When I first got this Apple i-book all of 4 years ago now, I had a brief love affair with the 'widgets' that you could have appear on your computer screen to give you all sorts of nifty information -- like local weather, the name of current constellations in the evening sky, etc.

So I proceeded to clutter my screen up with these cool knickknacks -- only to find that the novelty wore off within a week -- after which I never used them again.

The problem?

I don't know how to get rid of the beggars, and I'm too lazy to learn -- so every month or so, I inevitably hit some combination of relatively easy-to-hit keys that showers my screen with those now-useless widgets, and since it apparently involves processor-intensive apps, I have to sit back for about 10 seconds and let these useless knickknacks show me all of their unwanted bells and whistles, and usually even pester me to download the latest 'must-have' versions of their irrelevant selves.

Dumb idea. Like all the thousands of kewl but ultimately trivial things that you can do with Javascript -- oh, look, a flashing ticker tape scroll in rainbow colors?!! (Been there, done that)

Have you ever read a newspaper headline that implies such a depressing 'take' on life that you can't even bring yourself to read the op-ed piece for which it is the title?

That's what I felt this weekend when I ran across an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Gwen Ifill entitled... um... um...

See? That's literally how depressing the headline was to me: I couldn't even look at it long enough to remember the exact title for this rebuttal (something like 'The Incredible Luck Behind the Rise of Barack Obama) -- but there was no mistaking what the article was about: It was yet another rendition of the modern mantra from misguided (hence misguiding) role models for the African-American community reminding young people 'of color' (lest they forget and start becoming uselessly ambitious) that the odds are still stacked enormously against them and that any signs of progress on the racial front (say, the election of Barack Obama as president) is an enormous fluke.

What poison for young minds!

Yes, yes: a thousand times yes, Gwen: A minority of any 'color' will have problems unique to a minority in terms of how they're judged by the larger society -- but there are more stumbling blocks in life than race. This one's mother is dying of cancer, that one's leg was lost in the war, the man over here is terrified of public speaking, the woman over here can't ever really trust men due to a trauma she endured in her childhood.

Do these latter challenges make success incredibly hard for them? Yes.

Does it therefore follow that they should be regularly warned by their well-wishers that their chances of success in life are slim and that they've got the mother of all uphill climbs in front of them?

No, no: a thousand times no.

Of course, Gwen (like all A-A leaders who speak this way: Steve Harvey, Congressman Rangel, Jesse Jackson, etc.) will simply say that she's 'being real' and telling it like it is.

This is the same excuse that rap stars make for imposing their vulgar lyrics on society and why we're drowning in a sea of on-air misogyny and negativism: they're just telling it like it is, after all. But what all these role models forget is that the way it "IS" (and certainly the way it "WILL BE") is to a large degree determined by ourselves, by the attitude that we choose to take toward the world that is around us. Take a cue from quantum physics, folks: Remember that the observer doesn't just report what they see, they help CREATE the reality that they're reporting on.

So, please, stop 'being real,' Gwen: Be positive instead: Use the time that you personally have EARNED on the public airwaves and in the public media to challenge young people to live up to the ambitions of a Barack Obama -- don't spend that precious time reminding them how lousy their chances are.

PS I disagree with you in any case, Gwen: Barack Obama was successful for the same reason that Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs were successful: He played the Internet like a virtuoso, orchestrating a brilliant grassroots campaign 'beneath the radar' of old school, analog politics -- and to say otherwise is really an insult to the man in question, although he is ideologically prevented from taking your attitude as the insult that it is, to the extent that he, too, subscribes to the recriminatory and backward-looking zeitgeist of so-called 'Black' leaders in the 21st century.

(see also The Holder Challenge Web Site)

When I first heard of Satellite Radio, I was psyched about a future world in which I could wake to rock music from Helena, Montana, catch my afternoon news from Chicago, and maybe drift to sleep on a ukelele serenade courtesy of Maui, each time coming away with a feeling of having visited, at least to some small degree, the places in question thanks to the many local references that I would no doubt hear during the course of these faraway broadcasts.

Enter big business.

In the interest of maximizing profit (and minimizing competition), the big players in the sat-rad game have turned my fantasized business model on its head and decimated local competition with one-size-fits-all uber-broadcasts in every genre, originating from one single far-away corporate location, fostering a feeling of Sameville, USA, in every seemingly unique town and city in the country. Thus a technology that could have opened doors to the world has closed doors instead and routed every fan of a given genre to the exact-same broadcast.

