The Big One
The day the question came, I flubbed the answer. I had predicted that the question would soon be asked, made a mental note to figure out how to answer it, discussed briefly my prediction with my wife (who agreed on the likelihood), and yet still: when the question was asked, I fumbled for an answer.
The questioner: my daughter, age 2.5. The question: “What is god?”
***
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of watching my daughter learn about Jewish prayer and custom in children’s services. She’s an intelligent child, the kind who actively works to knit together bits of accumulated information. Questions may come days or weeks after a particular experience, when something else jogs the memory of the prior event and she asks how or whether those different things are connected. She will also often assert the connection—correctly or not, but with that self-assurance children possess—when it seems evident to her at the moment.
More recently, my daughter has been learning the lyrics to the song “Rise and Shine,” an old standard in the compendium of mildly religious children’s tunes. It was with reference to the song’s repeating chorus of “Rise and shine / And give God the glory, glory” that I observed we would likely soon be asked about god. After all, she’s been singing this song for a couple of weeks, nonstop (or so it seems); and “god” is hard to miss in that repeating refrain. While we have been able to explain the references to Noah—the flood, the ark, the two-by-two animals, the dry land—as a story coming from the Torah, it’s more difficult to answer a question about god that way. Yes, god is in the Torah, but also of it.
***
There is definitely a part of me that finds this situation amusing, no doubt because part of me also finds it personally challenging. I have spent a good portion of time over the years asking the same question, and working towards answers that feel true, intellectually and spiritually. The fact that we are raising our children in a modern, egalitarian, Conservative Jewish environment makes answering the question no easier, because those three modifiers—modern, egalitarian, Conservative—do not, for me, readily solve this riddle. I have written a number of times about aspects of Jewish “values” (e.g. here, here, here, and here), but not a lot about god. It is difficult enough to express my views to myself; perhaps the best I can say here is that I’m a materialist (in the philosophical sense) with a deeply rooted spiritual side. And despite that description, I still find myself not much closer to a comfortable answer—and by and large, I’m comfortable with that.
The question was asked over dinner, at which were also present a Reform rabbinical school drop-out, and a woman whose views on the subject of god and religion (such as I understand them) have always struck me as the very essence of unexplored contradiction. The immediate answers from those assembled ranged from a complete demurral to “god is a concept.” Thank you, Bauer-Marx-Nietzsche-Lennon! Score one for the toddler. For the immediate follow-up question my daughter asked—boy or girl?—we fared no better. One person answered “Both!”, while another assuredly said “Girl!” The child found none of these satisfying, and who can blame her. In the confusion created over so many different answers, I think she took a hint and, at that point, decided to leave it alone.
I don’t expect this to be the end. Indeed, I expect the question to arise again in short order. I’m hoping that next time, I will be more prepared. But I think it’s difficult to answer such a question for a 2.5 year old in a way that accommodates the range of intellectual and spiritual growth that I would like to have happen naturally. What can I say? “Just wait and see; you will arrive at your own answer(s) when you’re old enough”?
Perhaps.
Labels: children, Judaism, philosophy, religion
Not a Granny Smith
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to upgrade my MacBook to Apple’s latest operating system, nicknamed
Snow Leopard. Theoretically, this should have been as easy as popping in the disc and clicking a bunch of “Continue” buttons. In practice, that was not true at all. The installation software said that it could not proceed because my hard drive wasn’t the disc used to boot up the computer. Hunh? Web research ensued, and I
came to the conclusion that the only solution involved erasing and repartitioning my hard drive, and then installing Snow Leopard. That sounded drastic; I put Snow Leopard away.
A few days later, I called Apple support, to try to resolve this. The guy on the other end of the line was patient and helpful, and walked me through a series of tests, before coming to the conclusion that, yes, the hard drive needed to be repartitioned. Why? He didn’t know, but he acknowledged that I was clearly not the first person to face the issue. He assured me that the
Time Machine backup I had made prior to the call would work as promised, and he led me through the process.
This has a happy ending: it took about a half-hour to reinstall the original Leopard operating system, another 90 minutes to restore everything from the back-up, and then another 45 minutes or so to add Snow Leopard. Time Machine restored my computer perfectly—everything, down to each tweak, setting, and file. It was a reminder of the genius nature of that system, and credit to Apple for figuring it out: a back-up system that allows both a system-wide restoration and a file-by-file exploration, under one built-in software umbrella. And now my machine runs faster, courtesy of Snow Leopard.
***
Earlier today, I went in to the Apple story to have them check out my iPhone. A couple weeks ago, the little switch that controls the ringer just snapped off. I’ve been able, with the aid of finger nails, to flick the stub of the switch around when desperately necessary but it is a drag.
The “geniuses” in Apple’s
Upper West Side store were terrific. My phone is in great shape, and it was clear that this was both a small problem—and not a reflection of serious abuse. Plus, the phone is covered under Apple’s extended warranty program.
Or so I thought. I bought the extended warranty after I bought the phone, but the salesman at the Apple store told me that just by purchasing it, the warranty was in effect. Not so: I needed to activate it, and I hadn’t done that. Today, Apple took care of that for me—it helped that I had the receipt, showing I’d purchased it last February—and then, when finished, replaced the phone. No more questions asked. Then they let me sit there while I connected the new iPhone to my laptop and “restored” the settings from the old phone to the new one, courtesy of another smart Apple back-up tool.
Which also worked more or less flawlessly. (The less: I had to manually put my music, etc., back on the phone. A very slight inconvenience in the overall process.) It took about two hours to do the full restore, but it meant that two hours later I had my iPhone back, with all my apps, settings, old text messages...
