This post and the last one speak to the same issue. I'm trying to be be better about sending folks to the source material so the clicks come and people get to keep their jobs, so go read the whole thing.

The most nauseating advert in history? The Windows 7 ‘launch party’

I admit it: I'm a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can't control it. It's Apple. I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don't care if Mac stuff is better. I don't care if Mac stuff is cool. I don't care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you've got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There's a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.

Of course, it's safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They're not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.

This drew the attention of two nearby Mac owners. They hovered over and stood beside me, like placid monks.

"Ah: the delights of Vista," said one.

"It really is time you got a Mac," said the other.

"They're just better," sang monk number one.

"You won't regret it," whispered the second.

I scowled and returned to my infernal machine, like a dishevelled park-bench boozer shrugging away two pious AA recruiters by pulling a grubby, dented hip flask from his pocket and pointedly taking an extra deep swig. Leave me alone, I thought. I don't care if you're right. I just want you to die.

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I'm repelled. To them, I'm a sheep. And they're right. I'm a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I'm also a masochist. And that's why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That's why Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, "Hey, have you considered Windows?" Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host "Windows 7 launch parties" to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials. So you show them how to burn a CD, how to make a little video, how to change the wallpaper, and how to, oh no, hang on it's not supposed to do that, oh, I think it's frozen, um, er, let me just, um, no that's not it, um, er, um, er, so how's it going with you and Kathy anyway, um, er, OK well see you around I guess.

To assist the party-hosting massive, they've also uploaded a series of spectacularly cringeworthy videos to YouTube, in which the four most desperate actors in the world stand around in a kitchen sharing tips on how best to indoctrinate guests in the wonder of Windows. If they were staring straight down the lens reading hints off a card it might be acceptable; instead they have been instructed to pretend to be friends. The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos "Friendchips" TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).

It's so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call "shitasmia". It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It's the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history. Watch it for yourself.

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft's bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they're better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard. SNOW LEOPARD.

I don't care if you're right. I just want you to die.

I love my Mac, and a month of using a Vista machine at work has demonstrated that I can't go back to that bad, bad place anymore. With any luck my new Mac shows up this week and I can get actual work done.

That said, this guy has a point. I'm really getting tired of the whole product evangelist thing. I think it ties into my utter contempt for most product salespeople. Most of the time they are selling "solutions" that have no correspondence to a problem I'm actually having.¹

Selling a product as the key to a desirable lifestyle was old hat when the moneychangers set up shop outside the Temple.

OK, I get it.

But the next step is for you to discount any problem I have with the product YOU'RE pushing as a lack of understanding, or faith, or knowledge of my true Buddha nature, or some other thing. (Actually, most of my problems probably DO stem from my lack of understanding of my own Buddha nature, but I can assure you my understanding it better ain't gonna push much product for you. A lack of attachment kind of kills the buying mood. Don't encourage it).

We live in an off-the-shelf world, but our problems are always one-offs. And that's the way it's always going to be.

Anyway, I liked this article.

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¹I became aware of 9/11 from a salesman who was cold-calling me. Planes are smashing into the World Trade Center and all this guy can think of is selling me videotape stock. Think about that for a minute.

CHEMISTRY - perhaps the most-feared course in the college curriculum - has taken on an approachably sudsy look this semester at West Chester University.

"The Chemistry of Beer" is a new elective science class for students who don't wear pocket protectors.

"It seems most students are interested in two things," said associate professor Roger Barth, who created the course to attract nonscience majors to his classroom, "so I thought we'd go with the second one."

The course examines the complexities of chemistry, from acids and bases to hydrophilic molecules, through a beaker full of brew.

Using beer to study chemistry is not really a stretch, Barth pointed out, because "brewing technology has been one of the things that led to many of the advances in chemistry."

Indeed, Louis Pasteur studied bacteria by examining beer through a microscope. Søren Sorensen developed the Ph scale while working in the lab at the Carlsberg Brewery.

Barth, who wrote the course's textbook, leads the class from the very basics of beer, the chemistry of water, through the entire brewing process: milling, mashing, boiling, hopping, fermentation, sterilization, bottling and quality evaluation.

The course also includes a class trip to the Victory brewery in nearby Downingtown, where they'll meet Tim Wadkins, the brewery's director of quality assurance, who has a doctorate in biochemistry.

Though Barth and at least three of his colleagues in West Chester's chemistry department are homebrewers, the course is not designed to teach students how to make their own beer.

