The Squeaky Wheel – Revisited

ByHeather

The other day I posted how the squeaky wheel doesn’t always get the grease. Sometimes, it gets replaced. I found another variation to this delightful adage on the DesignAday web site.

“Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever” . . . When deadlines are tight, and there is more work to get done than there are developers or hours in the schedule, it’s not the squeaky wheel, but the jammed one that gets the grease.”

— Jack Moffett

So true. This is my frustration with Apple’s iPods. I have a 3rd generation Nano that has a couple of annoying bugs in the software. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I convert many of them to audiobooks so I can listen in the “faster” mode. Unfortunately, the fat Nano has a hard time remembering that it is set on the “faster” setting. I have to hit menu four times to back out of the current podcast and drill forward two settings menus to remind the Nano that it is still set on “faster.” Then back out two menu settings and drill back into the podcast. I have submitted bug reports to Apple at least a half-dozen times but I am afraid that my little bug isn’t broken enough to warrant a fix.

On the iPhone there is a bug in the iPod software regarding playlists. All of my podcasts playlist have a setting where playcount = 0. This means that as soon as a podcast is finished (and the playcount increments to 1) the playlist should update and the podcast should drop from the playlist. Not so on the iPhone. Sometimes the playlist updates, most of the time it doesn’t. It seems to work better in the video playlists but not 100% of the time. I have submitted this bug to Apple at least twice.

I can’t help but wonder if Apple isn’t spreading itself to thin. I mean, the iPod software on the iPhone has an annoying bug in it that has lingered through several updates. This is a foundational application on their flagship product. Shoddy software was never part of Apple’s image. I hope they fix it soon but I am not holding my breath.

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Celebrate art and culture. It defines who we are.

ByHeather

When you live in times of authoritarian rule one of the first things that end up in the cross hairs is culture. We believe firmly that artists and writers and dramatists and actors and musicians play a vital role in defending the integrity of who we are as human beings.

— Jeremy Scahill, on the Trump’s Cabinet of Killers and Why Orange is the New Anti-Black episode of The Intercepted.

I have never been more grateful for organizations like the ACLU and the plethora of lawyers we have in this country. Likewise, I am inspired by the power of our marches and protests as we stand up for our values. But, in addition to the direct tangible actions we can take, we also need a 100 million voices writing and singing and laughing and, in general, sounding our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.

Growth

ByHeather

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

— Edward Abbey

Perhaps it is my natural temperament to do things deliberately and with purpose (after all, it is the tortoise who wins the race). Maybe it is my persistent skepticism. Quite possibly it is an outgrowth of my intuitive personality type (INTJ). Whatever the reason, I have always been resistant to Wall Street’s incessant demand for growth from public companies.

Calculating the Distance to California

Calculating the Distance to California

ByHeather

Something like 90% of the nations fruit and vegetables are grown in California’s Central Valley. Here is a simple calculator to determine how far you are from this fertile land:

  1. Buy a 1/2 pint of raspberries from your local supermarket
  2. Count how many raspberries are moldy
  3. Multiply the number of moldy raspberries by 250. This is your distance in miles from California.

For example, I am in Northern Michigan this week. I counted at least 9 moldy raspberries in the pack. 9 x 250 = 2,500. This is the approximate distance from my location to California’s Central Valley.

Q.E.D.

Influence

ByHeather

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

— John Morley

How many times have I wished that I had this pithy little quote on a card in my purse, ready to be handed to a belligerent blowhard, or an incessant evangelist, on a moment’s notice?

The Glance of a Speechless Animal

ByHeather

In the glance of a speechless animal there is a discourse that only the soul of the wise can really understand.

— An Indian Poet

While in graduate school at Purdue many years ago a friend and I made a road trip to the west coast. Along the way we took the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon with a goal of hiking down to the canyon floor. Although we were experienced hikers, neither of us were in the best of shape, and we were further weakened by the several days we had just spent driving across the country in a Honda Civic. Hiking all the way down to the canyon floor and all the way back up in a single day was strongly discouraged by the park authorities. Since campsites on the canyon floor were reserved far into the future, we were fortunate to snag a reservation for a campsite that was a couple of miles up from the canyon floor on a different trail. Our plan was to hike down one trail all the way to the bottom, take in the grandeur, then hike back up a few miles to camp for the night. The next day we would hike back out and continue our westward journey.

Trees

ByHeather

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man’s life only saplings can be grown, in the place of old trees – tens of centuries old – that have been destroyed.

— John Muir

Like many in my generation, I devoured J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings with great relish. The metaphors, archetypes and stories from the rich world of Middle Earth continue to resonate through my mind many years after my last reading. One of my favorite creations is the sentient, intelligent, and wise race of Ents. These humanoid trees spoke too slowly and at a frequency too low for humans to perceive. They moved through the forest at a pace too slow to be perceptible.

Some years ago I hiked with a friend to a sacred Native American burial ground in the mountains of Northwest New Mexico…

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