Of iPods and alphabets

About a week and a half ago I received an iPod as an early Christmas present from my wife.

It arrived while I was frantically trying to complete the revisions for a journal article, so it sat in the shipping box for several days, because I knew I’d be too tempted to play with it if I opened it up.

You can imagine my anticipation when I was finally free to open it up. I looked forward to plugging it into my eMac and having it download all my music and some photos. In just a short while, I’d be ready to go…

Instead, the updating of my iPod froze on track 71 (out of over 2,000 in iTunes) and wouldn’t download anymore, nor could I quit (even with “Force quit”) iTunes. After a long wait on the telephone, I finally got on the line with someone at Apple tech support, who had me download iTunes and the iPod software (I’m not sure what he thought might have been wrong with the copies on the CD that came with the iPod). He also had me delete track 71, which he speculated was corrupted. He declined to stay on the line to make sure this fix worked.

It didn’t. After getting to song 95, it froze again. So I had to wait a long time again, after which the woman who helped me had me do the same things again, plus reset the iPod to its factory settings and replace my iTunes library files. This time I got to song 117 before it froze. And of course I lost all of my Playlists by replacing the library files.

I love Apple. I’ve been a customer since I got an Apple II+ in the very early 80s (and how cool was I when I got an 80-column card and could do lower-case letters!). But truly this was dispiriting. After spending almost three hours trying to get the iPod to do the most basic thing, I nearly shipped it right back to Apple, figuring I’d just save some money and get a cheaper, less elegant MP3 player.

After going to bed angry and sad, I decided to try out the iPod with my office computer. This worked, though it took several hours to download all of my music. I’ve been enjoying the iPod since then, though the bitterness of my first day has tarnished the experience considerably.

Today I discovered that I can’t plug the iPod into my home computer and add songs to it that I have here but not at work. The iPod only works with one computer, so I must either leave it as is or delete everything on it and have it sync with my home computer instead of my office computer. This is truly inconvenient, as I have slightly different iTunes libraries in the two places, and would like all the songs on my iPod. And this is all presumably done for copyright protection purposes. Such reductions of functionality make me want to go out and download some music illegally!

But actually what I wanted to write about was the following…

As I sat on hold on the phone, I knew that the tech support person would ask for my iPod’s serial number, and I was moved to reflect on how I should read it out. No matter how clearly one pronounces the letters, there is always potential confusion between letters such as “B” and “D.” Normally, I use simply throw out things like “B like Baby” on an ad hoc basis, with whatever pops into my mind. Some, such as “V like Victor,” are part of my mental default, since there’s a “V” in my wife’s name, and people on phones always hear “Z.” But for most other letters, I never have any idea what I’ll say.

So I thought it would really be nice to acquaint myself with a standard set of words for the different letters. I have noticed that airline operators, when they read one’s confirmation number over the phone, seem to use a specific set of words for each letter, but not the old one I associated with the military: “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie,” etc.

So while I was on hold I explored the problem, Googling “A like Apple” (way too many irrelevant hits), “Alpha Bravo Charlie,” and so on. I never did manage to find the one the airline operators use, but I did find some useful information:

The “Alpha Bravo Charlie…” version is from NATO (though something must have surely existed for the more than half a century between the invention of telecommunications and the founding of NATO). More importantly, I discovered what I was looking for was called a phonetic alphabet. I don’t know why I never knew that before. Had I known this to begin with, I could have found the fine Wikipedia entry on the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Fresh with my new knowledge, I read out my iPod’s serial number using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Sadly, though it helped me (I didn’t have to wonder what would pop into my head), it didn’t help the man on the other end of the line. Perhaps this was because, in my flush of excitement, I simply read out the phonetic alphabet words (instead of “[Letter] like [Word]”), or perhaps the words were a little too peculiar for him, since I don’t think many people use this version in daily life. Or maybe it started him thinking about some war movie he’d seen at some point, causing him to space out momentarily.

Still, it was kind of satisfying to say 3-7-Tango-6-1-9-Sierra-Romeo-5 [actual serial number changed to protect my iPod’s identity]. Note: I was not brave enough to pronounce the number 9 as “niner,” which just seemed far too geeky.

