Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh, inventor of click-and-drag selection, author of The Humane Interface, and human interface design guru, passed away on February 26th.

Let us reflect for a moment on the legacy he began:

Apple History.

Thanks for changing the world, Jef. Rest in peace.

So tonight I was a bit out of sorts; getting off the subway, walking down the stairs, about to go home. But what was that sound coming up the stairs? Was it…could that actually be Christmas carols?

I walked out of the station with a bit of a grin on my face, and there, at the bottom of the stairs, was a van pulled up underneath the train platform, with about two dozen Asian kids grouped up in front of it. Crisp white shirts, shiny black pant, singing their hearts out to Queens Boulevard. An extension cord stretched across the sidewalk from the van to the little band on the side – glasses and neat haircut on guitar, long hair never-saw-his-face on a little keyboard set to “Christmas synth strings” or some such. Their conductor looking just as sharp, his back to the passing traffic, proud to be at the helm of this kind of out-of-tune, kind of out-of-place, but ultimately wonderful operation.

Enter plot twist, stage left. He strolls by, captivated by the music; he is clearly drunk. He stops, he grins, he sways back and forth, his arms start to move up and down as his body rocks to the rhythm of “Noel, Noel.”

And before anyone in our little audience of about a dozen knows what’s going on, this man is conducting. Full-on up on his toes, arms swooping, whirling and raising to the sky, conducting this choir. The girls are giggling at each other. He is grinning from ear-to-ear. I am laughing hysterically. The “real” conductor, from whom he is standing about two feet away, is doing none of these things.

After two minutes or so, our drunken friend decides his conducting career has gone on long enough, and he crosses in front of the choir to head home, tripping on the extension cord as he does so. He turns around, and walking away, shouts a very heartfelt, very toothless “Merry Christmas.” He is engulfed by the moment, by the power of shared experience, by the unexpected emergence of whatever it is that Christmas is supposed to be all about, and for one brief moment, I am too.

So before that moment fades away, let me say this. Christmas itself means nothing. Presents, trees, Santa, reindeer, sugarplums, nothing. The ritual is all we need. Any one will do. Any imposition of time where we step out of ourselves and into the sacred space of the collective, into patterns of interaction that remind us that we share this world and this life with those around us, not just physically, but spiritually. And when we get there, that’s when we find the so-called “meaning of Christmas.” Or of anything else.

That’s all I got. Merry Christmas. Happy Festivus. Et cetera, et cetera.

Mbee. I blame them.

Wait, no, let me try again….

Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq, where thousands of weapons of mass destruction were recently found, was cap…..

No, that’s not it either….

Um. What’s going on again?

The way I saw it, it was our IT guy. I was at the bench in the back dealing with a computer when he reached over, fiddled with something, and turned off the power to the whole bench. I was just about to reproach him, when I noticed that he’d also managed to turn off the power to the entire store. Then someone ran in through the back door, saying it was the whole block. At this point, we started telling all the customers to go home – one customer, I heard, actually called upset that he’d been “hung up on” in the middle of a sale, and when informed that the power had gone out in what we’d now learned was all of New York, said that he didn’t care, that this was very important, and that someone had better call him back in 5 minutes to complete the sale. Sheesh.

Anyway. All of our biggest and baddest employees stood by the front door with the security guard to make sure no one took advantage of the confusion to walk away with a computer or two. The elephant in the room (or is it a gorilla?) was definitely whether or not this was a terrorist attack, and, if it was, what terrible things this would mean for the country at large. People had girlfriends stuck in the subway, family members they couldn’t reach – word was that the Manhattan Con Ed plant was on fire!

After about half an hour, we decided it was time to walk home. At some point, it was going to be dark, and if we weren’t inside yet, it was gonna seem real dark. And real scary. So I started walking uptown with my friend Brandi.

Now, I went on a little bit in my last entry about a sort of resurgence, a renewal in my faith and love for New York, brought on by the hipness and the lights and the downtown scene. This walk brought me to terms with the rest of New York, the monuments, pavilions, and parks sprinkled absurdly throughout the city. The strangely flat buildings, the abandoned high-rises with one inhabited apartment.

