Dear Apple Com­puter Inc,

My name is Patrick McNally and I hate your com­pany as well as your com­put­ers. Every piece of soft­ware you guys cre­ate is bloated, over­priced, and feels more like the fisher price ver­sion of a pro­gram as opposed to the real thing. iTunes has ruined the music indus­try by mak­ing it okay to pay for music, while we all know that pirat­ing and free music was the clear objec­tive in the war against record com­pa­nies. Your “Get a Mac” com­mer­cials spew lies  about the per­for­mance and qual­ity of your own machines, while they slan­der the name of your rival Microsoft. Yet, the sec­ond Microsoft makes com­mer­cials that are vaguely anti mac, you threaten them with a law­suit. Finally, your iPod touch and the iPhone are the biggest ripoffs I have ever wit­nessed in my life. The fact that peo­ple are will­ing to camp out­side for days just to spend money on  a stu­p­idass phone that has a touch­screen, truly shows how pathetic the Amer­i­can con­sumer really is.

Now Apple, I know you are a com­pany, and that company’s need to make money. So I would gladly cast off all of those faults men­tioned above if you could do just one thing for me, and that is to make a decent com­puter! What do I get instead? I get an over­priced entry level mac mini, with specs that should have been included years ago.  An iMac that looks retarded and can’t be upgraded since a freak­ing screen is built into the damn com­puter. Finally, there’s the Mac Pro which starts at 2500 bucks and only comes with 3GB of freak­ing RAM. If you’re mak­ing some­one shell out that much for a  com­puter it bet­ter have atleast 6GB of RAM you cheap bas­tards. Oh and let’s talk about the advan­tages of all your machines. Oh wait there are none. Your com­put­ers can’t 1) Be upgraded 2) Be eas­ily repaired at home 3) Come at an afford­able price 4) Have specs that are up to date.  Your oper­at­ing sys­tem OS X (which is a stu­pid ass name espe­cially when you pair it with some ran­dom freak­ing cats) sucks too. Why the hell is it that when I close out a win­dow for a pro­gram, it’s still run­ning? Why is click and drag the pre­ferred method of doing EVERYTHING as opposed to copy and paste,? Why does that rain­bow pin wheel thing always mean death to your com­put­ers espe­cially when you claim that they don’t crash any more? Why do you rec­om­mend that OS X (which is still a stu­pid name) have an antivirus pro­gram installed, even though you clearly state in your com­mer­cials that Macs don’t get viruses? Why is it that Final Cut Pro crashes on me at ran­dom times, when your com­put­ers are sup­posed to be rock solid as far as sta­bil­ity is con­cerned? Why do ran­dom video clips dis­ap­pear when I edit on Final Cut Pro, only to have them reap­pear after I restart the pro­gram? Why can’t I used my damn music in iTunes for your video edit­ing soft­ware? Oh wait I have an answer to this, you sold out to the record com­pa­nies with your DRM’s you sluts!

Yet, despite all you have done Apple, I need you. You see, Final Cut Pro is the indus­try stan­dard for video edit­ing. As an aspir­ing film maker myself, I must use your soft­ware and your machines in order to become a well acquainted film edi­tor. So you can imag­ine my cha­grin when it dawned on me that I must pur­chase at least one of your com­put­ers in order to have Final Cut Pro. Of course, for you guys it would be a slam dunk, you had me, a guy who absolutely hated your machines and com­pany. Con­vert­ing over to you because of the one decent soft­ware offer­ing you have, Final Cut Pro. How­ever, as always you guys dropped the ball.

I am  young, about to enter my senior year of High School. I worked my balls off all sum­mer coach­ing, and work­ing for my par­ents to have some iota of an expend­able income. After all my work, I had a bud­get of $1200, a ridicu­lous amount of money to spend on a com­puter, yet you guys some how screwed me over. Your desk­tops where imme­di­ately out of the ques­tion, edit­ing a movie on inte­grated graph­ics with a mac mini seemed like a stu­pid idea. Your entry level iMac wasn’t all that appeal­ing either. See­ing as how an entry level Mac Pro was dou­ble my bud­get, I didn’t dare con­sider one of those. Real­iz­ing that I would be going to col­lege soon, I turned towards your other forte, laptops.

