Hey Apple: Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

I have been an Apple fan boy ever since I owned my first Apple Computer (an Apple IIe) back in 1984. Beyond the aesthetics and hype surrounding Apple, I have always believed, even in dire times, that they had an edge over their competitors. The deep integration of Mac OS with Apple hardware and services made for an unsurpassed user experience that could not be found anywhere else.

As much as I hate to admit it, I have, unfortunately, grown very frustrated over the last few years with their latest services because they don't just work anymore! The philosophy of Apple products used to be about making things simple for the end user by empowering them with metaphorical and intuitive tools that made every task a tap or a click away. Hence, the legions of blind Apple fans that have been blessed by such a wonderful and unbelievable user experience that their dedication to the brand can only be compared to a religion in which Apple Stores are churches, and masses are held by "Genius" priests… One can't help but wonder why services don't end with Apple flavored drinks at the bar.

Ok, ok... I digress… Let's get back to my point:

We now live in the age of cloud computing and I must confess that if there is one thing that Apple never got right it is Cloud & Sync services.

iDisk was their very first attempt at creating an online Hard Drive for Mac users and it was an epic failure… As much as I wanted to use it, I could never understand how they expected me to use such a slow and buggy tool… Upload speeds were close to zero, iDisk would often crash the Finder and files kept disappearing…

The came MobileMe which promised to be "Exchange for the rest of us"… Even Steve Jobs admitted a year after the service was released that it was unreliable and didn't quite fit with all the great products that Apple had.

Then came iCloud that, I'll give you that one, worked for a few years… Syncing contacts, calendars, Notes, Reminders and backing up iPhones & iPads mostly worked as advertised… Mostly because sometimes Apple fan boys that trusted iCloud to back up their iPhone data learned the hard way that iCloud backups were not to be trusted as they would sometimes only partially restore their data when in need to do so…

But Apple didn't learn from their mistakes… They went on to release iCloud Photo Library which promised to solve everyone's problems with photos and videos by automatically syncing them to the cloud and across computers… What a brilliant idea… If only it had just worked…

I was one of the first users to blindly install the update as soon as it became available. After a whole week of uploading 100Gb worth of data, I came to the painful realization that the service magically resurrected long deleted photos that were not present on any of my iOS or Mac computers… To put it in a simple way: Apple had kept hidden from me pictures that I thought were gone forever after I had carefully deleted them from my camera roll, photo stream, and deleted pictures folder… This is just not acceptable in terms of privacy.

Although this may have disastrous consequences in the lives of many, it keeps getting worse as iCloud Photo Library (the one and only stop Apple would want you to think of when it comes to saving & syncing hundreds of gigabytes of photos & videos) can't deal with large photo libraries… Oh wait ??? Isn't this service all about such huge libraries?

Well… I have 100Gb worth of photos and videos. I use an iPhone 6 Plus with 128Gb of memory and have activated the "optimize iPhone storage" option for photos & videos (otherwise I wouldn't have much memory left to use my iPhone for anything else).

Every time an app needs to access my photos it takes about 15 seconds… I can only name two apps that behave correctly in doing so: Facebook & Instagram. Those 2 apps actually access, by default, the most recent photos instead of accessing my entire library. This is an easy and simple work around that every app should use and most importantly that Apple should enforce and write guidelines about. Unfortunately, none of these measures have been implemented since iCloud Photo Library was released more than 6 months ago.

When I take a picture, it sometimes takes 30 seconds to show up in my camera roll (using the buit-in camera app and camera roll)…

For the last 6 months, I have been dreading doing anything that involves photos or videos on my iPhone 6 Plus and iPad because I know that I am going to have to wait 30 seconds for any task related to this… This is not acceptable…

There are forums describing this problem which seems to appear with Photo Libraries that have more than 25.000 pictures… I have 52.000 pictures and 600 videos in mine…

So, as sad as I am to announce this: I'm not gonna buy Apple's next iPhone and am switching to Android as I have lost faith in Apple which made my user experience a nightmare for the last 6 months.

So long Apple…

What To Make Of Near-Death Experiences?

A recent spike in accounts of near-death experiences by some of my patients has led me to re-examine this fascinating phenomenon. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is described as a process occurring when one is dying or already dead. It usually consists of a feeling of painlessness and happiness accompanied by seeing an intense white light at the end of a tunnel. Some people who have experienced it report meeting religious figures or long deceased loved ones before being called back on earth after being successfully resuscitated.

It is amazing to think that this phenomenon occurs in almost the same way across all cultures. Of course, this doesn't address the question of whether it is only a physiological process or a spiritual one. Wikipedia has a very interesting entry on this topic which I can only encourage you to read.

I was just recently struck by a very vivid experience related to me in which a person was in contact with their recently deceased daughter. Of course, it could all be attributed to their imagination but what if it were "real"?

The Necessary Stupidity Of Our Daily Lives

As a highly intelligent (at least we like to think so) animal, we were granted the ability to be self-conscious. Such a gift can also be considered a curse as it can plunge us into the abyssal anxiety of death. We all are aware that it will happen to us one day, we all witness it around us and yet, we tend to discard any thought related to that metaphysical question.

Some of us find answers in religion, some think they do in science and some of us just accept it as a non-negotiable reality. The fact and the matter is that we all dread that last moment when our final breath comes and we leave our earthly existence to embark on a journey to the unknown. Clearly, living with that thought in our mind on a constant basis wouldn't be bearable and we might, ironically (if one can find irony in this), kill ourselves to avoid the thought of our own death. It seems odd and terrifying to me that the answer to this question that Evolution came up with was to give us the ability to be stupid and make it possible for us to forget about the most important question of all for 99.9% of our existence.

