Happy Birthday, Macintosh

Today marks the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. Ars Technica has a decent piece with various Ars editors reminiscing about their favorite Macs of all time. Reading the piece got me thinking about my own experiences with the Macintosh.

My history with the Mac goes back to 1988, when I was four years old. My father purchased a Mac Plus and, shortly thereafter, a LaserWriter Plus. I don’t think I can actually remember the day he bought the Mac, but I have a distinct memory of the UPS truck stopping at the top of our driveway, and the deliveryman emerging with the rather unwieldy brown box that housed the LaserWriter.

I don’t remember much about my first moments with the machine; my parents always tried to keep me away from screens at a young age. But I do know that I did manage to use it from time to time in my early years. I was probably six when I sat down with MacPaint and wanted to make a game. I wasn’t sure how, until I discovered I could draw shapes — what to my young eyes looked to be a helicopter — which I could then select with the lasso tool. With monochrome pixels progressing clockwise around my drawing like digital ants, I could click and drag my creation and make it fly. I was hooked.

The next seminal moment came shortly thereafter, in the early 90s, when I raced upstairs with my oldest sister on her birthday to find a small and unremarkable cardboard box with a 3.5″ floppy inside. She explained it was an online service called Prodigy, and that it allowed our Mac to connect to other computers around the world.

Flashforward to late ‘93 (or was it early ‘94?) and my father tells me that we’ll likely be getting a new family computer (the Plus had grown rather long in the tooth, though he did continue to use it as his personal machine until late in the 90s when its 9″ screen had a 3″ viewable range). I was ecstatic, and felt like the day would never come. Finally, after a lengthy afternoon at Micro Center, we came home with a shiny new Macintosh Performa, a 6115CD, to be precise. This was the beginning of Apple’s transition away from the 68k Macs to the PowerPC; it was also, despite ostensibly being a “family computer,” the first machine I felt I owned.

I have countless memories from this point on — of seeing Noah Wyle onstage as Jobs at MacWorld ‘99; of discovering HyperCard (oh, how I loved thee!) and sharing code with strangers on AOL message boards; of driving to Delaware with my mother to get the last blueberry iBook — it may have looked like a toilet seat but it had a handle and no latch! — from a CompUSA; of seeing New York for the first time with my dad, having an overpriced breakfast at 5am in midtown before getting in line for Jobs’s keynote; of befriending the employees of my local Mac shop, who made me custom-length cables and copies of System 7.

Of flying to Cupertino with my mom for the Apple shareholders meeting, attended by a man from Dublin and another who had come from Nevada by way of his Harley and another that complained that the free Apples provided at breakfast were not Macintosh apples; of meeting Fred Anderson and Avi Tevanian (who personally assured me that OS X would ship with a terminal application, despite the many rumors to the contrary) and Sal Soghoian; of seeing Woz speak my first semester of engineering school and getting to tell him that it was largely because of the Apple IIe that I was studying computer engineering; of starting my own private consulting firm to help people setup and troubleshoot their Macs and home networks.

Of analyzing every box on every page of every copy of MacMall, MacZone and MacConnection; of reading the monthly programming challenges in MacTech and wondering when I would be good enough to compete — or even understand what the problems were really about; of upgrading to System 7.6, to 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, and then to Mac OS X Public Beta, and then 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, and every single incremental version in between; of going to launch parties for 8.0 (with “I Break for 8″ bumper stickers), 8.5 (Sherlock!), 9.0 (better Sherlock!), and at least a couple releases of OS X.

Of coding late into the night until my mother would force me off the computer; of The Macintosh Toolbox and REALBasic and FutureBasic II and AppleScript and HyperTalk and GameMaker and demo versions of CodeWarrior and the first C code I ever saw; of watching every single keynote and webcast of Apple events for the past decade; of reading Crazy Apple Rumors and As the Apple Turns and all the other rumor sites; of the famous (?) “Back in Black” cover of MacAddict; of watching the community drama at the AppleInsider forums, and witnessing the bitter fork that gave way to AppleNova; of thinking that the iPod looked neat but expensive and that I’d likely never buy one; of reading rumors for years — years — of an Apple PDA, and finally — finally — watching the release of the iPhone; of standing in line for hours at the Fifth Avenue store to actually get mine.

