January 27th, 2010
So the Apple Tablet (hereafter “iPad”) came out today, and I’d be a fool if I didn’t post something about the iPad in the hopes of taking some of that iPad traffic for myself. And, like the evil SEO marketing genius that I am, I’m going to use the word “iPad” as much. as. possible.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the iPad:
First, the name. I know that I’m not the only one who thinks that iPad sounds more like a tampon than a tablet PC. A tampon that can surf the web, yes, but a tampon just the same. Other possible name? iSlate, iTablet, iTouch, or iAnything that doesn’t make me feel like I’m menstruating. Apple: 0, Me: 1.
(And yes, I’m keeping score. Every time that Apple does something awesome, they get a point. Every time that I make fun of something Apple has done, I get a point. It makes perfect sense.)
Second, I know that I’m probably sounding like a bigger hater than I am, but in a word I’m underwhelmed. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but I know that I wanted it to be on par with world peace, universal salvation, or Arrested Development. What I got was a 10″ iPod Touch. It will certainly have its uses: education (though I’m 99.9% sure I’ll still prefer reading books on my Kindle), healthcare (doctors already love their iPhones. This thing is going to inspire a giant wave of physician tachycardia), and even law (as an aspiring lawyer, I can’t wait to use this thing for data entry as I’m meeting with clients or as a quick reference while sitting in the courtroom). But outside of that, I can’t imagine toting this thing around everywhere I go in my man purse or my backpack. And that’s the problem: If I’m carrying a bag, I already have my 17″ MacBook Pro that does everything. Maybe I’m just being short-sighted, but I feel like this fills a need I don’t have. It’s a need I don’t even understand enough to be able to articulate. Apple: 0. Me: 2. (I was going to give Apple a point for designing my MacBook Pro, but it crashed last night so I’m withholding it)
As an aside, I am rocking my cooking experiment this week. Last night was Spaghetti in an Arrabbiata sauce, and tonight’s meal threatens to eclipse it all with its sheer awesomeness. When was the last time Apple made my dinner? Exactly. Apple: 0. Me: 3.
I hope that the iPad is awesome and it’s a huge success and that I’ll buy one and we’ll have lots of very happy iBabies together, but so far I’m not totally feeling it. I’m also a little skeptical about it’s lack of a camera. Is it just me, or is leaving the camera off just an excuse to release an updated iPad with camera a year from now? Either way: Apple: 0. Me: 4.
So Steve Jobs, when you read this please take a moment to assuage my fears. Remind me that you have done more, save Jesus Himself, for the salvation of mankind than any other person living or dead. Remind me about how much I love wasting time on my iPod Touch. And most of all, remind me that my gadget hunger is growing and can only be sated by something new and shiny from Cupertino. And please, for the love of all things good and holy, PLEASE change the name of the iPad. If you do, I might even be convinced to make you dinner.
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January 25th, 2010
I’ve not always been the kind of guy who nestles up with casebooks for ten hours a day and spends his remaining waking hours on a computer. In my past life I was a pretty adventurous guy. Case in point:
I have known and loved the freedom that can only come from riding a hog across the untamed West of this beautiful country. But then the secondhand smoke from the lady in the background caught up with me and I become an indoor pet.
In an attempt to reclaim some of my past glory, I’ve been spending some time developing hobbies that don’t involve law or the Internet. I’ve been reading a lot more thanks to my life-changing, always there, ready-to-be-read-when-I-need-it Kindle, and now I’ve decided to try something new: cooking.
It isn’t that I’ve never cooked. But when you have lived with a forty-plus year-old roommate (who I will call, to protect his anonymity, “G-Unit”. Partly because he had a “G” in his name and partly because on one fateful winter morning I saw his penis during an unfortunate disrobing in the kitchen) who abuses Bengay to the point that even your cereal smells like analgesic heat rub, cooking becomes less appealing. And it’s not just the mild PTSD that comes from seeing your roommate naked in the same kitchen that you prepare food in. It’s knowing that everything you cook with is going to give your tongue that all too familiar hot/cold sensation that will leave you wondering if you somehow sprained it during some unfamiliar tongue sport.
