Since moving to Israel in 2004, I’ve purchased two new mobile phones. The first was a Sony Ericsson T630 that I bought from a shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street in early 2005. The second was a first generation iPhone that I bought in America in early 2008.
My reason for buying the first phone locally, instead of getting an unlocked GSM phone in a Costco or on Ebay, was that I needed a phone with an operating system capable of displaying Hebrew, and a keypad with Hebrew letters for typing in Hebrew. For the privilege of getting a phone that would be suitable for someone who lives in Israel, I paid roughly a 50% premium over the American retail price.
My reason for buying the second phone internationally was that technology had advanced sufficiently in the next three years that I was able to overcome the operating system language and keypad language barriers. Question: how did this happen? Answer: the keypad became part of the operating system.
The original iPhone was the first phone I ever encountered that was genuinely as much a pocket computer as it was a phone. Computers get periodic software updates, so it’s natural for the iPhone to get them also. Therefore Apple planned ahead and built a system for computer owners to update their iPhones through their computers (I wish it hadn’t been through iTunes, but hey). And, because Apple gave iPhone users an easy way to update their phones, they also gave iPhone users an easy way to modify the updates, which meant people in places like Russia and Israel, two countries that didn’t have access to iPhones with support for their languages, could add support.
In that way, Apple’s iPhone, with its touchscreen keypad and system for firmware updates, became the first truly international phone.
At the beginning of the iPhone era, jailbreaking and unlocking an iPhone was a bit of a terrifying process. The modification was run on the phone itself, so if something went wrong, the phone could be busted permanently (nowadays, the software is modified by a program on the user’s computer and then, once it’s done and correct, it’s uploaded to the phone as part of a restore). The first time I installed the Hebrew hack – that is, giving my iPhone the ability to display Hebrew characters and enter them via a Hebrew keypad – I learned that it was actually a hack on the Russian hack. There was a confusing process to follow, at the end of which I had to go somewhere on the phone and turn on the option for Russian, after which I could select an international menu and Hebrew letters would appear. Does that sound terrifying to you? It definitely was to me (nowadays, iPhones are finally sold in Israel and Hebrew support is native).
A lot of people won’t buy an iPhone, or won’t buy another one, because they hate the touchscreen keypad and demand physical keys that they can have the feeling of punching. Undeniably, having that tactile-textual experience is awesome, but after seeing the iPhone’s great ability to switch out an infinite number of keyboards, I know that I’ll be using this type of phone for a long time.
By the way, which phone do you think cost more?
If you guessed the iPhone, you were absolutely wrong. In fact, the two phones cost about the same. Buying phones in Israel is for suckers.
Mac users in Israel, and probably in many other countries, have long experienced befuddlement and frustration to find that the Mac version of Microsoft’s market-dominating Office suite doesn’t support right-to-left languages like Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi. Now it’s clear that even the next version, Office for Mac 2011, won’t support right-to-left languages.
Over the years, many right-to-left compatible Mac alternatives to Office have been identified. Some, like OpenOffice and Google apps, are not at all Mac-specific and consequently don’t strive to deliver the Mac experience, but are intended to replace and even to supersede the attraction of Microsoft Office by offering 95% of the features for 0% of the cost, with the added feature of stability and opensourcity. Apple’s own iWork suite – which includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote for Word, Excel and PowerPoint – has pretty decent Hebrew support. iWork does cost money, but it has the benefit of being made by Apple and intended only for use on Apple computers by the same people who made those computers. Actually, even TextEdit, which is like Apple’s built-in version of Notepad, can handle Hebrew pretty well. I used it for almost all my writing until recently, when I switched to Notational Velocity – which also does Hebrew and which has the awesome added benefit of storing all my notes in a database and syncing like a champ with an iPhone app called Simplenote. For Mac users in Israel who need serious word processing, another popular choice is Mellel (it means something like phrasing in Hebrew) is a full-featured Mac word processor that’s built with right-to-left languages in mind.
My point is that there are really not that many reasons for a Mac user to need Microsoft Word specifically. I understand the game changes when it comes to Excel, but I’m not a spreadsheets monster so I’ll just point out that Numbers is not as easy to use as Excel but it’s still pretty good. There are only a few reasons that people cling fanatically to Microsoft Word: habit, Word’s market dominance and demand for Word’s advanced features.
Reliance on Microsoft Word for either of the previous two reasons – out of habit or deference to the large Word-using community – are problematic for me. I don’t have Office installed on my computers. When someone sends me a .doc format file, I can open it in any of a half dozen applications, but most of the time, I ask the person to send it again either as .txt, .rtf or .pdf, depending on what he needs me to do with it. 99% of the time, I get no complaints. In the remaining 1% of the time I get an opportunity to educate someone who needs help.
In the rare event that someone needs something that involves a Word feature not available in other programs, I secretly do have Office, but please don’t tell anyone.