Of being ridiculed for being a Mac user; of reading of Apple’s imminent demise and “beleaguered” status; of wanting to strangle Apple’s board of directors on a regular basis; of zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the Desktop File; of extensions conflicts and SCSI ID problems; of SimCity and Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle and Sam & Max and Marathon and Dust; of LAN games of Bolo and WarCraft II and StarCraft; of writing $5 checks to shareware developers; of becoming part of a rich culture with its own history and mythology and celebrities and traditions.

Of hearing that glorious startup chime, looking at the glowing screen, and seeing a small blue face staring back at me, smiling.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh. Thanks for all the memories.

Life Optimization, Or, Brief Thoughts On What Has And Has Not Worked In Improving My Day-to-Day Life

Five minutes of cleaning is actually a lot. Long ago, I asked myself, “why does my room get messy?” I hypothesized a number of potential explanations — the natural increase in entropy of a given system, when things are “put away” they are necessarily not available for use and this creates an unstable equilibrium, etc, etc — and started an in-depth analysis of this problem. This was actually intended to be a full-blown blog post. As usual, I got distracted by something else and left the post in a half-finished state, where it remains nearly two years later.

A few months ago I decided to make a conscious effort to spend five minutes every day cleaning my room. I’ve found that this actually works remarkably well, to the point that my room is almost always in a clean or nearly clean state. This is partly because my room is small, but it’s also because five minutes of “straightening up” — e.g., making your bed, recycling old papers, putting books back on shelves, putting dirty laundry in a hamper — is actually quite a lot. I still haven’t finished my theoretical framework of orderliness, but my room sure is a lot cleaner.

Visible checklists are the only ones that matter. If you want to get yourself to do something, make it hard to ignore and even harder to forget. This is one of the many things I use my whiteboard for: My notes/goals/lists live as large letters on my wall, visible from my bed. A note on my computer or phone will quickly be forgotten or lost; a note on my wall will greet me when I wake. (Note that this doesn’t mean every habit you put on a readily visible checklist will automatically be picked up. This worked great for making sure to floss every day without fail, but my results were less impressive for making sure to exercise — perhaps my new taekwondo class will change things?!)

One (or two) habits at a time. When I come up with six or seven new habits to acquire, I’m likely to fail at most or even all of them. If you’re serious about making changes, concentrate on one or two things; if after a week or two those are going well, add a third or fourth.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. For those of us who spend way too much time in our heads, it’s easy to forget just how powerful real-world experimentation is, or even that things can, like, be empirically verified. If you find yourself daydreaming about what the “ideal” method for doing xyz is, try to come up with something that you can try that might be part of that ideal system or which is simply good enough. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you’ve an idea for your next hypothesis to test — or at least more data to daydream about.

In a minute

Note: This post was written by guest blogger Sra. Bibliotecaria.

Almost exactly a year ago, Maj. Andy Olmsted died in Iraq.

I thought of Andy again when I heard that trauma surgeon John Pryor had been killed in Iraq on Christmas Day. Beyond the devastating loss to his loved ones, our world is poorer for having lost his passionate honesty. Indeed, the first I ever heard of him was through his 2007 op-ed about parallels between his work overseas and at home:

In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time [mass casualties] would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or 10 patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying “just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.”

The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.

More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa. Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN.

Pryor was in a better position than most of us both to see this bloody misery firsthand and to bear witness to it. It would have been enough that he used his hands to heal; that he also used his voice to advocate was an act of profound generosity.

It takes titantic self-confidence to cut into human flesh, even to heal. I don’t know what it was like to live with Dr. Pryor or even have him as a colleague. I do know that the obituary was shocking to me, though as the song says we should know how fast the world can change:

Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody’s going to jail
If you find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
In a New York minute
Everything can change
In a New York minute

Back to Andy Olmsted, and his farewell message:

[F]or those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.