We walked up 10th Avenue for a while, and at one point, we saw two guys in shirts and ties, loudly directing traffic at an intersection, yelling “C’mon,” “Move move,” and other such invectives. How nice, I thought, that they are expending all this energy for the good of their fellow New Yorkers. I noticed, however, that they seemed to let cars from the right through while holding most of the cars coming straight through. This was when I realized that they were just trying to get their friend’s car through the interesection so they could get home. I mean, the noive!

At this point, cell phones were still not working at all. We were beginning to hear news reports from the informal car-listening sessions along every street: It wasn’t a fire, it was a “programmed shutdown;” the FBI did not suspect anything suspicious. (Interesting use of language, I thought.) I still think that if the FBI had suspected any terrorist activity, they sure wouldn’t have told us – who wants the whole country to flip out during a power outage?

We turned left around 34th St., walked over to the Javits Center, and kept walking up. We took a break at 59th St. right before the highway. Brandi’s AT&T phone had started working a little bit; my Cingular phone was of course absolutely useless. We made some calls, drank some water, and kept on moving.

This was the worst part of the journey. We decided to walk up on the side of the highway, and, in my infinite wisdom, I forgot just what puts the “high” in highway. Those of you who know me well will know that I have a terrible fear of heights. This did not help.

We walked slowly up the highway, separated from the street by only a thigh-high concrete structure, as the highway grew steeper and steeper. I started to get a little worried, but after a fairly short time, the concrete was topped by a tall fence, and my worries went away. We walked many blocks like this, when suddenly, out of nowhere, the fence just stopped short. And the shoulder started getting thinner and thinner. The ground was littered with crap and sewer grates, while cars drove much much too close for comfort. Tripping and falling over the side was the only thing on my mind as I stared at the ground straight ahead and focused all my energies on maintaining my balance, lightly touching the concrete guard for support. Every time a car came too close, I would shudder and return to my intense focus. Brandi walked behind me, cool as a cucumber, checking CNN on her cell phone. This was when we found out the power had begun to come back on. Up ahead of us, a man in a suit and tie was trying to hitch a ride down the highway, and he succeeded. I was too focused to consider such an option. I walked for maybe five hundred miles or so in that state, and we got off at the very next exit on 72nd St.

We took another break at Riverside Park, and watched the Upper West-Siders walking their dogs and strollers as if this were a day like any other. We spotted a bunch of 20-somethings in the back of a pickup, driven by an older guy who they probably didn’t know. We saw another would-be hitchhiker trying to get up Riverside Drive – he failed.

On the way uptown, we spotted a monument in the 80’s that looked strikingly familiar. I thought about it for a bit…. It was the place where we took our high school senior yearbook picture! [Insert quick trip to the high school yearbook for confirmation, followed by 20 minutes of time-wasting reading high school yearbook messages here.] This monument is basically a set of stairs with two human size tables in front of it, possibly for performing surgery on. Or something.

Kept walking through Riverside Park. Brandi had names for the sections from the kids she used to work with. We passed the “dinosaur park,” which looked really fun, and the “boring park,” which looked really boring. At about 106th St. it occurred to us that it would probably be dark soon. Very very dark. We started walking much faster.

By the time it started getting really dark, we were at about 125th St. and Broadway, where shit was just totally different. There were people EVERYWHERE. Waiting for buses, waiting to cross the streets, just everywhere. We went over to Amsterdam to get a little breathing room.

Cop cars were out, with flares at every intersection to light the way. We noticed a few buildings with lights on. Hmm. People were just hanging out in front of their buildings, playing chess, blaring music from their cars. We passed a guy selling candles whose sales pitch was “Candles! What’s up?! Candles! Hollah!” We passed couples dancing to salsa music on the sidewalk. We passed a bunch of bodegas that were still open, selling vital supplies out their side windows. We passed a restaurant selling roast pork and roast chicken in pans right out front for 3$. The chicken was good.

I finaly got home around 9-ish to an absolute pitch-dark building. I have never seen such darkness – it was brighter with my eyes closed than with them open! With the help of my trusty keychain light, I made it upstairs, made a few calls, devoured my chicken, and plopped into bed. Couldn’t sleep worth shit though.