***
I finally broke up with
Microsoft a little more than a year ago, and thus far, Apple has not let me down. In fact, my household has converted, my extended family has converted, and my office may convert, too. Still—despite reaffirming the high quality of Apple’s products, software, and services—these two experiences highlight the frustrating nature of computers and personal technology when something goes wrong. And invariably, something will go wrong at some point.
My experiences are not unique, but that’s the point. I remain concerned that we rely too much on these machines to (help us) manage our lives, without giving due attention to the weaknesses of the systems, or of ourselves. One lesson in all this is, clearly, back-up regularly. Another is buy Apple: the products and services are better value for the money. The biggest lesson of all may be the one we will never learn: to start relying on less fragile systems, before our collective memory needs to be erased and repartitioned, with little hope of a full, restorable back-up available.
Labels: computers, digital life, memory, software
Sensible Reading
I appreciate effective combinations of quality products and good service. While it’s often more entertaining to excoriate companies that fall down on one front or another, the folks doing good work deserve recognition too—so here’s a short item of support for the creators of the my6sense app for the iPhone / iPod Touch.
I first learned about the my6sense app through a post on Mashable back in August. They gave it a rave review for its combination of features: feed reader; information sharer; and a feature called “Digital Intuition,” that over time learns your tastes and suggests other reading material based on those tastes. For me, the initial draw was the feed reader component. I have discovered, though, that the “Digital Intuition” feature works quite well: having added my own feeds, and spent time reading different items (or not), the app has learned some of my interests, and the main feed page now provides a range of different, interesting items to look at, in addition to the feeds I added myself.
Adding or importing feeds in my6sense is easy, as is creating folders to combine multiple feeds into one reading page, so users can cluster technology items together, arts items together, etc. The top 20 items loaded are available offline, which is perfect for paging through on a subway ride where there’s no internet access.
BUT, the thing that really got me committed to continued usage was the response I received from the company when I did have a problem. Early on, two feeds that I tried to add would not go through. It was odd; everything worked fine except for these two specific, unrelated blogs . I got a range of error messages, some telling me that the items were there already, others just a slightly-too-cutesy “Oh noes!” Oh, noes indeed. On the verge of giving up—the app was free, after all, so I wouldn’t lose much—I submitted feedback through the app’s own feedback tool. That generated a reply within a day, with a person who was terrific on follow-through. She asked for more detail about the problem, and proposed a few different solutions; none worked. She was apologetic and, when she said that the developers were looking into the issue, I believed her. And, indeed, a subsequent update to the app fixed my issues.
At this point, there are a few small tweaks I’d like to see my6sense make, to improve the usability. One is to add side-to-side page scrolling, as in the Wall Street Journal’s app; right now, my6sense makes a reader go back to the top of the screen to change items. Another is just a little more flexibility in controlling the font size. A better automatic information category for the arts would be nice, beyond the celebrity-driven items that are built in. And the real stretch nice-to-have would be a “save” or bookmark feature, to keep track of a few things one may want to remember for later.
So there you have it. Great product, great price, and great service: if you’re looking for a feed reader and information aggregator, check out my6sense. Labels: computers, digital life, software
1 in 9 Million
If all you read was the news coverage of AT&T’s wireless services, particularly since the launch of the iPhone, the stories you’d be most likely to see would be along the lines of the big New York Times piece from 3 September, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” or an item from All Things Digital about the launch of multi-media messaging ability for the iPhone. The tone of these stories, for as long as I can remember, is one of complaint and frustration among the many millions of AT&T customers, including about 9 million iPhone owners.
The thing is: I find it bizarre, and completely counter to my own experience.
I have been an AT&T customer since 1996, with vague but fond memories of the acquisition of my first phone, a seemingly brick-sized Nokia that worked so well it made me a committed Nokia user, until I got my iPhone a dozen years later. Not only did the phone work well: so did the service to which it was tied. It’s precisely because of the quality combination of the two that I have remained an AT&T wireless customer ever since.
While I spend most of my time in New York City, I have also spent substantial time away from here, from very rural parts of New England to middle-of-nowhere spots in Texas between Houston and Austin, to a range of other places around the country. Rare are the times I have found myself without service. More common has been finding myself with better service than Verizon or (more dramatically) Sprint customers.
The quality of my service or experience hasn’t changed since acquiring my iPhone, either. Sure, periodically I get calls that don’t go through; but hardly so frequently as to be a meaningful factor in my general experience, and no worse than ever or, as far as I can tell, worse than friends with other phones on other services. Sure, I have moments where the downloading of my e-mail seems to take forever; but it usually turns out that some idiot has sent me 10MB of photos, and the problem is either not AT&T’s or, frankly, not so unrealistic. The broad problems described by people in the Times and the many other articles one can find with a quick search have never been my experience. At all.
If anything, I continue to find the iPhone an amazing tool (and toy), something out of the science fiction or comic books I read as a kid—and nearly the real-world equivalent of the hand-held communicators and analyzers of Star Trek. Maybe I’m just old enough that, never having expected such technology to be realized during my lifetime, I’m grateful for how well it works, even with its flaws and failings. Few technologies are perfect, and the iPhone—as a unit, and as a tool to access the AT&T service—seems damn good to me.
I spend a lot of time using computers of varying kinds. My threshold for poor products and services is both high enough that I stuck it out with Dell and Microsoft longer than I might have, but also low enough that newly adopted tools that just don’t work well are traded out or discarded rapidly.
The iPhone and AT&T are not in that category. Let’s just hope that by writing this I’m not jinxing it. Labels: computers, digital life
Radio Reade
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