Kunstler header with whimsical pictures to illustrate Jim's themes--post peak oil adjustments: a horse drawn car, cartoon landscapes: a car stuck in the earth at Cadillac Ranch, and some 19th century radiomen discussing the long emergency. Jim's mug is over a gray and foreboding arcing freeway overpass, the horizon is cloudy. A vintage for sale sign at Levittown is borrowed to pitch Jim's books.

Eyesore of the Month linkWhat's New: Updated Aug 18, 2008

Eyesore of the Month -- August 2008

New Paintings - Gallery Five New Aug 11

NY Times Freakonomics Blog on the Future of Suburbia (featuring JHK)
Check out the comments to see how clueless Times readers are New

"Scenes From "World made by hand"

a Riff on 'localism' for metropolis magazine

The KunstlerKast -- New Weekly Podcast
Riffing With Host Duncan Crary
Updated Thursdays

Interview with the excellent Megan Sullivan of the Bookdwarf blog

Excellent Essay by Frank Kaminski on a batch of post-oil novels including World Made By Hand  

KUNSTLER'S APPEARANCE ON 'THE COLBERT REPORT'

Interview with Grist Magazine New July 1

Interview with the University Bookman New July 1

World Made By Hand Website -- Now Up and Running
(Includes entertaining video)

The Daily Grunt
~ If I have anything to say

August 12, 2008:

Steve Jobs Meets Franz Kafka
Apple's MobileMe Fiasco

     The hard drive on my MacBook (laptop) died last week and Apple replaced it in two days on warranty. So far, so good. The trouble really started with Apple's iDisk program. idisc is a service Apple offers for a couple of hundred bucks a year. It gives you some storage space on a remote server so you can send files 'out there' where you can retrieve them when you are on-the-road. For instance, if I'm working on a chapter, I can upload it to idisc and and then work on it away from home. It's also good "insurance" against loss-of-files in case your house burns down. Finally, idisk also offered an additional service of sychnchronizing things like address books and web bookmarks between one's desktop and laptop computers... pretty handy.
     Now, wouldn't you know it, Apple has really screwed up. Some months back, they decided to rename idisk "MobileMe," and reconfigure it. The transition has been a fiasco. It has caused me huge headaches this week, such as the loss of my email account (through a botched synchronization).
     But here's the really weird part: Apple's technical support has been excellent in the past. They have live human beings (here in the USA) available by phone and the wait is rarely longer than ten minutes. Except they have decided not to offer phone support for MobileMe / idisk. In other words, the most screwed-up part of their system is the one thing they don't offer phone support on. Instead, they make you go on an internet chat line, which is extremely cumbersome and ineffective. What I want to know: if you can pay somebody to sit in front of a keyboard, why can't you put a phone headset on him or her?
     Someone please call Steve Jobs and ask him to get his head out of his ass on this one. The one thing you don't offer phone support for is the service that we pay $200 a year extra for -- ???
     If Apple stumbles, this country is really lost.


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