The base level Mac­Book Pro seemed like a great buy for me. Sure it didn’t have the specs of a MacPro, but I was con­fi­dent that it could deliver the video edit­ing expe­ri­ence that I was look­ing for. But there was just one prob­lem, the stu­pid thing was only thir­teen inches. I am a six foot tall, broad shoul­dered swim­mer, with mas­sive piano play­ing hands. If you think I was going to edit movies on a weak sauce thir­teen inch  lap­top, than you are sourly mis­taken. So I fig­ured I would go up a size, and  what the fuck? Your fif­teen inch lap­top costs $1,700. Spec wise, it isn’t even THAT much bet­ter than your 13 inch Mac­Book Pro, it’s just two inches larger.  Then there’s the fif­teen inch model with two video cards, pretty much the per­fect lap­top for my video edit­ing needs, and how much does that shit cost? $2000, for that price I could build two video edit­ing PCs with specs twice as fast as all your lap­tops, and I could still have $400 left over to buy  pro­fes­sional PC based edit­ing software.

Frus­trated by the options you were giv­ing me, I sim­ply had to step back and quit. You had your chance Apple, you really did, and your greedy prices, and hor­ri­ble sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tions ruined it.

With much regret,

Patrick McNally

After spend­ing a few years on the inter­net there’s a few things  one learns. First off, the inter­net was invented for Porn. Any girl who is not in a porn and claims to be a girl is really a guy. Any­body who claims to be a child is really the FBI. Teenage girls on Myspace are most likely Chris Hansen alts.  There’s Rule #34 which states  “if it exists there’s porn of it, no excep­tions”. Finally, you don’t threaten 4Chan. Being one of the largest providers of inter­net ser­vice in the nation, one would think that AT&T would know these rules bet­ter than any­one. How­ever, on Sun­day night AT&T decided to block access to one of 4Chan’s most infa­mous boards /b/.

To sum up my thoughts on the mat­ter I think AT&T is screwed. 4Chan has been known for going toe to toe with child preda­tors, Sci­en­tol­ogy, twelve year old kids on the inter­net, and basi­cally every­thing in between. While a mas­sive cor­po­ra­tion that con­trols the inter­net cer­tainly isn’t in their list of past oppo­nents, 4Chan is well versed in wag­ing war.  What makes them so effec­tive is the fact that they are incred­i­bly influ­en­tial on the inter­net, have access to all kinds of infor­ma­tion, and they can attack in anonymity and with great num­bers. Basi­cally think of 4Chan as a Hydra for every one head that you cut off, two return to take its place. Now 4Chan’s attack so far has been a bit more con­ven­tional in com­par­i­son to their past wars. In the past 4Chan has been known for launch­ing mas­sive attacks on inter­net servers in order to bring them down, tying up phone lines with dozens of threat­en­ing calls, deliv­er­ing thou­sands of piz­zas to a person’s home, send­ing mil­lions of erro­neous faxes to waste a company’s paper sup­plies,  and of course find­ing and releas­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion about vice pres­i­den­tial candidates.

This time, 4Chan is solic­it­ing their sit­u­a­tion to hun­dreds of  news web­sites, and places sym­pa­thetic to 4Chan. They are call­ing and email­ing AT&T con­stantly to com­plain about hav­ing their web­site blocked. Many 4Chan mem­bers who have AT&T ser­vice are can­cel­ing it. Finally, 4Chan is threat­en­ing to release per­sonal infor­ma­tion about exec­u­tives of the com­pany.  While I am sure some more “inter­est­ing” attacks are being devised and will be car­ried out in the next few days, this is a sur­pris­ingly con­ser­v­a­tive approach for 4Chan. I truly don’t think this ban will last very long. First off, AT&T is basi­cally going against our con­sti­tu­tional rights by cen­sor­ing 4Chan. While some may argue that this cen­sor­ship is jus­ti­fied, the fact of the mat­ter is, we’re not in fuck­ing China, and we Amer­i­cans don’t like our rights being taken away. So not only is AT&T going against both the hyper patri­otic lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives who like to accen­tu­ate the rights of Amer­i­cans, but AT&T is also going to have to deal with all of 4Chan’s attacks. See­ing as how I just found the AT&T CEO’s con­tact infor­ma­tion, with phone num­bers lead­ing directly to his sec­re­tary, and even his office phone, I doubt AT&T is going to  be able to just brush this aside with a few generic PR statements.

