something broken

I wrote this over a month ago. I forgot about it and it just sat there, digitally speaking. So here it is. 

So the microphone on my phone died the day before yesterday. There was no cataclysmic event to signal its passing, just a phone call from a friend who couldn't hear what I was saying. At first I suspected one of the periodic bouts of terrible signal my flat suffers. But then the second call came and went with yet another person screaming "What?!" and "I can't hear you!!" followed by a small explosion of expletives cursing their phone, my phone, the networks and technology in general. I hung up and did much the same. Folks claiming we have replaced god with technology may be on to something - we curse both virulently when we feel they fail us.

My love-hate relationship with technology is such that I hate that I love it. There's a side of me that wishes I had only a landline, never had a Facebook account and thought the biro to be the only writing tool I would ever need. It's not a sense that technology is evil, it isn't, it's just a discomfort with my reliance on it.

And there's no more painful reminder of that reliance than a microphone dying. Or a hard drive failing. The things for which there are no real means of prevention, only measures to make the inevitable less painful.

So on the only day of snow this year, I jumped in the car and drove to Aberdeen and the quietest Apple store I've ever visited. The young genius checked my phone and then took it into the back room, no doubt checking to make sure that I hadn't dropped it in the toilet after hitting it with a sledgehammer. I hadn't, and so he gave me a shiny new iPhone (not a new new iPhone, sadly) and with an update and a login, I had my phone back, minus 2 texts I'd received between my last backup and my replacement. Fairly painless, and I enjoyed driving past the snow-blanketed fields of Angus and Aberdeenshire.

On a run about eight weeks ago, I sprained my right ankle in a fall so bad that the elderly couple I had been attempting to pass heard the crunch of tendons and ligaments as I collapsed. Only in the last week have I been able to run again, and it's been tough going. The weeks intervening, the recovery weeks, drove me slowly crazy with immobility and, most importantly, the sense that my body had failed me. Failed attempts to run again saw me barely able to make it around the block.

Rehabbing included stretching, ice packs and swearing profusely. Then there were the aches and pains that came from elsewhere, because of my limp. Injury begat injury.

I curse my reliance on technology and simultaneously fear its failure. I complain, whine and grumble about an app crashing or a corrupted file. But when I'm the damaged hardware, that's a different story. It throws it all into sharp relief. I'd rather drive to the Apple Store than Ninewells every time. 

remembrance

Santa brought my family its first computer on Christmas Day 1984. I was 8, though for some reason it feels like I should have been 7. It was a Macintosh 512, affectionately referred to as the 'Fat Mac'. We got a subscription to Macworld and a bunch of programs as well. My mom spearheaded the integration of this strange new machine into the household while my dad stood back and embraced the ways of the luddite, as he still does to this day. I looked on in wonder and excitement, using the new machine at every opportunity, curious as to why my MacPaint creations never looked as awesome as the sample art. Swapping floppies became habit. Boston Mac User Group (BMUG) discs littered the desk. I begged for a LaserWriter but instead we got an ImageWriter II.

At school I used Apple II's and Basic to make shapes with a turtle.

At home I designed posters and wrote screenplays based on me being Indiana Jones. And I played Lode Runner. A huge amount of Lode Runner.

After an upgrade to 1Mb of RAM could only take us so far and so we used my cousin's educational discount and bought a Macintosh SE. That had an internal hard drive, which blew my mind. Swapping floppies was relegated to installs only. My mother wrote a cookbook on that machine. It was that machine that came with us to London when we moved in 1989.

My first Mac was a Classic II. I got it my junior year of High School. By then Tetris had replaced Lode Runner as my gaming addiction. That was followed by an LCIII, a Centris 610 (hand-me-down), a PowerMac 7100/66 (also hand-me-down), a PowerBook G3 250, a PowerBook G3 Pismo, a PowerBook G4, an iBook G4, a black MacBook and now the 15" MacBook Pro that I'm writing this on. I had the first iPod and quite a few subsequent iPods - Shuffles, Nanos and a Classic, but never a Mini. I'm on my third iPhone and I use an iPad regularly. I've never owned a PC.

In the summer of 1997, my mother and I drove from Key West to Washington DC. We listened to a lot of NPR and tried to identify road kill along the way. I remember saying that she and dad should, if they had the money, invest in Apple. The stock was trading at about $12 a share at the time. This was before the iMac. Steve Jobs had only just returned to the company and the future was uncertain to say the least. My mom asked why and I said, 'They make the best computers. Someone's going to have to notice that eventually. And it looks like Steve Jobs is going to help people notice that.'

Every step of my education and subsequent professional life has been processed on Macs. Writing, web design, general design, photography, project management and wine merchanting have all been made a little more comprehensible, a little more pleasurable, a little more manageable because I have faith and confidence in the tools I use.

Last night I was drinking whisky with friends when one stopped mid sentence and handed me his iPad with the news splash of Steve Jobs' death. I took to Twitter and saw a steady stream of reactions to the news. We poured another dram and spoke in saddened awe. I couldn't sleep when I got home and so wandered online, reading testimonial after testimonial.

Steve Jobs built the company that makes the tools I use and trust. He did it remarkably. He built another company that makes movies I love. The tools that forged the World Wide Web were built by yet another company of his. The sheer scale of his accomplishments is daunting. He changed the world in not one but several fields. For the better, and without question better than the alternatives. A future without him driving forward innovation, shaping the advancements of technology so that it actually matters to people, seems a sad prospect.

It seems selfish, really, to mourn the loss of someone who has done so much because, in part, I wanted there to be more.

Rest in peace, Steve. And thank you.