Reading the summary of the MacWorld keynote today reminded of why I hate Apple. There's no question they have the best designers and they produce some seriously polished, usable products. But the reason I don't like the company and don't want to own any of their products is that they are bad people and they encourage the same of their users. The keynote was blatently elitist, which is what I have come to expect from Mac users recently. I'm all for hyping your product (or the one you enjoy) and touting its superiority over the competition but I think it is quite a different matter to be overly condescending without reason. I don't try to tell anyone that they shouldn't use a Mac or an iPod; I think they are wonderful devices, the best for those who they are especially good for. So why do they need to be rude to anyone using a product that is not made by Apple? Apple, as particularly evidenced by its recent "Mac vs. PC" ads (which I find offensive), has given its users a liscence to denigrate any competing product. They don't accept that different devices have different strengths and weaknesses that make them desirable for different people. Anything that isn't the thing they like is immediately evil, even if the thing they don't like about it is an unfortunate result of being better in some other way that I desire, just as to me the lack of that feature is an unfortunate result of the more streamlined design of the Apple product. Until Apple and its fanboys adopt a better social policy I can't, in good concience, join them.

This is showing up in a flurry of backdated journal posts. I like to date the posts when I should have written them, even if I was lazy and only put them on a list to write later. Once there are a couple on that list, it only grows because I don't want to write one if I'm not going to do them all and that would be more that I usually want to do. I was doing pretty good this summer, but there's a reason that a list developed.

While at NextFest I noticed that my server was down. I was afraid that it was hackers and when I got back, I found that it was. Luckily GATech computing services rocks. They had taken me off the network but they weren't so mad that it had happened and that I wasn't a student. They were willing to reconnect me as soon as I fixed the problem. And they were able to tell me exactly what happened. At first I was worried I wouldn't be able to resecure my machine because I didn't know how it was vulnerable. The computing guy told me that it was an exploit in an old version of awstats (that I wasn't getting updated because it was debianized) that I wasn't even using, I had just forgotten there. All I really had to do was turn off cgi-bin since I didn't use it anyway. Of course who knows what else the hackers did. It seems liked a good time to reformat and reinstall linux anyway. Besides, I needed to upgrade the kernel.

Well, that wasn't the only machine with problems when I came home. My desktop was making a very loud noise. It sounded like the harddrive working frantically.

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