Pourhadi Perspective: I’m baacckk

by Dan Pourhadi • 12/29/2005 at 09:00 PM

Macworld’s right around the proverbial corner, and that means I get to put on my fancy reporter hat—the one with the PRESS paper sticking out of the band—and play dress-up. This year, I’ll be covering the event for Macteens, Macsimum News, a MUG newsletter, and maybe even a radio station here in Chicago.

“I’m starting to think you’re spreading yourself thin...” said Chris Saribay, Macteens’ valiant commander-in-chief, after I informed him of my reporterness.

No way. I’m so on top of it.

“Okay,” he responded. “Where’s your writing, sir?”

My column? Oh, it’s, uh...well, you know....

I’m baaaack...

There are some advantages to taking a Bush-vacation-lengthed sabbatical from column-writing.

For one, I have a whole lotta topics to cover. My Pourhadi Perspective OmniOutliner doc is filled with mouth-watering writeables. It’s exciting, really.

“Not to me,” replied the venerated Chris, obviously trying to kill the mood.

Well, it should be exciting.

“You live in a perverted world, Dan Pourhadi.”

Why does everyone say that?

Up, up, and away!

The Music Industry—or, as I like to call it, [censored]—is hell-bent on setting variable pricing for music downloads.

Why? Well, the Mac world’s tape worm, Paul “The media is so anti-Microsoft” Thurrott, explains it this way: “...new songs should cost more than 99 cents, and ... the vast majority of each record company’s catalog should be available for as little as 49 cents a song. Fixed pricing isn’t just potentially illegal, it’s impossible in an open market. And it’s bad for consumers.”

Fine, variable pricing it is.

The [censored] already makes more dough per-song with downloads than they do with CDs. So why the greediness?

Wanna touch my iPod?

If you’re reading this column, I think I can safely assume a few things about you: (1) You’re probably young—a teen, perhaps?—or you recall what it’s like to be young, and (2) you’re a fan of technology—whether you’re a l33t hax0r, a graphics nerd, a network geek, etc.

And while a most of your friends may share your love for electrons, there’s a good chance a few of them respond to technology the same way you respond to American Idol—ie, horrified gasps and extended prayer sessions begging for mercy.

The same could be said about me. I have some friends who are the mental equivalent of a computer science major —“Ah, looks like you got a DNS error; don’t worry, I’ll reset your DHCP settings and make sure TCP/IP is running”—and some that are, uh, not—“What the hell is ‘reboot’? I didn’t know computers had boots!” The latter of which are typically the most common.

Being the most nerdy of my Circle of Friends, I’m obviously the butt of many “poke fun at the computery kid!” jokes. Not that I have a problem with it. They’re funny, after all.

One such joke plays on the social ineptitude of the typical nerd stereotype. My friends would say that I used my nerdyness to attract girls; that my geeketry was obviously my—shall we say—sexiest characteristic.

I imagine this to be the typical scenario:

I approach a cute girl sitting at her computer—how else would it start?—and begin my trademark pickup.

“So,” I say, slowly nodding my head with my devilishly cute smile. “That’s quite a machine you’ve got there. A Dell, Opteron, huh? Yeah”—I continue nodding, lowering and raising my eyebrows—“those are sweet.”

She pauses and angles her head in my direction, a puzzled—yet obviously intrigued—look painting her face.

“I have a Mac,” I continue confidently. “A PowerBook. 1.25 blazin’ gigahertz.

“And...upgraded RAM.”

She bites her lip, my snake-like insidiousness obviously too much for her to handle. I move in the for the kill.

“Wanna go back to my car and”—I pause, half a smile, slowly licking my lips—“touch my iPod?”

I wake up twenty minutes later on the floor with a blasting headache, surrounded by a throng of people asking if I’m OK or if I need to see a doctor.

Seriously, though

The above piece is obviously just meant for entertainment, and doesn’t reflect my true social nature at all.

In fact, I’m dealing with a problem right now where I’m actually trying to avoid a girl who seems to have an unhealthy—though totally understandable—obsession with me.

“Why don’t you write about that in your column?” asked my friend Tim when I told him of my troubles.

Write about what?

“How to get girls off your back,” he replied.

No, no. I can’t do that. That’s not what this column’s for.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he agreed. “Mac teens don’t have too many problems with that.”

Ouch.