a scale of Robinson Crusoe to Not Really could let you know if like-minded ugly socially awkward people are nearby.

To really take off, of course, it's going to need Google glass, so it can guide you to these people and you an see if they are as attractive in real life as that photograph of them wearing that choirboy outfit on their profile page would have you believe.

The flip side is that this might encourage others to talk to you.  Cyber stalking is a truly first world problem, especially if you don't guard your privacy and deactivate those real time location updates.  Essentially, if somebody you have been avoiding sends you a message reading 'I see you're in the knicker aisle at M&S', it's time to go offline for a while.

Going after net nuisances can be problematic.  A few years ago, tiring of e mails from associates of the apparently countless deposed members of royal families in Africa who were keen to send me oodles of loot in return for only my bank account details, I tinkered with the notion of replying to these would be benefactors instead of simply deleting and continuing my daily routine of looking for diverting porn. 

My reply would read that this was an automatic reply, generated by 'Microsoft Curseware 2009 Beta', that the recipient was immediately and irrevocably cursed upon reading the first line of the e mail and that the curse itself was encrypted in the body of the e mail.

I never had the guts to try it.  On sober reflection, it's cruel and actually fairly irresponsible.  Also, I have read enough horror stories to know that these things invariably backfire.  But more than that I was always worried that if some poor sod in an e sweatshop in Nigeria read my e mail and then had a freak accident, possibly involving a goat falling on him or something equally newsworthy to net nerds, suddenly I'd be the bad guy.

Steve Jobs R.I.P

Sad news today that Steve Jobs, top man at Apple and Messiah figure to the high priests, acolytes and devotees of the cult of Apple, has passed away. I wonder how many people, like me, found out the news while browsing the internet with Safari on their iPhone.

Film fans have their screen stars, music fans have their pop stars, geeks had Steve Jobs – who was a film star, a rock and roll god and techhie guru rolled into one. There’s no doubt that the Apple brand is, at the moment, all conquering, given the expense of the iphone their ubiquity is astonishing. Less expensive but more common is the iPod in its various guises. These days it’s odd to see somebody on a train without the tell-tale white wires disappearing into a pocket.

The close association between Jobs and the creation, and then revival of, Apple means that he’s probably linked more than any other individual to something that it would appear everyone carries around with them, whether they realise it or not.

From the images that accompanied the headline it appeared that little shrines had sprung up outside Apple stores. Apple fans are. Of course, no strangers to keeping vigil outside a store, although usually it’s because of the birth, or at least the release, of something rather than the demise of somebody. Rock and rollers have their shrines, like Jim Morrison’s in Paris, they even have their temporary shrines, like the bouquets, bottles and fags and candles left outside Amy Winehouse’s flat so it was entirely appropriate that Apple fans should leave offerings of apples with bites taken out of them or even messages written on them, along with their candles flickering on the screens of their iPads, iPhones and iPod touches.

Of course, everyone knows that geeks have a strong sentimental streak. Want to make one cry, just say ‘you have been, and always will be, my friend’ and have the tissues ready.

Goodbye Steve, and thanks for some truly amazing gear that really did transform lives. I’m not saying that the decision to ask my wife to marry me was entirely related to her buying me an iMac…but I’m not saying it was entirely unrelated either.

Not a great advert for Windows

When I was a kid, I would watch science fiction programmes and films and think of how cool it would be in the future when we were surrounded by television screens, there would be television screen posters, even television screens on our telephones.

Now we have the technology and those things have been a reality for a few years, but unfortunately the content is crap.

Television posters are the worst example, just moving versions of the still image. There’s a limit to how much interest a woman tossing her glossy hair, on a loop, can sustain. Surely the most effective form of television mass market advertising would be some sort of fake public address about impending Armageddon. Possible drawbacks include little impact on repeat showings, and that while sex sells, the end of the world does not.

Probably better than this video poster though – reminding everyone seeing it that as an operating system, Windows is so crap it can’t even sustain a woman tossing her glossy hair. Might as well have slapped a ‘buy apple’ logo on the monitor and have done.

The blog entry now at platform 1...

Trains are by far the most romantic form of travel. Air travel had a brief flirtation with glamour but that ended when Concorde was removed from service. All the flat beds, showers in departure lounges and head massages in the world can’t disguise the fact that, even in the premium first cabin of a modern passenger jet, you’re still breathing the recycled exhalations of the proles back in super-economy and still possibly at the mercy of some bearded freak with a sharpened spoon.

First class travel on airplanes sells itself as luxury but the truth is that the huge passenger airplanes of today are really just big cattle wagons with wings. If first has beds, does economy now consist of a penny hang with a beverage cart option?

Rail, however, appears to be getting more and more luxurious. The newly refurbished St Pancras station has the longest champagne bar in the world! Train late? Who cares! Trains mean excitement, spies, the lady vanishes, nazi agents, stylish murders, brief encounters and assignations in the sleeper cars. Airplanes mean not being able to take your swiss army knife on board with you – a problem as it means you have nothing to fight off gremlins with.

Trains are great. Stations…less so. Recently there was some sort of train trouble on my morning commute and during a fifteen minute wait on the platform I and everyone else was subject to a audio torrent of announcements, all recorded. The first was apologising for the delay, the second reminding us to keep a look out for suspicious packages, the third telling us we can’t take bicycles on the train and the fourth making other announcements about delays and then the whole thing started off again! Bloody hell.

The worst thing is that the apology is so obviously computer generated. It’s maddening that something without a soul says it’s sorry – it’s like your VCR apologising if it records songs of praise over the porn tape you put together through recording the ten minute free view on the Hot Channel for two weeks. Even creepier would be if it was actually programmed to feel sorry. You just know that one day it would get into therapy and channel all that sorrow into aggression and the next thing you know you have a computer with a chip on its shoulder directing you to the wrong platform out of spite and laughing. That’s why I’m uncomfortable with anything more technologically advanced than a kettle.