Random bullets of Friday

Until I can muster the brainpower for a post on Apple's education initiative, here are some random bullets.

• Blogspeak is already serving as a placeholder in what I'm writing. I just reread a section in which I said that a character "was in dire need of an ethics makeover," which, while true, doesn't exactly pass for scholarly prose these days--or does it?
• My resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard may end at our mutual fondness for Earl Grey tea, but I wish I had one power that he had: the one where you say "make it so" and some minion does it. I'm thinking especially of scheduling meetings, which even with online scheduling software where people put in their preferences is a process with far too many to-and-fro messages and far too much wasted mental energy. This includes the gentle reminders to those who refuse to put in their schedules but greet every announcement of a meeting with "I can't meet at that time!" If I were Jean-Luc, I would say "Schedule a meeting. Send the documents. Book the room. Make it so." and it would be done. Actually, I would just say "Schedule the meeting. Make it so" and the minion would intuit the rest, instead of my wasting two entire writing days on scheduling and meetings this week.
  
• Speaking of Apple, I recently joined the Cult of Steve after yet another Sony computer's hard drive bit the dust one year two years after purchase, apparently taking some programs with it. It would warn me that I ought to back things up to the external hard drive, since the hard drive was failing, and, when I tried, gave an error message equivalent to "Nuh-uh, can't back this up. Fail!" With Dropbox, I still have almost all of my documents, but the lost email files would sure be nice to have. On the plus side, I'm still using the speakers and subwoofer from a computer I bought 12 years and 3 computers ago, which work with Steve's creation just fine.
• In addition to my slow learner status re: the short life of planned-obsolescence Sony products and my vow never to buy another one, I had been introduced to the Cult of Steve by gateway drugs such as the iPad and iPhone. Now it seems normal to have to hunt for files and be frustrated (but less so every day) by the inscrutable workings of a machine run by Powerful Beings who purport to know better than I do where my pictures ought to be hidden. (I'm allowed to tag them; I just can't find them.) It's good training for dealing with bureaucracies, anyway.