Dear Apple,
Why have you not already used just a tiny fraction of the engineering horsepower you no doubt posses, to make iDisk what it truly ought to be? What? What’s that?… “what should it be, you ask?…” Well, funny you should ask; let me tell you what iDisk should be, in a word: Dropbox. You may have heard of it? It’s this little upstart-turned-juggernaut in your backyard that has made you look like a crotchety old fool, sitting on your decade-old WebDav technology and forcing people to hate you whenever they try to use it with any degree of efficiency or reliability. A few bullet points might be in order here to quantify the ways in which Dropbox embarrasses you (or ought to):
- Speed. There is simply no comparison. I put a file in Dropbox, it’s in my friend’s dropbox in seconds.
- Ease of use. I never think about Dropbox. It is as if it isn’t there. Except that it IS there, making my digital life easier. Dropbox is transparent. It’s just there, and I just put crap in it. iDisk acts like a poorly written third-party plugin. I can store important files, even application settings, in Dropbox and KNOW that they sync-up. Every. Single. Time. iDisk makes me cuss.
- Versions. I deleted something the other day from Dropbox that I shouldn’t have. Oh wait—no I didn’t. Dropbox had a nice “restore” button happily greeting me and welcoming me back to sanity. Alternatively, iDisk announced to me today (via a fit of archaic error codes) that I could not even delete a file that I WANTED to delete. So that was fun.
- Sharing. Interesting that although you control the entirety of the operating system and the MobileMe experience that supposedly integrates with it, you still can’t quite manage to make, oh say, sharing a file with a friend, easy to do. I have to go online, log in, go find that file, hit the “Share File…” button and hope. Dropbox version: right-click, “copy public link…” This is getting laughable.
- Space. For $100 a year I get 20GB of all of the garbage I’ve been describing with iDisk. For the same $100 I can get 50GB of versioned, scary-fast, easy-to-share, pain-free, I-never-even-think-about-it Dropboxy goodness.
- Speed. Did I mention that yet? Let’s make it perfectly clear: iDisk is slower than shit and Dropbox is faster than shit. So in The Shit category, Dropbox is.
In closing, I propose two solutions:
- Take a fraction of your mountain of money, and buy Dropbox outright. For any amount they want. (Fine — feel free to apply your gorgeous user-interface to the web app, just don’t mess with how well it works.) Rebrand it as, gee whiz, how about “iDisk.” Continue to offer a free plan. Continue to develop (with your newly acquired Dropbox staff) the Windows and Linux versions. Don’t make it all “Apple-only.” Just replace the backside of iDisk, with Dropbox.
- Make your own damn Dropbox. Just make it as awesome or better than the current one. The only requirement: START OVER.
Sincerely,
Ben Delaney
Gasworks Park. Seattle.
Check out this crazy theme I’m tinkering with. CHOOSY THEME. I’m not fully sure where exactly to take it yet. It’ll never pass muster with the Theme Garden because it uses the Tumblr API to get the posts directly and not the normal Tumblr template system.
At this point, the theme is really more of an experiment. It’s really limited, but I thought I’d throw it out there and let people toss ideas at it if they want to. You can leave suggestions or ideas here..
(I’ve really only tested it in Safari so far, so be warned. And get Safari if you don’t have it.)
Also, I don’t have any caching working yet (would love some tips if anyone has any), so it may just break from time to time because Tumblr’s servers don’t always return the JSON consistently.
This seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A little extreme.
I disagree completely. This sounds like a case of a school board getting some stones and doing what a school board should do. Teachers unions have a strangle-hold on education in this country and it’s time more school districts and school boards started standing up to them.
This part is rich:
In a proposal based on federal guidelines, Gallo asked teachers to work a longer school day of [GASP!] seven [WHOLE] hours and tutor students weekly for one [ENTIRE] hour outside school time. She proposed teachers have lunch with students often [THE HERESY!], meet for 90 minutes every week to discuss education and set aside two weeks during summer break for paid[!] professional development.
Congratulations, members of the Central Falls Teachers Union, you’ve now been treated like the rest of the people in this country who decide to flat-out refuse to accept the terms of their employment.
What we look like (apparently) when we go for coffee & steamers. Ha! :)
My little brother, Matthew.
If you haven’t seen these yet, go do it. Somehow, this gives me a whole new appreciation for photography in general.
I’m almost ready to put this one out there; it just needs a few more tweaks. Couple cool features: it takes advantage of high res photos whenever possible, it uses base64-encoded fonts to look good in the good browsers, it’s got a nice word count feature for text posts (I originally designed the theme just for writing), it’s got a nice “print this post” option, and a handful of other niceties…
Please do let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback at all. http://bendelaney.me
Honestly, I had never heard of it until just now.
Here’s the lowdown for those unaware (emphases added):
Kopi luwak (pronounced [ˈkopi ‘luak]) or civet coffee is coffee made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) and other related civets, then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. In its stomach, proteolytic enzymes seep into the beans, making shorter peptides and more free amino acids. Passing through a civet’s intestines the beans are then defecated, having kept their shape. After gathering, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world.
Typically, when I see any type of food whose description contains the words “are then defecated” I tend to, well you know, not like that.
The process does sound intriguing though, and if it truly does taste as good as its price-tag implies, then I’d love to try some. The fact that it is categorized alongside Blue Mountain coffee does give me pause though. I’ve had the fabled Jamaica Blue Mountain, which I bought in Jamaica no less, and although it is very good, it’s certainly not worth the exorbitant price-tag, in my opinion. So the fact that this, ehem, repurposed coffee is now being blended with Blue Mountain and sold for $100 a cup honestly makes me a bit skeptical.
