My Life: A trail of abandonded websites.

I'll start with a quick follow-up to two issues I've been blogging about this semester: the demise of my iMac and my annoyance at the liberties retailers take with my email address. I mentioned earlier that I was so angry at Apple's refusal to service its older-model computers that I was tempted to fire off an email blasting their lack of regard for long-time customers. Apple headed me off by sending an email to inquire whether or not my visit to the Genius Bar was satisfactory. Here was my chance. I politely made my opinions known, and checked off that I did not want a follow-up phone call to discuss my experience. I generally expected a half-hearted and ultimately meaningless email to follow, something along the lines of "we're sorry you were not entirely satisfied, yada yada yada." What I received this week was an email from Apple advertising "iMac: the perfect desktop computer for your home." Right. Because a) I gave the Apple store my email address for the purpose of confirming an appointment, and b) they now know I need a new computer...With that, I'll lay this subject to rest.

This week's assignment is the World Wide Web itself! I'm currently working on my personal website--the first one I've created in years. I remember how excited I was when I first went online way back in 1993. There were thousands of websites, or, as most individuals called their personal website back then, homepages, to browse through. I was desperate to join in and build a homepage of my own. But first, I needed to decide on a subject. I needed to find my "thing." I joined Geocities early on, delighted with their little virtual "neighborhoods" that would host a user's web address. After much consideration I decided to go with a Riot Grrl theme. Thus, Grrlzine was born. Armed with an HTML guide in one hand and a web graphics book in the other, I put together what I considered to be a pretty snazzy--and snarky--website. And I broke all the rules regarding good web design in the process. Animated GIFs? Check. Busy and confusing backgrounds? Check. Haphazard image placement? Check. If that obnoxious dancing baby animation had been around in 1993 I probably would have included it. In the meantime, a tiled photograph of Diana Rigg as her Avengers character Emma Peel--rendered in hot pink and black contrast in Photoshop--would have to do. I updated Grrlzine slavishly for a few months until it was brought to my attention that another woman was publishing an actual paper zine called Grrlzine--and had been for quite some time. She got there first, and she was way cooler than me. Undaunted, I switched tactics and launched Avenue A soon afterward. My new "thing" would be a NYC-centric art and pop-culture guide. I was way out of my element. Apart from a virtual art gallery featuring my artwork and photos, and a lame list of my favorite shops and restaurants in NYC, there wasn't much content. Eventually I lost interest, and gave up on contributing to the internet. Sure, millions of other people with nothing interesting or important to contribute continued to contribute, and that's one of the pros as well as one of the cons of the internet, but for me, well, I simply gave up.

These days I prefer the quick-edit instant satisfaction of the blog's format. I'll discuss my blogging habits later on in the semester. For now, I've dragged out the HTML guide (thank you Visual Quickstart Guides!) as I immerse myself in yet another crash course in coding.

Strawberry Whine (Continued)

For today's post I'll continue my ruminations on the need to keep up with the internet's technological advances. In the post below I whined extensively about my 8-year-old iMac's obsolescence. I don't mind the slow operating system on my iMac as much as I mind the fact that the damned thing requires more RAM and updated operating software just to be able to surf the internet. Eventually the hardware could no longer keep up with the software. I have 1 gig. of RAM in this computer, and I use it for everything. Internet surfing, paper writing, graphic design and my creative writing projects. Right now I have all of my projects safely saved onto Zip disks, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to access them.

I brought my iMac to the Apple store two nights ago. The technician took one look at it and said, "I don't know what I can do for this model because we stopped making it . I'll check it out for you but technically we're not even allowed to look at these anymore." Thank you, Apple customer service. I'll save the rant about deserving appropriate technical support no matter which Apple I own for another time. To my surprise the computer started up without any problems, but when he plugged the Zip drive in, everything froze and disappeared. I was a little confused, but at least the technician didn't charge me for looking at it, and he got my zip drive out of my zip disk as well. The drive worked on his newer iMac without any problems, so obviously, I'm facing the inevitable task of having to replace my computer sooner or later. No one actually laughed at my iMac, but a few techies shook their heads in a mixture of pity and disgust, and one young salesgirl went "AWWWW!" and patted my iMac in the same way one pats a dog's head.

So this is my dilemma: Do I continue to buy new equipment every 5-8 years? It looks like I don't have a choice, which means most internet-savvy consumers don't, either. Part of the iMac's problem is OS10.4, which is running on a G3 processor. The technician told me that 10.1 would be better to use with such an old processor, but I bought the upgrade because I could no longer access the internet using 10.1. As I said in my earlier post, living without internet access is not an option. 24-7 on-demand access to news, entertainment and shopping is taken for granted these days. I refuse to live without the ability to check my course materials, shop online, and communicate with friends and family from the comfort of my own home. The internet has brought the entire world to everyone's doorstep, and once we've become accustomed to that, there's no turning back.

I attended Parsons School of Design (of Project Runway fame!) in the nineties. Every single computer lab on campus was wall-to-wall blueberry iMacs, which means, of course, that many major learning institutions invested huge amounts of cash on Apple technology. I wonder how much Parsons had to spend to replace all those Blueberries. It doesn't seem very customer-friendly to me.

I'm fast approaching middle-age and already I can feel the crank letter-writer coming out in me. I'm almost tempted to write a letter--well, by letter I mean e-mail--to Apple letting them know how I feel. In the meantime, I'm not sure what to do. This sounds stupid, but I haven't plugged in my iMac since I brought it home from the Apple store. I'll get around to it this weekend. If I can still use it for everything except accessing what's on my zip disks, I'll take that for now. But if that' the case, what will I do about my novel-in-progress??