UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Update, May 24, 2010: Comments on this post keep trickling in, but Apple has long since fixed this issue. If you have a look at the screenshot of the Trackpad preference pane below, you’ll notice that, curiously, there are no checkboxes next to most of the “options.” This has been resolved with a software update. The current version of the preference pane looks like this. Note that now each of the items listed includes a checkbox to turn that feature on or off. Also note that in my settings, I have unchecked “Pinch Open & Close” and “Screen Zoom.” Problem solved.

If you don’t make a habit of running Software Update regularly, you really should. Click on System Preferences in your Dock, then click on Software Update. I recommend checking the boxes for automatic updates, and be sure to click Check Now and follow the on-screen instructions to grab any available updates you haven’t yet installed.

Don’t get too excited by the title of this post: I don’t have an answer. But it’s annoying the hell out of me in Safari and I want a resolution. I’m hoping that once again a post here might be a beacon in the darkness and someone will come along with an answer.

I’ve already looked here and on other similar forums, and all of the responses seem to be one of the following:

1. Download this shareware app you’ve never heard of and it will fix it.
2. In addition to being an idiot and a major d-bag, I’ve never touched one of the new MacBooks in my life, but I won’t let that stop me from cluelessly suggesting that you check under System Preferences > Trackpad in an obnoxiously smug way.
3. How on Earth can you possibly be accidentally zooming when you’re trying to scroll or whatever it is you’re trying to do instead of zooming? Clearly you are a moron who just can’t figure out how to use a trackpad properly.

Thanks, assholes. But seriously, thanks, assholes.

I know Apple has a history of introducing “innovative” features that their users may not be entirely willing to embrace. Some have been prescient (dumping the floppy disk drive) and others have been folly (the infamous “hockey puck” mouse). Obviously the company is trying to transform the way our fingers interact with electronic devices. The multi-touch trackpad is an impressive innovation and it’s also a logical extension of the touch control of the iPhone and the iPod touch. But it’s also radically different from a traditional trackpad in ways that are not at all apparent, upon initial introduction, to the user. I love some of these features, such as the two-finger scrolling and the four-finger swipe to switch apps.

Others, not so much, especially since there’s no forced education on how they work, so it’s easy to do them accidentally. Case in point, as I was just writing about the four-finger swipe, I decided to test it to make sure I was describing it accurately. Unfortunately I absent-mindedly swiped with only three fingers, an action which unbeknownst to me is the equivalent, in Safari anyway, of clicking the Back button. I never would have expected this, nor would I ever want it to do this.

I think the fundamental disconnect I’m struggling with here is that the interface metaphor is incomplete. With an iPhone, there is no cursor, and your fingers interact directly with what you’re looking at on the screen. With the MacBook, you still have a traditional, non-touch screen and a mouse- or trackpad-controlled cursor moving about on that screen. Putting iPhone-style touch gestures onto a non-screen trackpad, and mixing those gestures awkwardly with traditional mouse-style movement of an on-screen cursor just isn’t intuitive and it came with no advance warning.

So, boo on Apple for the half-baked multi-touch interface in general, but for the most part the only place where it’s really giving me trouble is in Safari. I almost never resize the text in Safari, but I scroll constantly in Safari. It makes sense to provide a convenient multi-touch gesture for scrolling, but how often does the average user resize the text on a web page? I suppose those whose sight is diminished may do it more than I do, but that still doesn’t justify making it such an easy-to-accidentally-trigger gesture, especially since there’s (apparently) no way to turn it off.

The problem is further exacerbated by the integration of the trackpad button into the trackpad itself. You always have at least two fingers on the trackpad — the one moving the cursor and the thumb resting at the bottom on the “button.” But where exactly is the boundary between the “button” and the rest of the trackpad? That seems to be the key flaw that is causing me to frequently resize my text in Safari accidentally.

That, ultimately, is what bothers me most about the new multi-touch gestures: most of them appear to be mandatory, like it or lump it. The new trackpad is obviously capable of performing all of the functions of a traditional, non-multi-touch trackpad. So how hard would it have been to provide the user with the option to turn off the new gestures if they don’t want to use them?

Come on, Apple. You’re better than that. Aren’t you?

I don’t think this skit from last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live will necessarily enter the canon of all-time classics, like John Belushi’s Little Chocolate Donuts commercial, or the Christopher Walken/Will Ferrell “more cowbell” mock-rockumentary. Dwayne Johnson’s delivery was uneven at best. But what can I say? I’m a Bill Hader fan, and this is definitely one of his finest moments.

It’s been fun to study the data collected by Google Analytics about visitors to my site. It’s not terribly surprising when looking at the world map that the United States is dark green and all of the rest of the countries are either light gray (no visits) or very pale green (a few visits). Frankly, I’m quite surprised though that most of the countries are the pale green. Pretty much the only gray on the map is the majority of Africa (all but six countries), the cluster of former Soviet republics between Russia and Pakistan, Mongolia, a couple of smaller South American countries, and, vastly over-represented by Google’s use of Mercator projection, Greenland.

