i think i said this already

but i'm lucky i decided to go into computers. really, in this world, by which i mean the upper-middle-class world of modern western countries, if you don't have computer skills, you're at the mercy of those who do.

for example, i wanted to create a slideshow of photos from my trip. i could use iphoto to do that, or iphoto could "export" it to iweb, or i could have dealt with flickr or picasa or whatever. but none of them did exactly what i wanted. so i used iphoto and two simple regular expressions in textmate, and voilà, i have exactly what i was looking for.

for me, it was a simple matter. but for someone who didn't know regular expressions, it's an entirely intractable problem and they must settle for whatever their Product Of Choice has spoonfed them.

these facts are why I am upset about the direction that Apple is leading the industry. the ipadification of computing removes my ability to do what I want, even though I find that as an old geezer I really don't want to do lots of spare-time programming. but when I want to do it, dammit i want to do it. and i couldn't have done this on an ipad.