Here is the NATO phonetic alphabet, along with a typical police phonetic alphabet (with variations):

NATO Police

Alpha Apple
Bravo Boy
Charlie Charles
Delta David
Echo Edward
Foxtrot Fox
Golf Gary
Hotel Harry
India Indigo
Juliet John
Kilo Kevin
Lima Lincoln
Mike Mary
November Nancy
Oscar Ocean
Papa Paul
Quebec Queen
Romeo Robert
Sierra Sam
Tango Tom
Uniform Union
Victor
Whiskey William
X-ray
Yankee Yellow
Zulu Zebra

Update: Once I had written this entry, I discovered an excellent webpage (intriguingly, the page is on a gay military S&M site) that includes US and UK antecedents to the 1955 NATO phonetic alphabet, as well as links to a fantastic collection of other phonetic alphabets for various languages:

http://www.milism.net/abc.htm

I still don’t know what airline ticket-sellers use, so I’ll have to try out the NATO phonetic alphabet on them next time I’m buying a plane ticket on the phone.

Manifesto

Occasionally over the last few weeks I have lain in bed, haunted by the notion that this blog will remain with a single opening entry. For some reason, this seems deeply embarrassing to me. It also, of course, totally defeats its purpose, which is to allow me to disseminate to my far-flung friends, with whom I am in lamentably poor contact (or, in some cases, absolutely no contact whatsoever), some of the news of my life.

So here I go with another entry, and I’ll see if I can wring out of myself at least something every week. Surely my life has at least one entertaining or interesting thing to offer every week, and a free half hour to write about it.

For a first proper entry, here is my modest personal manifesto/ explanation of blog name:

I had hoped to call this blog “eutopia,” or “good place.” The title of Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia deliberately blurred the ideas of “no place” and “good place.” Many utopian scholars now refer to depictions of good no-places as “eutopias,” distinguished from dystopias, anti-utopias, and utopian satires. Alas, the “eutopia” name was already taken—I still have to check out this site.

Instead, I chose “Utopian Socialist” as an appropriate title capturing my political orientation. At various times in my life, I have self-identified as an anarchist, Social Democrat, left-wing socialist, or Green. I have little interest in a doctrinaire program, and find aspects of all of the aforementioned ideologies useful. My friend P___ suggested “utopian socialist” as a political identifier some years ago, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more sense it makes.

What I value chiefly about the label is that it emphasizes two central components of my political philosophy:

1. A neo-Rousseauian faith in the human capacity for goodness. I use the neo because I do not share Rousseau’s unvarnished believe in a natural goodness corrupted by society. And while I don’t believe in the most extreme blank-slatism, I do think that much of what humans become is socially constructed. Ultimately, most utopian visions (though there is certainly no unanimity here) underscore that a well-constructed society reinforces (with a minimum of coercion) the social and altruistic tendencies of humans while discouraging anti-social and selfish qualities. Thus, while humans may not be innately good, or blank slates on which society can write anything at all, they are far from the egoistic actors of “rational choice” theory or imbued with the sinful wickedness imagined in Christianity’s origin myth.

2. A belief that societies can be changed through human will in ways that affect how people behave. I reject the Marxist teleology of materialism, in the sense that economic development follows an inevitable path, and that the superstructure of human society and culture essentially mirrors the base of the economic mode of production. Of course, even Marx himself did not always seem to subscribe to such a crude version of Marxism. Nor do I deny the important interrelations between economic conditions and social and cultural systems, as discussed usefully by Gramsci and others. Nevertheless, I fear that much Marxist thought can be paralyzing in its sense of how change can be achieved.

I also reject the teleology of liberalism—that progress occurs inevitably through the magic of capitalist competition and so-called “free markets.” I believe that while competition certainly is capable of breeding innovation, this is hardly inevitable, and in any case, there is no assurance that technical innovation will lead to a better quality of life for humanity. I also reject the related liberal Panglossianism—that is, the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds—exemplified most famously by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Change occurs, I believe, through conscious and determined human agency. The abolition of slavery, the forty-hour workweek, women’s suffrage, and the Social Democratic guarantee of universal health care (in the rest of the industrialized world) were all won (and can all be lost) through human struggle. And new standards of decency, in the case of gay rights, environmental protection, economic freedom for workers, for instance, will only come from determined action. Parenthetically, I would also insist that most of the gains we celebrate today were won by the political left over the last two hundred years (see Geoff Eley’s elaboration of this argument in Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000). Only by forcing liberalism to expand its central tenets to ever-wider portions of the human populace have we achieved what we have now.

For all of these reasons, and others too numerous to list at this point, I am a utopian socialist.

Fiat lux!

In the beginning was the word . . .

I do not have time to be what I would consider a "genuine" blogger, and have no particular interest in producing words to be read by other than my friends. There are already so many good political, social, and cultural blogs out there.

At the urging of my friend C___, I have nevertheless decided to create a blog: for the purpose of maintaining contact with my friends, posting pictures, and such sundry acts.

Here it is.

P.S. And here's my friend C___: