Part of the reason I switched to the Mac in the first place was that I was tired of endlessly fiddling with my computing setup. On Linux, I was constantly switching between an endless succession of window managers, desktop managers, themes, plugins, and tweaks. Eventually, I settled on XFCE, a rather Mac-like X Windows desktop manager, but that was only a foundation on which I constantly switched themes and plugins in search of the perfect setup. On the Mac, you don’t have nearly that level of customizability. Good.

The other reason I switched to the Mac was that I got tired of mucking around inside my machines as well. Maintaining a typical PC is not just software based. Throughout my life as a PC user, I was often opening up the case to change this, upgrade that, swap this, and install that. When I got my first Mac, a Mac mini, I opened it up once to upgrade the RAM, and then never again. [1] I never opened up my iBook, but I did upgrade my original MacBook to 4GB of RAM, and just before writing this, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to 16GB. [2]

The trend in Apple hardware of late has been towards increasingly closed designs. Removable batteries were the first to go. The latest MacBook Airs solder the RAM and SSD to the logic board. The Retina MacBook Pros have soldered RAM, but a replaceable SSD, if you can find a bare, case-free SSD. Power users bemoan the lack of access to their machine’s internals, and I can’t blame them, but for me, it’s one less thing to worry about.

There’s plenty of ways I can tweak my Mac, but I’ve stopped reading a lot of “workflow porn” because it’s not actually helping me with my workflow. The less I have to think about the machine that lets me do what I do, the more I can think about doing what I have to do. It’s as simple as that. The less I have to go inside, the less fiddling I have to do, the better. It’s a peace of mind thing. Merlin Mann calls it the “Catholic experience” that Apple provides. When some of the “easy” choices have been made for you, you’re freer to focus on the harder choices. Ask Barack Obama, the man who only has two colors of suit, so he doesn’t have to think about which to wear. He has more important things to worry about.

Whatever you’re looking for, it’s easy to find a bad review of it. Type a company, or a product, or a band, or anything into Google, followed by “sucks,” and you’re guaranteed results. People can wax poetic for pages about what is bad, what’s worse than bad, and why anyone who likes a certain thing is wrong, wrong, wrong. Since it’s so easy to toss out vitriol over stuff that “sucks,” there’s little value to negative reviews. Reading Roger Ebert’s review of Freddy Got Fingered is a great entertainment value. When buying technology, it helps to know if a lot of people opened the box to find the item won’t actually turn on, but there’s little beyond that. If the number of one-star reviews outnumbers the number of four and five star reviews, that’s all you need.

It’s still easy to get caught up in the negativity vortex around opinions on culture, technology, and politics. That’s because it’s easy to be negative. To embrace and love something is much harder. I’d rather read someone’s effluent praise of a product or album than a million negative reviews that boil down to “shit sux.” These aren’t going to change anyone’s opinion on matters that are religious in nature. Remember, nobody thinks they’re stupid, and everybody has their reasons. Unless someone’s choices directly affects you, your opinion is nothing more than that. If only we all could agree on that…

And at the risk of stirring up some partisan sentiment, I have to admit that I have only rarely ever heard anyone say they love a Microsoft product. They may like it, prefer it, or exist anywhere on a spectrum that only rarely goes into “love” territory. The same emotional attachment that attracts Apple fas is the same thing that repels its vehement detractors. And you can replace “Apple” in that sentence with nearly any other divisive item. Some suggestions: “Justin Bieber,” “cities,” “football.” They stir up the tribal instinct, the narcissism of minor differences, and split us into “us” and “them.”

Nobody talks up things they don’t really have an opinion on. Nobody sings the praises of beige. The extremes of love and hate are what drive us to share opinions, for good or for ill. It’s the things we love, however, that say more about us than what we hate. However, sharing what we love opens us up to the attack from the haters. That might explain the apathetic way some people discuss culture, politics, or tech. Better to not express a strong opinion any way, so as not to rile anyone up. That’s all the more reason to glom on to those people who sing the praises of what they love to the world. They share their true self, not the posturing avatar of what they want to be seen as. Even if you don’t agree, they are the ones worthy of your consideration when evaluating anything.

Time is the enemy. There’s so much to do, precious little to do it in. Factor in time needed for little things like eating, sleeping, and the little maintenance tasks we must do to keep alive, and it’s a small wonder anything gets done. So, we rush. Run to catch the train. Grab breakfast on the way. Get your work done as fast as you can. Take a short lunch. Eat at your desk. Work some more. Run to catch the train. Heat something up for dinner. Rush rush rush. It’s the only way you’ll have time for yourself.

Must it be this way? Especially with creative work, the axiom still applies: “Fast, cheap, good. Pick two.”

If you want something done fast, and you want it to be good, it won’t be cheap. In your working life, the cost is your own energy, and you only have so much of that to go around. The result is that, after you burn off the easy energy, your work begins to decrease in quality—as does your life. Mistakes slip in. Little ones. Big ones. The less energy you have, the more the pressure is on to rush, the more likely you’ll fuck up. If you’re lucky, you, or someone else, will catch the mistake, maybe even fix it. If you’re unlucky, lives are in the balance.

Most of us are lucky.