So with that background I have learned to love paying other people to prepare my food. I’m not too picky about restaurants, though I do have a strict policy about not being served by anyone with a sports injury. And while it’s been easy on my psyche, it’s wreaked havoc on my checkbook and my waistline. At 150 lbs, I am heavier than I have ever been—Fun fact! I have weighed between 140 and 145 lbs. since the 9th Grade—and as a subpar law student I really should be putting my money towards bribing government officials in the hopes of securing some low level job that will allow me to eek of a meager subsistence. It is with these thoughts in mind that I’ve taken up cooking.
I made avocado tacos tonight (pictures forthcoming soon). I chose a Mexican-inspired dish because 1) I love Mexican food, 2) this particular meal didn’t actually involve using an oven, and 3) I’m really hoping to get a nickname like “El Jefe” out of this cooking business. And while I understand I’m a little biased, they were really good. Sure I used too many onions and had to ask someone how to cut an avocado, but for my first foray into cooking I’m pretty pleased with myself.
I now have a fridge’s worth of ingredients for two other exotic meals this week. Because my mother is the only reader of this blog and because she is constantly concerned about how well I eat, I will be sure to make periodic updates about my progress. I enjoyed cooking last night, and I look forward to the day when I am able to proudly declare to my waiter as he brings my food, “This looks great! Not that I couldn’t have made it myself…”
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January 24th, 2010
On Sunday afternoons my thoughts often turn to type. And when one thinks of type, it’s natural to consider the typefaces of one’s own blog. (How’s that for a polite-yet-heavy-handed introductory paragraph?)
The advances in typography on the web were one of the major influences on my decision to come back to blogging. Nobody reads my site, so the content part is easy. Choosing fonts, however, proved much more difficult.
In the end I chose to keep it pretty conventional—FF Meta for the body and FF Meta Serif for the headers. Though I feel a little like I’m cheating on my new favorite serif Skolar, it’s hard to argue with how balanced FF Meta and FF Meta Serif look together. I’m particularly happy with the FF Meta body copy. Its readability is a huge plus and its humanist touches and x-height add a lot of personality to what is otherwise a pretty boring layout.
The blue headers—another dash of personality in a minimalist setting—came from eating Berry Blue Jelly Bellies. I’m making the rest of the design up as I need it.
With less time to play music than I’ve had in the past and with all of my old bandmates in Arizona or hungover and facedown in a gutter somewhere (or, in your case Gentry, both), type has become one of my few passions. Typography is like your cell phone: it rubs up against your life in so many ways that you take it for granted until it goes bad. And though I’m not a master (or even a competent) typesetter, I take dark pleasure in knowing the names and histories of the fonts I see throughout the day and sharing that information very loudly with those around me.
Does this type-arrogance make me better than you? Probably not, unless you set “type-arrogance” in something confident and strong like Tungsten. And then? Well in that case I ask only this: did you look at this page and say, “Wow, Zach! Great use of FF Meta!”
I didn’t think so.
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January 23rd, 2010
On the recommendation of a friend, I opened a Live Journal account in 2005. I thought about that account today and as I logged in and perused my past life I was surprised to find that I only posted three entries. I say surprised because my memories of Live Journal are much bigger than three entries. It was one of my first forays into social media before social media become my job. It was a way to connect with new friends that I’ve now fallen out of touch with. It was, in a lot of ways, a prelude to that awkward phase between adolescence and death.
My first Live Journal post comes from September 14th, 2005, and I don’t remember what was going on that day but thanks to the Internet’s long memory I know that I was listening to The Good Life’s Black Out and that my mood was best described by an emoticon with a thought bubble. The 2010 Zach is more than a little taken with a 2005 Zach who, thinking of someone he’d never met, would rather imagine her than Google her. It was very English major of me, and while I’m generally pretty happy with what I am I can’t help but wish I was a little more like that.