So, we go through our lives from one relatively pointless goal to another, without trying to figure out the big picture, blindfolding ourselves from our own insignificance and effectively denying ourselves the right to question the purpose of life or the anguish of death.

So my advice to you: embrace your stupid side and enjoy all these insignificant moments as they are part of the human condition.

The Structural Antagonism Between Oral Pleasure And Health

As disappointing as this may sound to the reader, this post is not about oral sex but rather surprisingly about food (another form of oral pleasure). Has it ever occurred to you that most pleasurable food or dishes are usually not good for your health? Whether it is cholesterol-filled tasty sauce or rich nutrients, experiencing fine food at its climax is usually associated with the intrinsic notion of putting our health in a transient state of jeopardy. Refusing to acknowledge this fact can result in an increased risk of cardiovascular or metabolic diseases and hence premature death.

This leads to a rather profound question. Is our world or universe structured in a way that pleasure has to be linked with guilt or danger? Or do we, as human beings, find pleasure in risky behaviors? Should we see in this realization the essence of God or merely the perverted nature of our condition struggling to disavow the castration perpetuated by religion or education? Do we have to sin to experience transient happiness followed by prolonged guilt? Or was our universe so ill-conceived that most good things are bad for us?

Will The Discovery Of Planet Zarmina (Gliese 581g) Change Our Faith?

The discovery of Planet Zarmina (Gliese 581g) is a ground breaking moment in human history. For the first time ever, we have reasonable proof that another Planet than earth in a not-so-distant Solar System could support human life. This only can lead to the conclusion that there probably is an astonishing amount of planets similar to earth in the Universe. Therefore, it must be very likely that life exists beyond our blue horizons.

Although I am thrilled by this discovery, I can hardly fathom the perhaps not-so-distant day when we discover life or, even better, intelligent life outside of our solar system. The world will be profoundly shaken and hopefully come to the realization that all our earthly conflicts have zero significance at the scale of the Universe. How will earthlings integrate this discovery with the religions they have believed in for centuries? How can we fight on earth over whose God is right when life is not limited to our planet?

Will we discover that Prophets visited other planets as well ? Or for the lack of such a fact, will we join our faiths and those of aliens in a common belief or understanding of an almighty essence in the Universe?

Can The Panspermia Theory (or as I like to call it: The Cosmic Bukkake Theory) explain a single origin of life in the entire Universe? I highly doubt it. So, if life emerged on different planets, at different times, under different (or why not the same) forms, shouldn't this come into conflict with our earthly faiths?

It certainly does not answer the question of God but it might bring us closer to it.

What Matters In The End?

I haven't updated my blog in a long time as I have been facebooking and twittering hectically!

Anyway, I'm in the mood for blogging today so let's hope my words will make sense! Today's post isn't going to be about food, technology or travel but rather about the human condition.

I, indeed, can't help but notice how little we think about our human condition on a day-to-day basis. We actually avoid to do so as the anxiety generated by any metaphysical questioning can be overwhelming or at least unwelcome. We all live our lives hiding from reality. We go from one insignificant thing to another, oblivious to the fact that we know nothing about our origins, what we are in the universe or what might become of us after what we call "death".

Of course, religion is an answer which only certainty comes from faith rather than actual proof. Faith is a powerful anxiolytic and in a way those that truly experience it must avoid some terrifying anxieties.

I, for myself, have a hard time believing in God or at least any religion created by humans. If not for something that most might consider insignificant, I wouldn't even consider believing in God... What is making me contemplate such an act of faith happened more than a year ago when my 10 year old dog was diagnosed with a myeloma and was in a lot of pain. At that point and I remember it with great accuracy, I turned to my wife and asked her "'If there is a God, why would he/she make such a harmless little dog suffer like this?" I don't think I had ever asked that question with such defiance and hatred for nothing seemed to make sense to me in this world. My parents having passed away, one might be shocked that I would only ask this question when confronted with the suffering of a dog. I think that there was something unbearable for me in seeing my dog suffer like that as I saw it as pure and pointless suffering.

When it comes to human beings, we all tend to try and make sense of death eventhough, I'm pretty convinced of it, it absolutely doesn't make any. The death of my mother when I was 21 and more recently of my dad, have at least made me realize that our presence on earth is transient and very insignificant. Whatever we hold dear doesn't last and the elusive feeling of happiness or our quest for it is just a mirage.

We all have certitudes. We all think our life is going in one direction eventhough it's going the opposite way. We all tend to think we'll do the important things tomorrow. But in the end, we miss many things and often the most important ones.

When we get to that defining and final moment, at the very time that our eyes are going to close for the final time, what is left? What mattered? What a terrifying and unbearable question, right?

My answer is that everything might seem pointless... This little masquerade that we call life, these moments of happiness that don't last... Our pride in the fact that some of our genes will be living on in the form of our children? Aren't we contributing to more insignificant lives? Or is there really a point? Will humanity ever reach a Nirvana or a state of higher wisdom with complete understanding of our very own existence and the fabric of the Universe?

In the end, we're only left with questions and that terrifying and defining moment when our eyes close for the last time......

To end this rather dark post, I must write about my dog, that one year later and thanks to chemotherapy is still alive and actually well. Should I consider this a miracle? Should I believe in God? Who knows? I just might...