Mind you, it's not as big a loss as it might have been, because the truth is that local radio was already fairly passe in the U.S. thanks to the likes of Clear Channel and Viacom, who bought up any local station of size years ago and then proceeded to force them all to dance to the same tune under the same format. The difference with sat-rad is that even the pretense to localism is out, maximizing efficiency for the broadcaster behemoths, perhaps, but maximizing musical monoculture for the listeners.

You know what kills me dead?

when you go to an exciting-looking site that supposedly lets you do X Y or Z and for the life of you, and you can find no link that lets you actually DO X Y or Z.

[ Titters ]

Have you been there and done that, folks?

[ Applause ]


Like they might say, Surf the Web three times faster using our special link!

And then you'll see all sorts of details about how their system works and how good it is and why you should tell your friends and how you can tell them, etc. etc...

But for the life of you, you cannot find the flippin' link that they are talking about that is so God Awful wonderful in their opinion!

Google, Apple and other large companies host forums where users are left to themselves to make up company answers for each other based on their guesses as to what the company in question is up to (what their refund policy is, how their gizmos work, why a certain model of theirs might be on the blink, etc.) I've never seen an actual employee respond to any of the questions for which I'm seeking answers on these "guessing boards" (as opposed to answer boards).

[ Titters ]

Now, you could say, well, they're probably busy people, right, and they can't answer questions like that?

Well, then, how come the second that I ask a question that sounds critical of their company, these same companies are all over it with live real-time support, with a real person e-mailing me immediately and telling me to shut up????

I have rarely gotten a correct or useful answer (and certainly never "on a timely basis") from posting questions to Apple's forums -- yet I recently posted a question about why their Associates program was so "bare bones" and "user-unfriendly" compared to Amazon...

Let me tell you, a real live person at Apple "got back to me" within 1 minute! I kid you not. The bad news is that they were not in a hurry to answer my question but just to warn me that such questions were inappropriate on Apple forums.

Why don't they spend a little more time and money on answering questions and a little less on censoring them???

Resolved: That instant-send e-mail is a bad idea.

I think the default setting should be that all e-mail gets delivered after a 5 minute 'holding period,' so that anyone who fires off a hot-headed e-mail will have time to cool down before they've made a fool of themselves or put their job on the line, etc. Just think how many nightmares could be avoided if everyone had a 5 minute grace period during which they can veto their original perhaps impulsive decision to send a scathing e-mail to a boss or customer, etc.

The 5-minute cooling off period would also help in the case of inadvertently misdirected e-mail.

Suppose you're writing to your manager at work to complain about Employee X and you inadvertently cc Employee X on the e-mail. These things do happen, believe me.

Chances are, you'll realize your mistake almost immediately after hitting "SEND", but under the current system of instant-delivery, even that quick realization is not, alas, quick enough (except maybe in the rare case where you have access to the addressee's e-mail server, in which case you could still at least theoretically delete the message in question before it's had a chance to offend its unintended recipient).

The potential for damage is tremendous when there's no 'holding time period' for e-mail deliveries:

"Dear John Gotti, just got your death threat a second ago! Well, let me tell you what I think of you, buddy! You no good --"

And then a minute later, you realize that the tone that you struck with the Mob boss was perhaps a trifle out of line, right?

But what can you do now?

I suppose you could always follow up with a retraction e-mail along the lines of:

"Dear Mr. Gotti,

Previous e-mail sent in error: please delete.

Thanks so much!"

These pizza places like Dominoes and Pizza Hut have absolutely nothing on their delivery menus that make economic sense to order if you're eating alone.

I kid you not, it's crazy.

This is a true story, folks: Last week I ordered a medium pizza with olives and ham, plus one ridiculously over-rich chocolate dessert, right? and the price tag came to...

Wait for it, folks!

Almost 19 frickin' dollars!!!

Fortunately, I picked the order up myself so I didn't feel obliged to leave any tip -- the more so in that the cashier never smiled once -- nor said so much as one word, for that matter, now that I think of it.

Shoot, for $19 he should have polished my shoes, let alone given me the time of day!