I’m including that post in its entirety, because despite the syrupy, pubescent melodrama more at home in a Smith’s song than in my present life, I still think that this poem is beautiful and relevant—especially after a week of thoughts, prayers, and donations sent to Haiti: “We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father. We clean up his disasters … afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs they could damn us unawares.”
Somewhere in Pittsburgh there is a woman named Julia Kasdorf. I don’t know her, but I imagine that she’s one of those willowy, long-haired types you sit next to on the subway because of their hygenic appearance and quiet manners. She has a canvas bag at her feet. It is full of books whose spines you can’t quite read and the cloth is at that comfortable place between the sterility of its shopping mall inception and its future disposal in some kitchen’s garbage can. But now she seems contented, and is someone who, without words, establishes herself as one of ‘your kind of people.’
Ms. Kasdorf writes poems. Her poems are the kind that don’t fight for attention, but quietly wait until there is a hole in your life. Then they unassumingly crawl into that empty space and expand like sponges into your hurt, patching it over and filling it back in. I’m typically not this melodramatic, but here’s her poem ‘Mennonites,’ as featured on the Writer’s Almanac. All things considered, I think that it’s appropriate.
We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other’s feet
twice a year and eat the Lord’s Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents—children then—
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
’til we’re drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.
The Writer’s Almanac, 13 September, 2005
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January 23rd, 2010
It snowed last night. A lot. My favorite part? How not even the antenna on my car escaped its wrath. Sorry for the fuzzy picture—I’m still not quite sure how to use the camera on my phone.
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January 22nd, 2010
Dear Denny’s,
While I sometimes take issue with your food (and, to be fair, your food sometimes takes issue with my stomach), I want to publicly thank you and your stalwart team of food research engineers/friggin’ geniuses who invented the syrup shot:
True, the syrup shot is an easy way to drizzle the sweet stuff over your surprisingly delicious wheat pancakes. But what’s more, if you’re looking to skip the pancakes the syrup shot is still a brilliant way to grease one’s gullet with the sugary nectar of happiness. And on a day like today, that happiness—though fleeting—is much appreciated.
After my hearty breakfast courtesy of Denny’s and one very generous Severin T. Nelson, Severin and I went to Timpview High School to speak to the kids about law, government, and why law school is so awesome. This all made perfect sense because if there’s one thing that rich Utah Valley kids need, it’s more opportunity to succeed.
But for fear of being misunderstood or possibly prosecuted, I don’t want to talk too much about hanging out with high school kids. It sufficeth me to say that I didn’t think I was old enough to say this, but high school kids are practically fetuses. I don’t know if it was their basic misunderstandings about American government or their complaining about not being able to drive, but I felt really, really old.
The day managed to move beyond this epiphany when grades came out at 4:00PM. This was the first year that BYU distributed grades through that Internet thing, and 450 people attacking the same site at the same time caused BYU’s ancient server to explode instantly. This led to an email from the registrar asking us all to “Go off the Internet” for twenty minutes to let the server recuperate. This valuable advice, coupled with last year’s advice to watch for problems with the “Firefox Wall,” has given me new insight into and appreciation for the Internet.
When I was finally able to check my grades at 4:45PM, I found I had dropped in my overall GPA by 0.02 points. Given the host of personal issues I was dealing with last semester, I counted this as a win until I realized that those 0.02 points dropped me from the 30th percentile to the 50th percentile.
0.02 points.
20%.
What. The. Hell.
Few things can take me from syrup shot to suicide watch in twelve hours, but this was one of them. For those of you who aren’t in law school, let me explain class rank thusly: Being in the top 30% of the class meant that I would be able to scrape into a moderately respectable job in Salt Lake or some other metropolitan center. Being in the top 50% means that my children will starve and I will die penniless, miserable, and alone. I am prone to hyperbole, but this is not one of those times.
I was feeling a little bad about launching this site with its sparse, 5-minute WordPress theme, but the upside being a total law school failure is that my future unemployment will give me plenty of time to work on a new theme. I am also on track to becoming the smartest homeless guy ever, so take that.
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January 22nd, 2010
Yeah, it’s happening. Boom (said it).
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