After paging through the textbook, I'd guess that even most professional brewers aren't conversant in the chemistry behind, say, sugars and starches. (Quick: What's the difference between D-glucose and L-glucose?)

During the class I visited this week, Barth looked suitably rumpled, with chalk dust covering his wool jacket and a loosened tie decorated with beer mugs. Lecturing on ion exchanges and osmosis, he quickly scribbled chemical formulas, explaining how adding O2 to water can remove unwanted iron.

I was completely lost in less than 10 minutes.

Other students furiously jotted notes, then polished off a surprise quiz in less than five minutes.

Because West Chester's campus is dry, Barth is prohibited from bringing beer into his classroom. Instead, he uses photographs and those hieroglyphic diagrams of chemical reactions.

The lack of beer doesn't seem to hinder Barth's teaching. Presumably most of his students already have a working knowledge with the bubbly liquid.

After class, I buttonholed the kid wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, "Part-Time Student - Full-Time Partier."

"I never knew most of this stuff about beer," Zach Jameson, 23, a creative writing and theater major, told me.

Why'd you take the class? I asked his friend Brian Malloy, also 23.

"We're homebrewers," he said. "This will definitely help us out."

Last question: What year are you in?

"We're fifth-year seniors," said Jameson.

Jameson and Malloy are exactly the type of students Barth hoped to attract to his class.

"I kind of feel like the students are learning about alcohol one way or the other," Barth said, "so without preaching to them, maybe this class will give them a thoughtful attitude toward alcoholic beverages."

Meanwhile, he added, "Chemistry has a reputation for being a real bear, partly because it is. There's all this chemical bookkeeping and numerical ideas like how many atoms in a molecule and how much a molecule weighs. . . . So maybe beer gets students interested in chemistry."

Indeed, for liberal arts types, it may be their only brush with the periodic table.

The course certainly worked for me: I finally learned the science of why beer comes in brown bottles.

Energy from light is absorbed by riboflavin in beer and transferred to the iso-alpha acids from hops. The process creates an unstable free radical that reacts with sulfur proteins, which produce 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol, the active ingredient in skunk spray.

According to Barth's text, brown bottles let in very little light at the wavelength that can "lightstrike" beer.

And, yes, this will be on the final exam.

"Joe Sixpack" by Don Russell appears weekly in Big Fat Friday. For more on the beer scene in Philly and beyond, visit www.joesixpack.net. Send e-mail to joesixpack@phillynews.com.

 

Now that's a chem class I can get behind

Reserve your place in history

This one off cruise is selling out fast – Book Now

British travel firm Miles Morgan Travel are taking reservations for this unique cruise that will commemorate the Titanic's tragic voyage in April 1912.

Our voyage of a lifetime will sail from Southampton on 8th April 2012 the twelve night cruise on board the MS Balmoral and will follow the RMS Titanic's original itinerary, passing by Cherbourg on the French coast before calling into the Irish port of Cobh.

From here the ship will sail across the Atlantic, arriving at the Titanic site on April 14th/15th exactly 100 years on from this tragic voyage, where a memorial service will be held to pay tribute to the brave passengers and crew who perished on that fateful night.

The voyage will then continue to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the final resting place of many who were on board, before sailing on to New York, the Titanic's ultimate planned destination.

This is obviously a unique event and such is the interest in the 100th anniversary of the Titanic it is highly recommended that a booking be made as soon as possible.

This can't possibly be a good idea.

The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment.

Investigators have said little about the case. The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, said Wednesday the man was found hanging from a tree and the word "fed" was written on the dead man's chest. The official did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word.

FBI spokesman David Beyer said the bureau is helping state police with the case.

"Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved — and that's part of the investigation — and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a census worker," said Beyer.

Beyer declined to confirm or discuss any details about the crime scene.

Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau's southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is "an apparent homicide" but nothing else.

Census employees were told Sparkman's truck was found nearby, and a computer he was using for work was found inside it, she said. He worked part-time for the Census, usually conducting interviews once or twice a month.

Sparkman has worked for the Census since 2003, spanning five counties in the surrounding area. Much of his recent work had been in Clay County, officials said.

Door-to-door operations have been suspended in Clay County pending a resolution of the investigation, Scurry-Johnson said.

The U.S. Census Bureau is overseen by the Commerce Department.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our co-worker," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with William Sparkman's son, other family and friends."

Locke called him "a shining example of the hardworking men and women employed by the Census Bureau."

___

McMurray reported from Lexington, Ky.

Source: AP News

The sad thing is that the guy who promised change is the biggest obstacle to getting it.