Now as a sub­scriber of AT&T’s inter­net ser­vice I am kind of pissed off about this.  I don’t nec­es­sar­ily visit 4Chan,  so this doesn’t directly affect me all that much. How­ever, I hate evil cor­po­ra­tions, and the fact that this multi bil­lion dol­lar com­pany is now decid­ing what web­sites I can and can’t view out of con­ve­nience to them and their infra­struc­ture pisses me off.  So screw you AT&T, Via­com, Warner Broth­ers Music Group, and any other cor­po­ra­tion that thinks they own the inter­net. I will side with the web­site that is influ­en­tial enough to make Oprah say “Over 9,000 Penises” thank you very much.

Aside from Asians in my gym’s swim­ming pool, celebri­ties being atten­tion whores even after they die, women, the gross lack of Cont Choc­ula in months that aren’t Octo­ber, and of course  “The Man”, the two other enti­ties I hate on this earth are Jews and the city of Irvine. Need­less to say, one could imag­ine my cha­grin when the loca­tion of my swim team’s lat­est meet was at a Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter in god­damn Irvine Cal­i­for­nia. Of course, being an opti­mist I decided to enter the expe­ri­ence with an open mind, and a pos­i­tive atti­tude, and as to be expected, the Jews and Irvine did not deliver.

For any­one who hasn’t dri­ven around the God for­saken city of Irvine, the place sucks. It is crawl­ing with Asians, which isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, until you real­ize that Asians can’t drive, and once you real­ize that then you want to punch your­self in the balls for even think­ing of dri­ving through Irvine. Being the safest city in the freak­ing world, the Irvine police depart­ment has noth­ing bet­ter to do aside from try­ing to write up tick­ets for peo­ple who are using their parks to exer­cise at night (in which case at least four cop cars will show up at the scene to “inves­ti­gate”). Finally, the roads are designed to favor beauty as opposed to effi­ciency,  and thus one wrong turn and you will be severely pun­ished by hav­ing to drive down the road for five miles before find­ing a place to make a god­damn U-Turn.  With all that in mind, I think one can envi­sion how much of a painful ride it was cruis­ing through Irvine at 4:30 in the evening, upon the twi­light of rush hour traffic.

Upon finally find­ing the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter, I was fairly impressed. The place was clean, ele­gant, Nazi-free, and it had it’s own police force. To sim­ply put it, the Jews in Irvine spent their Jew gold, and they spent it well. How­ever, being the Jews that the Jews are, upon park­ing and walk­ing towards the entrance of the cen­ter the Jew secu­rity guard stopped me and asked me to move my car.  As a coach, and an Amer­i­can, I was fairly dis­traught as to why I had to move my car, espe­cially since I parked in a spot that did not have any par­tic­u­lar mark­ings which for­bade me from doing so. The guard kindly explained that the park­ing imme­di­ately in front of the cen­ter was for Jews only and that I would have to move my car to the non-Jew park­ing lot just across the street. I argued with the guard briefly, offer­ing to show my cir­cum­ci­sion to prove that I was also part of the covenant, but he would have noth­ing of it.

I moved my car, and upon return­ing the guard thanked me for my coöper­a­tion. I then entered the cen­ter and was kindly directed by the hot Jew recep­tion­ist as to where the swim meet was. For being Jews, the Jews at the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter, where actu­ally quite kind and help­ful. Even more impres­sive was the fact that the cen­ter wasn’t decked out in Holo­caust mem­o­ra­bilia to help remind us of what the Nazi’s we did to them dur­ing WWII.

