testmeat photoblog

3 months ago, pretty much to the day, my ipod touch died. it was upsetting as it had become so useful while travelling, from walking into a wifi zone to quickly check my emails, to using the maps feature to navigate around a new country, to using the translator app to pretend i could speak the language. that's all in addition to thousands of songs to make the long bus journeys more bearable. anyways one day in july it stopped mid-song, the screen went white, and stayed that way until the battery was depleted. i tried all manner of resuscitation techniques but nothing worked, so i put at the bottom of my bag and bought a shitty, smaller, sony replacement.

two days ago i learnt about steve jobs. of course when anyone dies it's a sad moment, but i felt particularly bad hearing about steve. the last time i felt affected by the death of someone i didn't know personally was probably mark 'sparklehorse' linkous. the first computer i remember using was a mac (i believe the classic II). despite mac's being notoriously weak for games i clearly remember playing prince of persia and tetris, which were loaded on floppy disks. the first computer i owned was clamshell ibook which i had for when i started university. i remember a few of my buddys took the piss out of it claiming it was a toy computer and pcs were better - in fact even my computer teacher was on their side. i didn't care, i resented using the university pcs and remember the excitement of discovering the only mac on campus in the sound engineering department. in fact i was even excited when i started my last job a couple of years ago and i received a phone call asking if i preferred working on a mac or pc. i've had and used an ipod from the first generation up until my touch broke a few months ago so it's safe to say that steve's creations have been a part of my life for a long time.

i wanted to post an appropriate photo, but realised that i didn't actually have any apple products in south america. i bought a pc laptop to go travelling, mainly for cost reasons, and the multiple crashes are an unnecessary but constant reminder for why i prefer apple macs. all i had was my broken ipod, so i dug it out of my bag - and plugged it in. instead of being greeted with the broken all-white screen, i was welcomed with a small, sharp apple logo. i had to wait for confirmation, mainly because of a 400mb update/restore process, but a few hours later it was definite - my ipod had come back to life. i never would have checked if it wasn't for the news about mr jobs, so while i'd prefer him to be alive and creating, i appreciated the ironic symmetry.

here's the original