Hours later, I was woken up by a ticking sound outside my window. So no power, I thought to myself, and now this godawful noise! It’s like a Chinese water torture, dripping slowly onto someone else’s head. I tried to get back to sleep, and then I remembered…the noise is coming from the air conditioner…it’s water dripping onto the top of it…from the air conditioner above…which must therefore be on….

And with that, I sprang out of bed, turned on all the lights, and began my day. No Internet until just a little while ago. No subways. Streets probably too crowded to take buses. But I’ve got my lights, my keyboard, my iTunes, my air conditioner, and my memory of New Yorkers coming out of their shells for just a second and running amok without hurting each other. And I have this event to remind me that the way things are – where we go every morning, what we do, and how we do it – is just the way things are, not the way things have to be.

The directions read as follows:

Duration: 6 minutes (Gather at 7:18; disperse at 7:24.)

The Site: Toys R Us (Broadway at 44th St).

By 7:15, situate yourself on the second floor of Toys R Us, away from the Jurassic Park section.

At 7:18, approach the giant animatronic dinosaur. Fill in all around it. It is like a terrible god to you. Stare at it transfixed.

At 7:20, drop to your knees, still staring at the dinosaur. Whenever it roars, moan and cower behind outstretched hands.

At 7:24, disperse. No one should remain in Toys R Us after 7:27.

KEEP THIS SLIP HIDDEN. NO PHOTOS OR INTERVIEWS BETWEEN 7:15 AND 7:20.

What really happened: At 7:15, people started pouring and gathering around the dinosaur. Suddenly, the whole crowd fell to its knees. The dinosaur fell into roaring, we shrieked and hid behind our hands. The place was PACKED with people. I felt like I was on the subway. The people working at the store were very confused, I think. One of them shouted out, “Is anyone making a purchase?”

When I was kneeling, I just really wanted to get up and leave. I felt like this was a waste of the potential of human beings to come together and create something meaningful, exploiting our predisposition towards new paradigms to create something totally useless. A little too postmodern for my tastes. In addition, I felt bad for the Toys ‘R’ Us people whose store we were clogging up, and whose tourist customers we probably scared the hell out of. But I guess some of them seemed to enjoy it.

Police, or at least extra security, were called, and the mob was given a little bit of help on the way out. There were definitely still people inside at 7:27. But I think there were a lot more people than anyone was expecting. I’m just glad nobody got hurt or arrested or what have you. I mean, it was really crowded!

I ran into some friends from high school and college, and afterwards, a guy who I’d talked to a little while I was waiting at Hamburger Harry’s came up to me with a woman and a camera and wanted to ask me a few questions. It looked like a camcorder and they both had accents, so I thought they were just tourists or something. After I had talked to them, they asked me my full name, and I was like “Uh, what is this for?” We’re from Reuters, they said.

Damn sneaky TV news bastards.

Great pictures at Satan’s Laundromat. Other coverage at Fred’s Journal, Writing My Name In Water, cce blog, glowlab news and You Listen to Me, Mr. Kick-Ass. (She’s got a couple posts on the topic, so that’s the weekly archive.)

The installation failed while extracting some package, probably because of a bad burned CD. When I started up my computer again, I got a big ol circle with a slash through it.

I’d backed up recently, but I didn’t have my entries from today. Etan, being the loyal reader he is, was able to fish them out of his Camino cache for me. Thanks, Etan.

Diskwarrior didn’t even see the drive, so I was none too hopeful. I was NOT looking forward to reripping ALL my CD’s, reinstalling all my applications, reimporting my preferences, and sorting through my file lists to see what I might be missing.

I spent a while reading about Open Firmware, and let me just say that if you think the Unix shell is a throwback, wait until you see the Forth syntax on this shit. Absolute nonsense. Evocative of white lab coats and punch cards. Not at all helpful, but I knew there had to be some way to do it. There was no point during the failed installation attempt during which it could have been erasing my files or even my directory. I knew it all stlil had to be there, and some kind of partition map mumbo-jumbo would get it back.

A quick Google search for “lost partition map” led me to this article. Apparently, this is a known bug in the Yellow Dog installer. Nice one, guys. One full OS X install later, everything was back to normal. Whew! Close call!