The Empty Soda Can

Yesterday I spoke about those embarrassing moments from teenage life. Here’s another, even stranger incident from my oft–ill-fated senior year: Growing up in the metaphorical shadow of the Twin Towers had its advantages. Case in point: each year, two nights before graduation, our high school would rent out an entire ferry from the Circle Line, a sightseeing company that cruises around Manhattan Island, several times a day. The Senior Cruise was—perhaps is—a dinner/dance, once last treat for the graduates before they don their caps and gowns on Friday. Another nice thing about our school was exam week: exams began the Wednesday before graduation week and continued through the following Wednesday (the same day as the cruise), with Thursday (the day before graduation) reserved for make-up exams. The tests ran from 8:00–10:00 and 10:30–12:30 each day, but were scheduled such that very, very few people ever had more than one per day. Students from all four grades came in for any slots...

I just turned 37, this week, which may or may not have evoked some of the reflections I’ve been having. It’s more likely that it involves my upcoming 20th high school reunion, which I won’t be attending due to scheduling conflicts, just like my 10th. (I actually am interested in going, but ironically enough, we’ll be in my home town for my wife’s high school reunion, then in her home town for my 20th. Nice, huh?) Anyway, the title of this post should serve to set the stage for what I’m about to write. I was very much a nerd, throughout my school years—still am, to some extent, though that matters much less to a 37-year-old. By high school, I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care what other people thought of me, and occasionally went to great lengths to prove it. But somewhere in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, unbeknownst even to me (but probably quite obvious to everyone else), I did care. Even as a senior, when I had finally gained a little cred, I still longed to be i...

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It’s been noted by many authors that a surprising number of Latter-day Saints don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that we think ourselves above improvement; in fact, quite the opposite: we’re so constantly trying to improve ourselves, attempting to become more like our Savior, that making a New Year’s resolution is actually kind of redundant. So with that in mind, yesterday I came up with a New Year’s resolution that is completely unrelated to bettering myself per se , yet something that I can actually work towards with some semblance of completion. So, on to the task: in my iTunes library, I have a smart playlist with every track that iTunes has no record of me listening to. Obviously, I’ve actually listened to a lot of them: many are ripped from CDs that had been played at least once, often more than once, before I added them to iTunes. However, having never listened to them in iTunes, they have no play count, no volume adjustment, no equalizer preset, no ✭ rating, ...

I guess it’s probably just as well that I neglected to post this yesterday, since my customer support manifesto was long enough as it was. However, the subject of iTunes reminded me of a rather humorous scenario I ran into, a while back. Perhaps two, maybe three years ago, I received my weekly e-mail from iTunes informing me of some of the new releases to hit the store that week. One of the new items was a five-track compilation of some of Paula Abdul’s greatest hits. Curious, I clicked the link to see which five they considered to be her “greatest.” What I didn’t expect was the hilarity of the comments. While a few people that rated the compilation had some decent things to say—whether positive or negative—the great majority were along the lines of, “Paula Abdul is such a loser. She thinks that just because she’s a judge on American Idol , all she has to do is record her own material and she’ll become a pop star, too!” I could not stop laughing—as evidenced by the fact that even years...

A few months ago, I was horrified to discover that the RAID I use to store our family’s iLife—photos, movies, web sites, and music—had suffered severe header corruption. For those of you that don’t know what this means, the header is sort of like the index to the drive. Imagine a 10,000-page reference book that you use every single day. This book includes a 500-page index, so you can easily find what you need. Then one day, you notice that some of the page numbers are suddenly wrong: about 10% of the time, if you look up term A, it gives you the page number for term L, or Z, or W. That’s a pretty good description of header corruption, except that at least with a book, you can flip through until you find the right page. Without an accurate disk header, the computer can’t find the right data at all . Now, all this shouldn’t be so bad, since I’m extremely conscientious about backing things up. Unfortunately, the backup software I was using at the time was so good that it dutifully backed ...