Dream diary

So one day our friend hotspurre posted that he was going on a tourism trip to eastern Belarus, where there was (among other things) a medieval church that had a lot of artworks and artifacts from his persona's period and culture. Everybody wished him well.

A few days later, the TV and radio news (and of course the blogosphere) filled with news of a major earthquake in Belarus. Actually, it wasn't all that big -- Richter 6.3 -- but the building standards in the area were so bad that houses and office buildings all over the area were collapsing. Grainy home videos appeared on YouTube of what looked at first like alleys lined with tall, wobbly stacks of cans of cat food, teetering and falling over -- until you realized that they were apartment buildings. Political dissident groups seized the opportunity to try to overthrow the government, and the military seized the opportunity to try to crush political dissident groups. The two were on the move towards one another through collapsing cities. And hotspurre was heading for the exact same place. His friends were worried.

Then I woke up. Yo, hotspurre: don't do anything stupid!

Apple rant: what does "sync" mean?

To me, the word "sync" means "here are two collections of data which should theoretically agree. For each atomic item that differs between them, replace the older version with the newer version. If you're not sure you can do that safely, tell me the differences and ask me what to do."

I'm not sure what it means to Apple, but it apparently does not consistently include copying from the phone to the computer if what's on the phone is newer. That might lead to somebody somewhere using a phone to easily transport information from one computer to another, which might mean one less paying customer for MobileMe.

Apple's iTunes does sometimes "tell me the differences and ask me what to do," but only for calendar events... and even then, my decision apparently determines what goes onto the phone, but not what goes onto the computer. As a result, I have to resolve the exact same difference again next time, and the time after that, until I give up and accept the version that's on the computer, even though the version on the phone is right. (Then I usually open the .ics file in vi and fix it the hard way....)

And why is it impossible to sync a phone with more than one computer? Because, again, that might lead to somebody somewhere using a phone to easily transport information from one computer to another, which might mean one less paying customer for MobileMe.

What does "do not sync" mean? To me, it means "don't modify either of these collections of data." To Apple, it apparently means "delete the collection on the phone," because a phone is just a mirror of (part of) one particular computer, so if you don't want the data on your phone to exactly match data on that computer (which is of course the only one on which you will ever use the "sync" feature), you must not want the data at all.