I arrived on the pool deck and was already pissed off. The team whose coach we were swim­ming against was a bit of punk. Our team brought a solid legion of eighty kids to com­bat his swim team, while he had a mere thirty or so. Now I don’t quite mind this size dif­fer­ence between the teams, how­ever the oppos­ing team’s coach refused to let us use the entire pool for our warm ups, forc­ing us to com­pact eighty kids into a mere four lanes. His kids on the other hand took up four lanes, but with each lane only con­tain­ing about three or four kids. The result was that our warm ups were a com­plete dis­as­ter, as kids sim­ply can’t coör­di­nate them­selves when there’s twenty of them per lane. As a coach, deal­ing with par­ents, set­ting up the meet, and try­ing to warm up the kids as well, try­ing to cope with this was nearly impossible.

Real­iz­ing that warm­ing up in such a fash­ion would be futile we dis­missed our kids from warmups, and began final­iz­ing prepa­ra­tions for the meet. Now I could for­give the other team for the warm up mishap, was it poor sports­man­ship? Def­i­nitely, but we’re a tough team, and cer­tainly not snobs about the pool or how much warm up we get, so we just went with it. How­ever, what pushed me over the edge was the fact that I had to pass out the oppos­ing team’s stop watches to their par­ent timers. Once again, I don’t mind help­ing peo­ple out, but this team had six coaches, only thirty kids, was the HOST team, and for some rea­son they had to have me pass out their stop watches for them. Oh, and most of the other team’s par­ents where fairly rude. They seemed to be amazed that there were two stop watches, one for each of the two timers at the GODDAMN LANE, they barely acknowl­edged or thanked me that I gave them a stop watch, and one dude even held up his fin­ger telling me to wait as he was talk­ing on his cell phone. Now I’m not a guy that com­mands a whole lot of respect, nor do I feel the need to be thanked for sim­ply pass­ing out a stop watch, but the sim­ple man­ner in which these par­ents car­ried them­selves pissed me off, and that’s why I am com­plain­ing about it.

Like every­thing else that this team failed at doing, they didn’t even have the decency to hire a ref. Thus we were lim­ited their crappy assis­tant coach, on a weak sauce mega­phone to call the meet. This lead to a ton of kids miss­ing their races, which equated to more headaches for me as a coach. All in all, I was just pissed by the lack of hos­pi­tal­ity that the other team showed. I wouldn’t have minded the sit­u­a­tion if they had maybe one coach and since they had so few kids on the team they lacked par­ent vol­un­teers. But they had six coaches, an abun­dance of par­ent vol­un­teers, and they STILL acted like pompous asses to us. Worst of all was the fact that they thought that was the proper way to to treat vis­it­ing teams.

On the plus side, the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter was truly very nice. It  had some pretty decked out bath­rooms which had com­pli­men­tary razors and mouth­wash. The Jew life­guards, and the Jew recep­tion­ists were all quite nice, and even the Jew secu­rity guard wasn’t that bad despite the fact that he made me move my car. One day, I wish to return to that Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter, not to swim another swim meet, as that was the crap­pi­est meet I’ve ever been to. But to instead search for the hid­den Jew Gold which I am con­vinced lies some­where amongst the con­fines of that Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Center.

In order to help remem­ber the life and pass­ing of Mr. Frank McCourt we here at patrickmcn​.com will be post­ing a quote from him every day this week.

Hap­pi­ness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.

— Frank McCourt

I can‘t go too much into my domes­tic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in.

- Frank McCourt

I had no accom­plish­ments except sur­viv­ing. But that isn‘t enough in the com­mu­nity where I came from, because every­body was doing it. So I wasn‘t pre­pared for Amer­ica, where every­body is glow­ing with good teeth and good clothes and food.

- Frank McCourt

First of all there is always that artis­tic chal­lenge of cre­at­ing some­thing. Or the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence to take slum life in that period and make some­thing out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of respon­si­bil­ity to my family.

- Frank McCourt

You feel a sense of urgency, espe­cially at my advanced age, when you‘re star­ing into the grave.

- Frank McCourt

When I first came to New York and saw Ital­ian fam­i­lies and their dis­plays of affec­tion, I was taken aback a bit because it was uninhibited.

- Frank McCourt