the definitive daily cultural column curated by stefan boublil.



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    Jul 12, 2010

    oped-new7my disbelief in mankind's perfectibility took a turn for the irreparable on tuesday june 15th 2010 when i found myself unable to put through an order for apple's latest revolution due to miraculously unforeseen traffic on at&t's servers. i should have stopped there had i known what was in store for me...

    sure, i'm an early adopter, the earliest kind there is actually. but on that day, i felt lazy. why indeed should i leave the comfort of my compound for the city whose big lights might inspire me but whose noisy and nerd-crowded streets are lately doing little for my peace-seeking brain. so came wednesday and since, ever the loyal subject, i purchased the iPhone 3GS on this same date last year, i was ineligible for the deep discount myself. my wife, ever the loyal object, pitched in and bought me the phone from her account, eligible since nary a purchase had been made in the past 3 years. i had been assured by an at&t representative that the switch from one number (hers) to another (mine) would be an easy one, all done remotely, all within 24 hours at the most... happy, i gladly overpaid for a dock and a bumper and i was on my way to feverishly waiting!

    as the first wave of black glass noisily started to make its way from the world's factory floor, i kept my cool seeing that my particular handset would not, due to unforeseeable high order volume, land in my hands the first week the quick would undoubtedly broadcast breathtaking unboxing videos displaying their "i'm better than you" faces whereas the dead would cower in shame, pretending none of this shit was actually important. right? right.

    finally, after totally forgetting about it for a while, i received, on friday july 2nd, an electronic notice that my golden ticket had left the flowered alleyways of the foxconn factory ...
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    Mar 12, 2010

    this omniwriter downloadable concept is a.ma.zing. not sure if i'd be able to write with all those sound effects but all those toolbars sure are a good riddance. so far and long have we strayed from the meaning of our words when we type on computers, vulgarly ...
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    Mar 12, 2010

    imac27we rudely interrupt this program to bring you the following inexcusable presumption of interest:

    the deed is done... through the freedom of information act you need not send in, i will tell you that i just pre-ordered the wi-fi only 32gb iPad for the following reason you couldn't care less about: rarely do i ever roam this earth without my iPhone, which provides me with an able 3g signal wherever i go and i do not feel that, while in a taxi, i need 1024 x 768 pixels of goldenfiddlr, 480 x 320 is quite enough. plus, who needs another at&t contract... also, since i will not use the iPad as a confusingly large iPod to listen to music, i really feel that its main storage will be used for movies in transit, presentations ...
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    Mar 5, 2010

    why can't sony sell its products anymore? well, part of the answer is that they don't have any products to sell sure. but they did at some point. have products, know how to sell them. look! it's so sad because whenever i need a new electronic gizmo, my first instinct is to look at sony, i feel conditioned to think ...
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    Mar 3, 2010

    for PCs, there's the intel inside chime and then, there's the interval of the devil, baked once upon a time into every mac. and that's just one of the delicious tales woven by jim reekes, the sound designer at apple until 1999 and the creator of the startup chime.


    Mar 2, 2010

    legoipadit shouldn't be too hard to find love in this age of collective solace. that said, if you have trouble, please, don't make a lego iPad.


    Mar 2, 2010

    screenwpalette-hialright microsft, you've got my attention now... the inexplicably-named project gustav (klimt?) is taking mspaint where it didn't even want to go... into the realm of actual artists who will, one day, use the 'puter to basquiat their way out of anonymity. ...
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    Feb 24, 2010

    so unbelievably preponderant have green screen visual effects become that they have found their way into the most mundane of settings, like ugly betty! amazing that it would cost less to film someone coming out of a building and bumping into a bus stop in a ...
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    Feb 12, 2010

    clean roomour good friends at pc perspective (kidding! really, i don't know anyone there...) have entered the holiest place this side of skynet, the clean rooms at intel's flash memory production plant. worship if you must.


    Feb 4, 2010

    steve-jobs-apple-41171_463_800technology is nothing. what's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. it's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. they work, or they don't work. it's people you have faith in or not.

    whatever you think of his unitasking tablet, the quote above i believe is the ...
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    Jan 28, 2010

    multi_touch_20100127so excited was i (weren't we all?) to hear about a new category of product yesterday when apple was due to unveil their game changer. too long, computer-based products have relied on a learning curve, whether light or steep, in order to be used at all. new language always needs to be learned whatever your age, sophistication or operating system allegiances. as opposed to the appliances we use everyday, from the phone to the dishwasher to the car, they just work and are usually operated, even on the first try, with minimal instructions. i was hoping that what el jobso would reveal was such an appliance which would signal the beginning of the end for computers as we now know and hate them.

    as the kidz say, FAIL.

    in the interest of fairness, and to one's surprise who regularly visits these pages, it is hard to find a more hysterical, one-sided apple apologist than me. this fruit company, whatever their missteps in the past or present, always has, in my nut-sized mind, had its priorities straight in that it does not consider design a marketing tool but a foundational one, in that human interface guidelines are based on behavior that is, as much as possible, existing, in that they understood early, perhaps the first multinational to do so, that design is not how something looks but how something works. from product to product they have astounded us ...
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    Jan 27, 2010

    appletableteventthis is it people, defcon 1, 60 minutes away from taking delivery of information we have been waiting for since that black monolith freaked the shit out of those monkeys and a flying bone turned into a spaceship. due to overwhelming over-excitment on my part, i will not be able to post during the keynote but wanted to share with you the direct livestream links you might have missed and that i will be constantly monitoring on your behalf at 1pm easter standard time:

    engadget
    wired gadgetlab
    apple insider
    mac news network
    ...
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