I’ve actually never seen the Siskel and Ebert show. Or rather, I never did see it while it was on television. I don’t know if that’s a weird quirk of my childhood or if it perhaps wasn’t shown on Montgomery Cable when I was growing up, but I feel a little bit left out that I didn’t get to watch these two guys trashing some of the terrible movies of my youth. Fortunately, Mental Floss has put together a bunch of clips so I was able to get a great feel for how it works when Siskel and Ebert hate a movie. It’s a riot. You should watch every one of them.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised not to see Dolemite on that list, but it was so outrageously bad that it definitely became good (example of its weird badness-cum-goodness: boom mic visible in the upper part of the screen in a few scenes).
Traditionally, Mars Needs Women is considered one of the worst movies ever made. I’ve never managed to see it (for some reason it’s not available on any of the popular p2p filesharing networks), but I’ve gathered that the Martians in it are dudes wearing wetsuits with football helmets and that they’ve come to earth because, well, “Mars needs women.” I don’t know why, but it reminds me of an article I once read about North Korea freakishly and creepily kidnapping South Korean and Japanese women (and actresses, and movie directors) to fulfill their weird fantastic ideas.
Another movie known to be almost unbelievably bad is Ishtar. I have managed to download that one, and I watched about 15 minutes of it, but I could not force myself to go on. The fact that this movie was only available to me with Swedish subtitles says something really confusing and disturbing about Sweden.
What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen?
I’m not sure whether it’s because I always considered my name, Nathan, to be a little out of the ordinary for my generation (baby boom echo), but is it weird that baby names and how they’re chosen have long interested me? I came across this US government database of popular baby names by state recently, and when I checked the popularity of Nathan in Washington DC, 1981, imagine how surprised I was to find that it was the 50th most popular name for boys!! Now you might be thinking that Nathan only got to seem so popular because 85% of all boys born in the District in 1981 were named Antwahn, but that’s totally untrue: the top five most popular names for boys that year were Michael, Christopher, James, David and Matthew, which is reflected by my experience growing up nearby in Maryland. Antwahn does not even appear in the top 100 at all, though Antoine is 66, Antonio is 47 and plain old Anthony is 16.
This got me thinking: if Nathan was even more popular than Antoine in 1981 in Washington DC, how does it compare to names of my family members from the states and years in which they were born? I decided to compare my 50th place name against my brother and those cousins who were born after me (I can’t remember the exact years of cousins who were born before me, and they aren’t sharing this information in their facebook profiles). Also, on this side of the family, all seven cousins are boys, which makes the comparison more fair (families tend to be more traditional when naming their sons).
Here are the ranges that I would have expected to find:
- 1st-10th – Michael – 1987, Pennsylvania
- 1st-10th – Jeffrey – 1987, Pennsylvania
- 21st-30th – Matthew – 1981, Pennsylvania
- 21st-30th – Marc – 1985, Pennsylvania
- 31st-40th – Andrew – 1984, Pennsylvania
- 41st-50th – Alexander – 1984, Maryland
- perhaps 91st-100th – Nathan – 1981, Washington DC
Here’s what I found:
- 1st – Michael – 1987, Pennsylvania
- 2nd – Matthew – 1981, Pennsylvania
- 13th – Andrew – 1984, Pennsylvania
- 34th – Jeffrey – 1987, Pennsylvania
- 50th – Nathan – 1981, Washington DC
- 54th – Alexander – 1984, Maryland
- 94th – Marc – 1985, Pennsylvania
The most shocking thing about this is that Nathan was more popular than Alexander in our respective years and states of birth. Who would have guessed?!? I definitely always thought that his name was more conventional than mine. Marc was also a surprise, ranking far lower than I expected, but I also noted that Mark was 28th. Jews typically spell it with a C, so if Marc and Mark were combined they would have been in the mid 20s.
George Steinbrenner is dead. I guess it’s weird that I never thought he was the kind of guy who could die. He was just timeless, effortlessly throwing vast amounts of money at some Caribbean immigrant athletes so they’d wear pinstripes; and immortalized in Seinfeld episodes that are starting to feel weirdly out of date.
I came to be a Yankees fan in the mid 1980s when I was pretty young. Growing up in a DC suburb, I never felt that Baltimore could be my team, and Yankees were just an alternative to liking the Orioles. But the Yankees legend grew on me as I came to realize what kind of a team I’d chosen to follow. The Yankees were the team of the great baseball heroes of earlier eras – Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and always Babe Ruth. In some important way, the history of the Yankees is the history of baseball.
Steinbrenner took a team of legendary history and brought glory to it, bringing esteem and pride to New York. I’m sure my idea of wanting so badly to live in New York was fueled in part by its being the kind of awesome city that seemed to bring home World Series rings year after year (when I was in high school in the late 1990s).
There are good owners and bad owners in sports, but almost all are mediocre. Steinbrenner fucked up a lot, but eventually he figured things out and it was never difficult to be a Yankees fan after the strike ended in 1995. By that point I was pretty sick of baseball, but I was always proud to be a Yankees fan and a New Yorker.
Do you have a Mac? If so, go now to download AppleJack and install it on your computer. Then forget about it. When something goes terribly wrong with your computer at some date in the distant future – and you can’t access the GUI, don’t have a startup disk, etc., you should then remember that you gave yourself a way to access the computer with this handy Applejack thing, back in July 2010.
It’s nice if you print out the Read Me document, but that’s not necessary.
I would have told you to do this half a year ago, but the Snow Leopard version of Applejack just became available.