Meanwhile, I see coupons in the paper every day offering 2 large pizzas with all the toppings and 2 large bottles of Coca-Cola for $19! Talk about '2 can eat cheaper than 1'! 2 can get away like a bandit, in fact, because they're subsidized by premium-paying solitary diners such as myself!

Speaking of those desserts, here's Pet Peeve #3-A, folks: there are no simple Key Lime Pies or Jell-0's on the dessert menus at these pizza delivery places, either. No rice pudding, no simple sponge cake. Instead, there's about 5 dishes, each of which is so weighted down with sugar and calories that they make a Cinnabon look like health food!

I'm signing up for so-called Windows Live today, right, under the vague belief that it's a social networking site with which I can 'big up' my online articles, right? (I'm still not sure, mind, but that's the impression that I had at the time, right?)

Well, I take exception to the fact that the sign-in procedure requested my birth date, right? So I enter 2010 by way of protest.

Well, the program accepts 2010 as my birthday year, right? So I'm naively thinking I got away with it, I actually gamed the system, if only ever so slightly.

But then on the next screen, a message informs me that I am 'underage', thank you very much, and that I therefore need my parents' okay to join Windows Live.

Yeah, I'm underage, all right, being born in 2010! I'm not even out of my mother's womb yet! Whoo-hoo! Talk about a child prodigy, hacking his parents computer before he's even 100% viable as a human being!

What's more, they tell me that if I made a mistake in entering my birthday year on the previous screen (in other words, if for some reason I'm not actually less than 1 year old...), the only way that I can now correct that gaffe is to supply them with my credit card number.

Can you believe that? I can't simply page back and enter a more plausible birthday year -- oh, no. It's like they want to punish me now for having been facetious. No, if you make a typo in the year field (purposefully or otherwise), you have to cough up a credit card number! How maddening is that?!

Of course, they swear on their mother's grave that they won't ever actually charge the thing -- but if it's all the same to them, I'd rather not put temptation in their path, know what I'm sayin'? Besides, how can I know whether their mother is alive or not -- and even assuming that she is dead, I can't be sure that they entertained a healthy affection for the lady before she shuffled off her mortal coil.

Long story short: I am not -- repeat NOT -- a member of Window Live -- whatever that may turn out to have been!

Hey, listen, it's their loss -- as far as I can tell, anyway.

Pet peeve number one is the phenomenally slow-loading Help button on Adobe Photoshop Elements that completely monopolizes your computer's resources, thus causing you untold eons of frustrating downtime.

You know what I'm talking about, folks? I'll be slaving away making site graphics, right? incredibly busy, and suddenly I accidentally click the help icon --

I'm like, 'Damn, I just clicked the Help button again -- Oh, well, I may as well take my morning shower now while the damn thing is cranking away, trying to load the ridiculously slow help pages.'

The first question answered on the Help page should be: How do I get this damn Help page to load in a timely fashion?!

No, seriously: They should have a confirmation button, like when you're going to delete something: 'Are you sure you want to click on this HELP button? I mean, the devil alone knows how long it could take to load for you!'

So I read an article online and decide to recommend it via StumbleUpon, right? I click the icon and am asked for a user name and password.

So far, so good.

I dutifully key the sucker in, only to be told that it is wrong (never mind that it was right last week).

Suddenly recalling, however, that I have another StumbleUpon password and user name which I sometimes use for placing ads on their service, I look that up and give it a try in the log-on form. But no, that password, too, is invalid.

So... I decide to get a brand-new password, even though I have already plowed through two passwords in my brief history of doing business with this Social Web site.

I make up a new user name, new password, enter my e-mail address and...

Surprise! The system won't let me create a new user name because there's already one associated with my e-mail address!

And I'm like, hello? Of course there's already one associated with my e-mail address: namely the user name that you yourself were just now telling me was no longer valid!

So I take a deep breath.... [ SIGH!!! ]

Time to access the StumbleUpon help page -- which turns out to be a discussion forum, but no problem, right? I spend 20 minutes meticulously explaining my log-in problems and finally click on the button to post my question.

Three guesses what happens next, folks, and the first two don't count.

The blasted form now tells me that I have to log in before I can ask my question!!!!

And I'm like, um... hello? That's what the problem was in the first place, dudes: I can't flippin' log in!!!!