I remember the donut shop on the corner near where we went for class. We’d all wait impatiently for the decades-old safety video about seat-belts or mirror-signal-headchecks to end, and then we’d jet over to the Donut Parade and get 25¢ day-old glazed old-fashioned’s and 50¢ styrofoam cups of tar/coffee during the breaks. You gotta love the classic glazed old-fashioned; the way it coats the inside of your mouth with that filmy, almost waxy, sugary membrane-like layer… until you wash it clean with ice cold paper-carton-flavored 2% milk (which, let’s face it, just always tastes better than milk from a plastic jug).
Anyway, it’s not the most entertaining story, but I do have fond memories of drivers ed. Oh yes, and the driving instructor was incredibly fat and smelled like cheeseburgers and veiled B.O. I wasn’t a big fan of his. I don’t think he really liked me either. Probably because I was a better driver than him and he knew it.
I’m not really sure if this is the absolute highest point I’ve been to (actually, I’m sure it’s not), but it’s the one I thought of first. Chimney Rock, near Priest Lake, ID.
I didn’t actually climb Chimney Rock itself, but I hiked up about 3 miles to the peak that sits directly across from it. The view was completely breathtaking, both of the rock and the lake below.
And yes, the story was slightly interesting. I was photographing a wedding for a couple who were both getting re-married and both had teenage/college-age kids. So it was one of those hikes like you could imagine in a late 80’s movie where the mom and dad decide to get their nearly grown-up kids to join them on a big nature adventure to the top of a mountain as a way of bringing everyone together and bonding. So fill in whatever “awkwardness” blanks you want to with that… but the really funny part was the overweight, advertising account manager-slash-part-time-minister-for-extra cash who was performing the wedding. The dude must have signed up for this gig when he thought it was going to be a little 15 minute jaunt through a park and quick $300. Instead, he got 2.5 hours of driving, 5 hours of hiking, blistering heat, and sore feet. He whined like a little sissy the whole way to the top and then performed a typically lame wedding ceremony, devoid of anything original.
Oh, and the pictures were horrible. I’m sure I’ve deleted them by now.
Don’t have one. Drinks that are four dollars are not coffee drinks, they are mutations.
The day my signature old-school macchiato or double espresso costs four dollars, I’m switching to tea completely.
I have to tell you this quick story though… the other day MaryAnn and I were in San Francisco and I got to have espresso at Blue Bottle. My pal Jim, who is a roaster at DOMA over in Post Falls, recommended it so I knew it would be good.
The line had like 20 people in it, but I figured, hell, if this many people, in this town, are willing to stand in line for this coffee, it must be good quality at the very least. So while MA went to a candy shop a few doors down to buy something to take home to the kiddos, I start waiting. Ten minutes or so go by, and then by sheer luck I notice that they have TWO different espresso stations, the main one and another slightly less obvious window around the corner where they have another machine and another barista serving drinks. Only this isn’t just another La Marzocco machine like they have at the front bar; this is a Mirage Triplette Idrocompresso (lever-pull style). Theirs is the 3-head version of exact machine we had at our café. It is considered by those who know about such things to be one of the finest commercial espresso machines in the world. They are hand-made one at a time in The Netherlands, and produce espresso that is simply, well, the best espresso you’ve ever had in your life, hands down.
So after another 10 minutes or so of waiting in line, and teaching a couple of first-timers who were in line with me what a true “macchiato” really is (because they asked), I finally get to the counter and promptly order two of them.
The preparation is an absolute clinic in perfect macchiato creation; a thing of beauty. Rich dark brown genuine Heath demitasse cups, a tiny spoon neatly placed on the saucer before the cup arrives, and the perfect timing of the whole exercise as the two big silent levers slowly make their arc back towards vertical.
The result was everything I hoped for. Quite simply, a macchiato that may have been the best I’ve ever had. In my opinion, the true macchiato is the perfect and essential way to experience espresso. And this one was perfect. The small amount of steamed milk slightly sweetening the ristretto espresso and making it taste like a whole new substance; something round, berry-overtoned, sweet, rich, thick, bright, luscious, and so instantly and insanely satisfying that it makes you grin and shake your head and chuckle out loud in public and call your wife who just had hip surgery and tell her to HURRY BACK RIGHT NOW because this is so bloody amazing. :)
That drink didn’t cost 4 bucks. I don’t pay 4 bucks for coffee. Ever.
Mr. Anonymous has apparently been busy lately and it’s super late so I’m gonna cut loose and answer these 4 bizarre questions one after the other while listening to The Whitest Boy Alive (a pretty chill new band I was introduced to today).
So, to answer this one: No I don’t know anyone who owns ferrets. That seems like it ought to be fairly easy to deduce. I think the presence of one or more ferrets in a friend of mine’s home would be one of those “red flag” moments where I take a good hard look at the friendship and where it’s headed.
Nah just kiddin’; I’m not that shallow. I love the smell of fresh ferret dander on my friends. Who wouldn’t?!
[Oh, and to answer part 2 of your question: 1 Million Years.]
Colorado (via .bijou)
Why idots?
My favorite thing about my little Amia’s blog are her captions. This one cracks me up.
Yes, “why dots?” :)
