A journal and sounding board for a geek girl in Silicon Valley.

Three times in one week, it's amazing.

And to celebrate the occasion, today we have a rant.

It's a popular topic, so forgive me if you've heard it all before. The Claudia Schiffer edition of the Palm Vx. Supposedly, it's to make "busy" womens' lives easier. To me, the phrase "busy women" implies minivans and soccer moms, whose only job in life is to ferry their children to their various extra-curricular activities. I bought a Palm Vx shortly after the line came out, because it's already one of the most beautiful PDA's I've ever seen. It doesn't need an "aqua" color to be any more useful. I can't honestly see how taking Claudia's makeup and beauty tips and pre-loading them onto a Vx is really going to make the average woman "more organized". Everything the average woman should need is already included in every other Palm model. Maybe Palm's just going for the "teenybopper girls whose sole goal in life is to become prom queen and who have too much of daddy's money" market.

It's sort of disgusting, too, to have a supermodel hawk technology. Claudia likely knows as much about technology as I know about airplane engines. Which is to say, not a whole fuck of a lot. I thought that I worked and lived my life in the one sector of humanity free from the pressures of the waif-like fashion industry - that is to say, I'm a geek. (I'm a Bernie. Read Waiting for Bob. August 30th's strip sums up my feelings on the fashion vs tech issue.) The last thing I need is for a girl with a boob job (or not, I don't know) telling me what colors I need my PDA's in. They're supposed to be useful, not a fashion statement. Maybe Palm should change the color of the cases of the color line (did that make sense?) just so the entire unit can be color-coordinated with itself. It turns into madness, very quickly.

Once again, Apple leads the way. Once the eye candy known as the iMac came out, everything had to follow suit. Apple didn't just have a functional computer, they had a movement. Even my new Rio (see below!) is purple, but at least it actually matches my iMac. Diamond made an effort at making it as close to the same color as possible, which I appreciate.

Yes, I own an iMac. Yes, I like eye candy. However, all else being equal, I like functionality. I bought my Vx because it had eight megs of ram and came in a sleek form factor - one more easily slipped into jacket pockets. I always research products before I buy, and if something with whiz-bang functionality comes in a cool color, so much the better. (Just don't ask me to pay more for a purple whatever than a plain black plastic whatever.)

Maybe I dislike the idea of Claudia hawking Palm's wares because I feel more like a man than a woman sometimes. I like computers, I like UNIX (and I work with UNIX!), I like first-person shooters, I like cars, and I like technology in general. This sets me apart from women, I think, and indeed my roommate's always asking me why I seem to not like women. Many of them definitely don't have the same mindset I do, and sometimes things a lot of women say just seem inane. This is likely traced back to my childhood, where I started out watching He-Man on TV at a young tender age. Things sort of went downhill from there.

In the end, I think it's sad that Palm's starting to go towards the trend of "form over function", at least in their marketing. Palm already had such a huge market share, why bother with such insipid and transparent advertising? I don't foresee the "Claudia Schiffer" line taking off. You can try to take the technology to the women, but you can't take the women to the technology.
posted by Ciannait at 6:28 PM

Wow!

On a total whim last night, Jon turned to me and said, "Let's buy a Rio for the walk to work." I said, "Since we have different shifts, we'll have to buy two." And thus began the saga of buying two Diamond Rio 500's.

I nearly bought the 600, since it has capability to address 372 megs of RAM. Only problem is, 32 megs is all it'll get for the foreseeable future, and the 500 has 64 megs built-in and there are cards available to give it another 64 megs. So, the 500 it was.

Might I say, outpost.com rocks my socks. Overnight delivery, I ordered these things at 7pm PST last night and had them in my hands at 12pm PST today.

I can't get over how great I think this Rio is. I stuck some Sunscreem on it, and started off to work. The sound quality is great, and it holds most of a 74-minute CD at 160kbps. And it's so cute! It fits in my back pocket, and it matches my iMac. I adore this thing, I can't wait to get a Smart Media card for it.

I haven't loved a piece of technology this much since I got my iMac. Thankfully, Jon isn't taking pictures this time around. (Yes, he really took pictures of me unpacking my iMac. And no, you can't see.)

And in other news, I moved the streaming mp3 server off of the iMac, and onto Jon's Linux box. Turns out now that SoundJam MP will feed an external shoutcast server, so this means I can use shoutcast and our 40-some-odd gig mp3 volume on the beige G3. So if you're bored and want to check out "Ciannait's Celtic Stuff and Chick Rock" (as Jon so eloquently put it), visit http://blatz.pbp.net:8010/ in your favorite mp3 player.
posted by Ciannait at 6:08 PM

Welcome to my first weblog post. Hopefully future ones will be shorter and more to the point...
I figured since there was not much on my site other than my journal these days, I'd make it easy on myself to update it. Once other stuff reappears, I'll change the main template to reflect that.

Stuff that's happened since my journal last was updated... A lot, and nothing at the same time.

Jon's started working at Netscape, in frontline. It's nice to have him around more, and I missed him when he worked down in Santa Cruz. The cast came off, and Jon's car broke down, so now I *have* to walk to work. It's good for me, though.

My friend's getting married in September, which means (oh darn) a trip back to Minnesota for me. I don't get homesick for Iowa as much, but I do get quite homesick for the Twin Cities, on a regular basis.

In other disjointed news, it looks like my would-be housing arrangement is falling through due to the current residents' inability to communicate with each other. It's possible Jon and I may be able to take over when the now-two current residents leave, but it'll be hard to do with just the two of us. Faced with poor housing prospects and an almost-certain rent increase when my current lease expires, I'm a bit worried. I enjoy living so close to work, and I don't want to give that up. All I can do is try not to think about it and hope it'll get better.

LinuxWorldExpo was a lot of fun, if exhausting. Having been in a cast for three months, and not having done my PT yet (bad Heather), made for a tired me. We got a fair amount of schwag, and I even bought VMware while I was there, because it was so inherently cool. (So much for Linux users not buying software - although I don't consider myself a Linux user.)

And speaking of operating systems, work's going pretty well. I'm losing one project but hope to be gaining some more cool ones (that I can't really discuss).

And finally, I've been laughing at JenniCam lately. It got amusing last month when Jenni stole her friend/neighbor 's fiance. A week or two (or less) after they hook up, they get little matching ring-finger tattoos of the others' name. Needy, co-dependent, certifiably insane, it's still funny to watch someone make such an utter fool of themselves. Also check out alt.fan.jennicam for other perspectives on the soap opera / drama.
That's it for now...
posted by Ciannait at 2:53 PM