I’m going to tell you about a guy I know. He’s really smart and clever. He cares about all the right things, and is quite pleasant to know. However, at some point in the past, he’s decided that computers are magic.

They’ve got fairies inside, and if you shake them too much, all the pixie dust dribbles out the cracks, and the whole thing stops working. Fucking magic! This is not a problem, really. I myself have decided, in similar fashion, that cars are magic. Put petrol in, and the goblins under the hood drink it and push. Or something. Magic! Isn’t it great. Because things are magic, they cannot be understood – so one really ought not to waste too much time trying to get one’s head around them. It’s magic! You’re not supposed to understand what’s going on.

The odd thing is, this guy (remember him from the first paragraph?) seems like the type of person who would be interested in technology for the sake of it. He’s curious, interested in new things, and generally very aware of what goes on around him in the world.

I decided that cars were magic when I was 16 or 17. Around the time most kids are thinking about getting a cool car, I was thinking about getting a cool computer. Zowie! I had a 16” monitor back then, and it was eeee-nooorrr-mus. I was so cool. I even had an SE/30. Yeah, baby. I rocked. I understood computers pretty well. Bits of thing fly around in there, sending messages to each other, asking other bits of thing to do things for them. Simple. Look under the hood of a car? Goblins! Magic! Bad smells! Dirty!

I wonder if first-paragraph guy feels the same way about computers, and when his magic moment was?

The real point of this essay is this: even though computers aren’t magic, MySQL is. Evil, black, dark magic that silently and randomly refuses to update tables whenever it feels like it. No pattern, no rhyme or reason. Poof. Magic.

Last night on Spicks and Specks, the musical game show that doesn’t have the gorgeous Julia Zemiro in it (but it’s got Myf, and Adam’s kind of cute too, so that’s okay), they quoted at length from a rider for Iggy and the Stooges. Being a clever kind of guy, and a friend of the Google, I went and found it. It’s a hilarious document, especially compared to most of the other whiney riders I’ve read in my time.

Here’s some random snippets.

In which the rider teaches international standards and spelling to Americans:

Note to our American brethren: A metre is about 3 feet 3 inches. And ‘metre’ is ‘meter’ spelt correctly…

In which the rider throws terror into the hearts of monitormen:

We need: one (1) monitor man who speaks good English and is not afraid of death.

In which the rider gets tangental about pandas (again):

Anyway, there you have it : straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m not saying Chris is a horse, naturally. Actually that would make quite an interesting fight, wouldn’t it – Horse v Panda? I think the panda might just win it if he managed to get on the horse’s back and sink his teeth and claws into its neck. Without getting kicked in the bollocks, of course. Two hooves in a Panda’s gonads would probably bring victory to the horse, though I doubt it would celebrate much. Horses arent big champagne drinkers.
And fucking Grand Prix drivers just squirt it all over each other.

I’ll leave the rest of it for you to read yourself. Trust me, it’s brilliant.

The boosterist Melbn city council (John So is my bro!) has come up with another way to get people to appreciate the alleged joys of the CBD: They’re staging a romp! (Giant ball of string not included). Of course it’s a blatant rip-off of similar events around the world, not to mention a TV show – but hey, it sounds like so much fun, and a great way to get lost in the city with some friends. And it comes with free stuff! I’m all over free stuff.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of my software product. It’s kind of what I’m supposed to be doing all day. I keep coming back to a quote from (real) Steve Jobs:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ ... It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve’s no dummy.

So this thing we’re building not only needs to look good (which it does, to a point), it also needs to work well (which it does, to a point). The tricky part, from a business perspective, is to be able to justify the bits that can’t be seen. Changing some colours in the UI is dead easy (therefore cheap) and will create more ooooh-aaahhh than doing the less glamourous, more expensive, harder to justify under-the-hood stuff.

I’m still pursuing elegant utility.

Here’s some more design wank, via Monoscope.

As usual, I’m way ahead of the curve. Oh yes, gentle reader, this is another ego entry. It was recently announced at a very reliable and completely serious news source, that Vista SP1 would actually be a re-install of Windows XP.

I’m so ahead of the curve because this is something I just did myself a few weeks ago. I installed SP1 before it was even released. Woohoo! Bye bye Vista, hello XP. It’s so much nicer (of course, that’s saying that feeling cat poo is much nicer than feeling horse poo). I still like NT the best though. And it’s so damn fast in Parallels on my MacBook Pro.

I’d read this guy even if he wasn’t Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ). He’s a fantastic writer, with excellent insights into the (finally) converging media and technology worlds. At the recent All Things Digital conference, apparently both Real Steve Jobs (RSJ) and Bill Gates admitted to reading FSJ occasionally. Occasionally my butt. I’ll bet RSJ has FSJ on his RSS, and is thinking “damn I wish I could say some of those things out loud”.

FSJ posted two columns recently that I thought were excellent examples of his insight. They’re kind of companion pieces, so I’ll link to both his story about Disney and his more general rant about TV networks in general

Daring Fireball posted a quote about how the TV networks are merely distribution engines whose time is done, but I like this bit better:

I stood there yesterday looking at these stuffed shirts [the Disney board of directors] and then thinking about that crowd of teenagers I was watching in Glasgow earlier in the week [the opening of the Apple Store] (yes, I was there; I go to all the store openings) and I could not imagine two groups of people who could be less able to understand one another. And I just had this amazing huge epiphany. I mean these people running networks have just sat up there in their board rooms and conference rooms and private jets for so long that they’ve become completely untethered. They have no idea about how young kids today want to consume media. Let me correct that. The issue is not how kids want to consume media, but how they are demanding media should be delivered.

Ta-dah. Thanks FSJ. You rock like a chair. Um, not that I’d like to sit on you or anything.