M79 by Vampire Weekend

My good friend Rob was in NYC when Vampire Weekend played this show for Pitchfork.tv at the Columbia U. ADP Literary Society (Pretension alert!)

Coming soon...

I'll have a picturey post about the Steve Wozniak lecture I attended last night. You're excited.

[edit]: might be a while. check out the flickr set in the mean time here .

To Answer Your Question...

Boil my myriad reasons for preferring the Mac platform to Windows down to this main tenet: The Mac represents to me a truly pedigreed platform. The Windows/Intel platform seems like it's merely gone through a series of lackluster upgrades. It is as if their developments were compared to a child's. Whereas the Mac platform was borne of a revolutionary parent idea, Xerox's Palo Alto Research project; the first ever platform to use a mouse-based graphical user interface. Windows was sired by DOS, and before that CP/M; neither of which was particularly revolutionary, or even innovative. The original, close-knit team of Mac engineers and designers were like a dysfunctional cult of savants. They came from wild and varied backgrounds, and their leader has always been known as (among other things) an innovator. Microsoft as a developer has always been interested in a universal approach to personal computing. That is, they factor so many things into a platform's development that user experience tends to fall lower on the priorities list. The generational updates to Windows are notoriously half-baked, which contributes to a "big-picture" lineage of mediocrity. Both platforms have seen ebbs and flows in their release quality, Microsoft's Windows 95 was relatively well-recieved, and Apple's software and hardware in the mid-nineties was embarrassingly disorganized. I remember the first time I used Windows, in revision 2.0, on an Everex Step 8/25MHz 386. I thought it was cool, but I couldn't understand why all the letters were the same width, even the 'i's. Having already been introduced to Apple's System 6, I was expecting more than 8 colors and fixed-width fonts. One of Apple's other early engineering triumphs was its so-called disk controller setup. At that time, many floppy disk drives had built-in hardware to process the data being read, and were therefore subject to bottlenecks due to the slow hardware controller chips. Apple's Steve "Woz" Wozniak found tri-fold increases in speed by using the Apple's CPU to perform the raw data conversion. In the design department, Apple's Mac OS interface gurus worked 90-hour weeks perfecting graphics routines and were happy about it. Everyone on this team knew they were contributing to something special, and it showed in the final product. It was these revolutionary ideas and attitudes within Apple that set the stage for the user-friendly personal computer's renaissance.