“I’d rather hang out with the liberals and argue about economics than hang out with the Republicans and argue about Darwin and stem cells.”

Reason, the best damn magazine you’re not reading (assuming, of course, that you don’t already read it), has a decent piece today about liberals and libertarians. This quotation by professor Jacob Levy from McGill University struck me as particularly important:

“If our core liberalism—if our roots in the struggle of common law against the absolutist king, or in Locke, or in Montesquieu, or in the American Revolution mean anything at all to us—then it means a four percentage-point difference in income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance with the right seem kind of silly.”

There’s a laundry list of issues on which libertarians and liberals ought to share at least some common ground: torture, war, criminal justice issues, the drug war, gay marriage, immigration, the death penalty, government transparency, privacy, reproductive rights, and free speech.

The Democrats have proven to be a miserable opposition party these last two years, and their excuse seems to have been that they couldn’t do X because the Republicans were running the show. On issue after issue, ranging from the Iraq war to FISA, they’ve proved to be not just incapable of stopping a Republican executive but all too frequently compliant. That excuse is now off the table — they’ve got commanding leads in both houses of Congress and a President with strong popular support. The questions that remain to be answered are how much the Democrats really believe in these values, and how exactly they will prioritize them.

Early results (and by that I mean yesterday’s election) are mixed. High Democratic turnouts helped pass bigoted, civil-liberties bashing state constitutional amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, while Democrats in Massachusetts decriminalized pot and Michigan voters legalized medicinal marijuana. This last issue is one on which President Obama has the potential to do some immediate good: If Obama stays good to his word and stops federal raids on legal, state-sanctioned medicinal marijuana dispensaries, perhaps we can stop ruining the lives of innocent citizens and throwing away tax dollars.

The results of half a dozen ballot initiatives clearly can’t be used as a true gauge of how the new Democratic government will run things; only time can answer that question definitively. But if President Obama decides to prioritize traditional liberal and libertarian values — equal protection under the law, social tolerance, privacy, constitutionally limited powers, and peace — the next four years will be a breath of fresh air.

The atmosphere in New York City

Less than an hour ago, walking from my office in the West Village to the Q train in Union Square, I heard constant shouts, cheers, and chants; passed a young woman singing the Star-Spangled Banner; and saw more smiling faces than I’ve ever seen on a New York street — or any street, for that matter. My wait for the train was accompanied by still more screams and yelps of joy, as each new group of people descended the stairs into the station, giddy and enthusiastic.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed “Obama!” and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

This may be short lived…

Our system worked today. The majority of the House of Representatives — which was always intended to be the branch most responsive to the will of the people — rejected what would have been a massive and disasterous government bailout.

I’m happy to say that I was wrong. Last week when I read about Paulson’s initial proposal for the bailout, I thought that the backing of the White House and the leaders of both parties, coupled with an atmosphere of fear and the need to “do something quickly,” would be more than enough to push it through. Instead, a coalition of far-left Democrats and the few remaining free-market Republicans, joined by many members of both parties worried about losing their seats in the upcoming elections, defeated the bill and came out victorious.

My gut still says the bill will resurface and will probably be passed, in some form or another. But today we won, and tomorrow, I’ll be quite happy to be wrong again.

A triumphant return

After months of delays, false promises, and distractions, Unschooled is back.

Since I last posted, dear reader (readers, even?),  much has happened: I graduated from engineering school, started my first full-time job, and moved into a new apartment. There was more, of course, but this site has never been about the nitty-gritty details of my life, and just because I updated the banner graphic does not mean that is about to change.

For the curious, the resurrection of Unschooled was delayed in no small part by the fact that I spent more time geeking out than getting the site back online. I switched hosting providers twice — from bluehost to VPSLink to Slicehost, where the site currently resides. I switched web servers twice — from Apache to nginx back to Apache. And I switched blogging software three times — from WordPress to Byteflow to Movable Type and back to WordPress, albeit a newer version. Needless to say, none of this was actually necessary in order to get the site back up and running.

So, despite my best efforts, the site is back, to which I can only say,

Welcome back.