That’s pretty amazing. Nearly 2,500 (68%) of the slightly more than 3,700 visits my site received in the last month were from the United States, with the fairly obvious (for language reasons, if nothing else) U.K. and Canada following at 200 (5%) and 160 (4%) visits, respectively, and Australia in fifth place with 63 visits.

Among non-Anglophone nations, France was first, and fourth overall. Again, not terribly surprising. What is surprising is the sixth-place country: Poland, ahead of Germany by 10 visits. I’ve been to Poland. I enjoyed my visit; it’s a fine place; but I just didn’t expect much site traffic from there. Brazil, Italy and Spain round out the top ten countries with a combined total of 120 visits.

Looking at the top ten cities was even more surprising, to some extent. Well, OK, the top five cities were not surprising at all: Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, London and San Francisco. (I guess London was a little surprising, as the fourth most frequent source of visitors to my site. But, you know, it’s a big city.)

It was cities number eight and nine that really surprised me: La Victoria, Peru and Kissimmee, Florida. What? Well, OK. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kissimmee visits were entirely due to this, but I’m at a loss as to what it might be about my site that is so uniquely appealing to the residents of a district in Lima. If you live in Peru, please share!

No one city jumps out from Poland in the same way. My popularity there is far broader! But no more easily explained.

Sadly, though, all of this enthusiasm over my burgeoning international popularity fizzled when I took a close look at the stats for a particular country: China. I had a mere 7 visits from the world’s most populous nation. But given that country’s reported restrictions on access to the Internet, the low number is not so surprising. What is revealing, though, is the duration of the visits. All but one of them were for precisely the same amount of time: 0 seconds. One determined soul in Shanghai did actually spend 19 minutes on 3 of my pages, but the rest were blips too small to measure. Which suggests to me that either Chinese web surfers are experts at frightfully clicking instantly away from questionable online subject matter, or these visits were not from humans at all, but spider bots.

I suspect if I were to dig deeper into these international visits (as well as some in the U.S., particularly from San Francisco), I would find that many if not most of them are from search engine spiders simply undertaking the thankless task of indexing my site for the benefit of Internet users in their countries who are thoroughly indifferent to my unengaging drivel.

Our governor measures his words with a Vernier caliper while dissembling Rush Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails — as subtly hinted at by a vague, ambiguously titled article on his website (Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails) — on the Rachel Maddow Show:

…And is slightly less politic (though no more factually accurate) when criticizing Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak in front of a less public audience in Rochester last month, as shown in this video of Mayor Rybak’s rebuttal:

On a positive note, I can confidently say that I’d rather have this Republican governor than a certain former Democratic governor in a certain other state who tried to sell a certain Senate seat vacated by a certain current President of the United States. Or any of the four (maybe five) other Republican governors I can name off the top of my head.

Don’t believe me? From west to east, Sarah Palin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bobby Jindal, Charlie Crist. Is Sonny Purdue still in Georgia? I ought to know him; I voted against him. I know there are some more, but in the words of the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, they’re “known unknowns.”

I’m not sure anyone else on the planet has taken notice, but I for one have enjoyed a recent addition to this site — the “On This Day in Room 34 History” panel in the middle column of the home page. It is programmed to automatically display an excerpt and link to any posts I’ve ever made on the current date in years past, going back to the earliest days of the blog-ified version of my site in 2002.

Today’s historical artifact is of particular interest. It is a short story I wrote in 2003 called “The Poster.”

It’s interesting (to me, anyway) because I rarely write fiction. I wrote a lot of short stories, and poems too, for that matter, back in middle school and high school, but since then, nothing. Well, almost nothing. Just this one short story, six years ago today.

Why did I write it? I can’t really say. I literally just woke up that morning with the entire story fully formed in my mind. As soon as I got to work — yeah, I blogged a lot at work back in those days; it was my way of surviving a semi-pointless job in a rat-infested basement of an old house in the northern Atlanta suburbs that had been converted into an office — I set about writing it.

It doesn’t happen a lot, but I do occasionally wake up in the morning with a creative spark for some ridiculous project like this. Most of the time I either lose interest or inspiration before I get around to doing anything with the idea. Sometimes, as was the case last week when I got an idea for a second RPM album, I’m motivated enough by the idea that I get right down to the business of executing it, but it ends up not living up to the vision and I abandon it. And on the rarest of occasions, it actually comes together and I nail it.

Well, I’m not totally sure I nailed it with “The Poster.” I sure thought I nailed it right after I had written it. But now, looking back on it having not read it in at least five years, I’m not so sure. It definitely has the quality of a dream where it seems to exist in a small, enclosed world with its own twisted logic. When examined critically as a work of short fiction, it’s probably rubbish (just like the objet d’art it so prominently features), but taken as a recounting of a typically bizarre dream vision, it’s kind of cool.

At any rate, if it’s fiction you’re looking for, this is all I have to offer. Enjoy.