UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Jesus wept.

(Full disclosure: I am an Apple shareholder. I’m glad their stock is up. But I think this is stupid.)

Update (the next morning): I just have to specifically call out this shot from the promotional materials. Seriously. Think carefully about what we’re seeing here. The woman wearing the “Vision Pro” is interacting with other people over FaceTime. None of them are wearing a big contraption on their faces. And they’re definitely real video, not avatars. She cannot possibly look to them the way they look to her. And, critically, they are definitely not using the product being promoted here.

Combine this bizarre demo with a very far-out launch date (I may be wrong, but I think this is the first time Apple has ever announced a product with a “next year” launch), and the whole thing reeks of the kind of vaporware desperation Apple’s competitors are frequently guilty of but Apple itself almost never succumbs to. “Real artists ship” is the phrase Apple has lived by. I’m not sure they believe it anymore.

Update to the update (that afternoon): So, Brian X. Chen of the New York Times got to try the unit, and it sounds like maybe these actually are digital avatars — or at least the woman wearing the ~~ski googles~~ Vision Pro here would be represented that way to the others. Still. Reading the rest of his first impressions, I am just affirmed in my extreme skepticism of this product. Maybe it’s time to cash out my Apple stock before it’s too late.

Update³ (even later that day): One last thing I want to talk about, since I’m mentioning Apple’s stock so much. Yesterday morning, just prior to the announcement, Apple’s stock was at an all-time high. Immediately as the keynote was beginning (1 PM EDT), the stock began to drop. It’s still very high as of the moment when I took this screenshot, but it’s lost about $5 per share from yesterday’s moments-before-the-keynote peak. Hmm.

Oversharing and paranoia

Oversharing is an inherent part of social media. Just ask anyone who’s made the mistake of clicking a Socialcam link on Facebook.

But oversharing takes different forms, and the most potentially dangerous type is one many people don’t even realize exists: the copious logging of your online activities by the social networking sites you’re logged into. Thanks to their “deep integration” with other websites, you may be “sharing” your browsing habits with Facebook, Twitter and Google even when you’re not on their sites.

Have you ever been on a site and noticed a little corner of the site looks like it’s been invaded by Facebook? That sickly blue, the font, the little profile pictures of your friends who’ve liked or commented on the page you’re currently viewing?

How did that get there? It’s because the site is integrating with Facebook, and through the magic of cookies, Facebook’s servers can tell that it’s you looking at the page and deliver content customized to your profile. Maybe you like that, but I find it a little creepy. Twitter and Google do it too, even if it’s not as obvious.

Google may be the most insidious, with so many of its tools now consolidated under a single login. If you use Gmail, and you keep your account logged in, every Google search you do is logged. Ostensibly this is to help deliver “personalized” results. More crassly, it is used to put “targeted” ads in front of your eyeballs. But that data is being collected, and regardless of what Google says their privacy policy is now, the data is there, and could stay there for a long time. Someday Google might change their policies or sell that data or the government might subpoena it or just come in and take it.

What’s worse, Google Analytics is everywhere. Heck, even paranoid old me uses it. Google says Analytics isn’t tied in with your Google account, and maybe it’s not… yet. But why assume it will always be that way?

Fortunately, there’s something very simple you can do to combat all of this data collection. It’s the online equivalent of a tinfoil hat, except it actually works. Log out. And just to be safe, clear your cookies.

I’m trying something out right now that takes all of this even a step further. It all hinges on the fact that in all three of these cases — Facebook, Twitter and Gmail — the web interface is probably the least usable, least satisfying way to experience these services. I’ve never really been a user of Gmail’s web interface; I’ve always preferred using the Mac’s built in Mail application. But now I’m also strictly using the Twitter app on my Mac. (I already use Tweetbot on my iPhone.) And I have made the decision not to use Facebook on my computer at all. I already hated the Facebook web experience anyway, so why bother with it? Now I am only going to check it using the Facebook iPhone app.

Dug the Dog (minor spoiler)

I saw Up today, and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I have enjoyed every Pixar movie (except A Bug’s Life which I frankly found a little boring). Some have been better than others. But I think I can safely say Up is the best one yet. The opening sequence was such a masterpiece of poetic, wordless, visual storytelling that I literally wept (wept! literally!) at the end of it, both because it was an emotional scene but also because it was just so beautiful.

From there the story becomes a bit more conventional but no less engaging, with a wonderful balance of humor, action and suspense. It’s a story wonderfully told, wonderfully acted, and artfully animated.

When it first became apparent in the mid-’90s that hand-drawn animated feature films were on the brink of extinction, I was dubious that computer animation could ever become as artistic as the best classic animation. I feel like Pixar reached that point with Finding Nemo, surpassed it with The Incredibles, (truly incredible), and finally became an art itself with Ratatouille. I thought the opening third of WALL-E maintained that level, although once the doughy humans appeared my enthusiasm waned. But I am pleased to say that Up has picked up where Ratatouille left off. The sight of thousands of brightly colored helium balloons billowing up from Carl’s house was a dazzling moment, and that was just the beginning.

Yes, I think Up is a success in just about every way. But the thing that has stuck with me most through the rest of the day is the impression Dug the dog made on me. He’s a wonderfully endearing, delightfully comic (without being cheesy or corny) character. Here’s a clip of our heroes first meeting him.

This one just may take the cake…

First, a qualification: Since I got a flat-panel display at work, I no longer have my PC connected directly to the display; I view the PC’s video output via Remote Desktop Connection on my Mac. I’ve learned over time that RDC does not provide a direct, unaltered feed of the PC’s video. For understandable reasons (faster screen refresh), but by perhaps unjustifiable methods, RDC re-renders parts of the video display. The result is that you do not see a pixel-perfect (or even simply downsampled) representation of the actual PC video; it appears to be redrawn completely for network transmission.

In particular, this does funky things with Internet Explorer’s output. Last year I spent a few hours trying to figure out why borders around my buttons were extending by one pixel both down and to the right, until I realized that on the actual PC’s display this wasn’t happening… it was just an RDC quirk.

With that out of the way, I have to admit that perhaps my current problem is an issue with RDC and not with Internet Explorer. But either way, it’s a Microsoft problem.

After making some CSS adjustments to a page I was working on, I noticed that the main body seemed to be extending 3 pixels wider than it should be. Further testing revealed this only happened on certain pages, and after resorting to commenting out each CSS class one-by-one, I tracked this down to an inline class that simply italicizes text. So, for whatever reason in the grand Microsoft scheme, a word or two in italics can cause a much larger section of the page (at least 2 or 3 levels up in the document tree) to expand by 3 pixels.

Again I ask… WHY???

And again my cry for explanation goes unheeded. Time for another lame workaround?

Addendum: As it turns out, in this particular case a workaround will not be needed. I went to our test PC and confirmed that this is an RDC glitch, and not an Internet Explorer one.