And the cycle continues. Rush. Sleep less. Rush. Work harder. Do Bob’s work. Do Velma’s work. Do your work. Work overtime. Work from home. Work Saturday. Work Sunday. Run yourself ragged, make more mistakes. As this continues, the mistakes get bigger, as do the blind spots. It’s done. Next thing. Go. Run. And in the back of your mind, or even in the front of your mind, a part of you is screaming for a solution. You work harder, trying to get ahead for a bit, so you can take a day off. Maybe a week. Vacation. That’ll help, right?

It feels that way for a while. Then you come back, and everything is piled up. You have to catch up. Do the work you missed, and the work that is coming in, and the work that your co-workers aren’t doing, because they’re on vacation now. The deadline is looming. Can’t push it back any further. Ship or die. Run.

And you ship. And then you find out about all the little things that you, and everyone else missed. You were too busy, too close to the metal, and moving too fast to see the mistakes that piled up. And that pile needs to be fixed.

And the cycle starts again.

This happens to all of us. It happens at the top of the org-chart, and it happens way down at the bottom. Especially at the bottom.

All you can do is try and slow down. Stop running, and learn to walk when things get tough. Walk, and take your time. Think through what you do, especially when it’s something you’ve done before. It’s easy to be like water and flow through the same deep channels of your habits. With each trip though, the channel gets deeper, and it gets harder to escape. When you rush, when you run, when you go on autopilot, the mind slips right into those well-worn channels and nothing new happens.

Only when you slow down, look around, and walk instead of run do you find ways to improve things, and to avoid the inevitable pitfalls you run into, day in and day out.

Stop running, stop rushing. Walk. Just for a little while.

I’ve spent the last few days living in fear. I’ve been afraid of the consequences of a mistake I made, and a very dumb mistake too. It has the potential to ruin my professional life, and more. What sets this mistake apart from the countless others in my life is that it could effect a lot of people, and their careers as well. Forgive the vagueness, but the nature of the mistake, its potential impact, and the audience of this site make me wary to go into details.

Fortunately, it seems that the worst has passed. I’ll find out for sure in a week or so. Talking with people aware of the issue has also helped me gain some perspective—it may not be as bad as I have made it out to be in my head. Still, worry is what I do best, and it didn’t help that this whole thing coincided with a bout of illness, which never helps anything. It’s affected my sleep, my appetite, and my ability to write. [^1]

There’s talk about failing upwards, the idea that the people who make mistakes go on to better things because they’re known. I’ve written about owning your own failures. Neither of these were any consolation in the late, worrisome hours, or during the hours of busy work fixing my mistake before the Sword of Damocles could fall. I’ll be satisfied when I know for sure the end result, but I’ve done all I can, and as far as I can see, it looks to be safe. What I’m not sure about is how far I’m able to see.

[^1] Which is why I’m posting this late.

My mother has shelves upon shelves of books, to the point where it borders upon bibliomania. I suggested to her, once, getting a Kindle or using her iPad for reading, especially since she could adjust the text to better suit her vision. This was quickly rebuffed: she likes books.

On App.Net, I was in a brief conversation on mix tapes versus mix CDs and playlists. I took the case that a well made mix CD or playlist could be just as good as a mix tape. Aaron Mahnke’s response to the conversation, as well as Harry C. Marks’s both put the value on the medium over the content—the effort needed to make a tape is certainly greater than the effort needed to make a CD, or a mere iTunes playlist. I maintain, however, that though it is easier, the same amount of effort and thought can go into their digital equivalents. The ease is simply an excuse people have to be lazy.

A part of me sees this love for pure physical media, particularly older forms of it like cassette tapes, as ludditeism. Another part of me thinks about my book and record collections [1] that are sitting in a storage shed in Philadelphia. While I’ve rarely bought a new hard copy of a book since getting a Kindle, I still appreciate books for what they are. Certainly, I don’t have to worry about keeping my places in sync if I open the book on the subway versus at home. [2] On the other hand, if I had physical copies of everything I had in my iTunes library, I wouldn’t have anywhere to put them.

A vinyl record, a cassette tape, a CD, a hardback book, an ePub file, or an MP3—all of these are containers in one form or another. They come in many sizes, shapes, and colors. Some are more durable than others. [3] A container can be plenty valuable, and there’s nothing wrong with valuing it. One reason I collect records is because I enjoy the packaging: big album art, decorated inner sleeves, the way a record cover wears around the disc within… I also enjoy the experience of playing a record, and the physicality of it.

However, I listen to most things digitally. It’s easier, it’s the same music, and my ears can’t tell the difference between a CD, a record, and a good quality download beyond the superficial. Reading a book on a Kindle screen, my iPhone screen, or my iPad screen makes no difference—it’s still the same story, the same words the author put down in the first place. Same content, different container. For me, in my life, there’s more value when content is in smaller, more flexible containers like digital files, then there is in bulky, potentially fragile ones like CDs, records, and cassette tapes.

If you value the container over the content, I don’t know what to say. Perhaps it’s nostalgia. In the example of the mix tape, Harry Marks says that “The girl could feel your love in that fuzzy version of ‘Faithfully’ you recorded at 2am on a Friday morning before school.” That fuzzy version is the content—molded slightly by the container—but content all the same. It’s easy to get mixed up in nostalgia. As a music fan, I’m guilty of this too. However, the container is not the content, though it is very easy to conflate them.