So, I was out of the office for a couple of days with a bad cold. When I got back in this morning, I had a voicemail on my office phone—a fairly rare occurrence, since phones are now about fifth in the office order of communication priority (after email, IM, face-to-face, and carrier pigeon). Usually when I get voicemails at work, they are nothing but a couple seconds of silence, or a recorded spiel for some product I don’t want.

Today, however, I got a mostly-unintelligible message from somebody who identified himself as ‘Christopher Pasquale.’ He called from a California area code at 2:58am ET on Thursday, and slurred something about how “I don’t know what to do with these crazy white people,” and that he didn’t know “where you are in DC, or Arlington, or Langley.”

Anyway…here’s the recording (MP3 link). Maybe you can make more sense of it than I did. Note that I have redacted the phone number by changing area code to 555; the original recording contained the actual area code. This guy seems to have enough problems without a bunch of Off on a Tangent readers calling him. That’s the only edit I made, other than snipping out some silence from our voicemail system.

I usually have some sympathy for people who are required by their employers to do distasteful things. I doubt, for example, that the customer service representatives at Cox Cable really enjoy wasting half an hour telling you to reboot your computer and router when they (and you) already know they are having a service outage. I doubt that credit card company operators really enjoy trying to up-sell some kind of useless debt protection service to everybody who calls. I try to give these folks the benefit of the doubt.

In these cases and others like them, I place most of the blame on the company that implemented the bad policies and procedures, not the individuals who dutifully perform the task they’ve been assigned. But this benefit of the doubt only goes so far; once you pass into illegal or immoral activity, ‘just following orders’ no longer passes as a valid excuse. Every individual has a personal responsibility to do the right thing in their dealings with others, even when their superiors order them to do the opposite. Maybe you risk being fired for making a moral stand. So be it. It is better to be unemployed with your honor intact than to debase yourself to keep a job.

I know taking this kind of a stand isn’t always easy. It seems like most people, when faced with these situations, take the path of least resistance and simply comply with the unjust orders. Understandably, they don’t want to deal with the loss of income, the hassle of finding a new job, and so on. I’ve seen it countless times. At one of my previous employers, questionable employment and contracting practices were commonplace. All up and down the chain of command, most people just shrugged their shoulders and did as they were told. Their willing compliance made them just as guilty as those at the top who issued the questionable orders in the first place.

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So, the follow-up to our recent barrage of test drives is this: we bought a ‘cosmic blue’ 2012 Mini Cooper S All-4 Countryman last weekend. They had one on the lot that was very close to our ideal specs, and were able to give us a bit of a deal (though not much, since Minis are all in high demand).

The Countryman, while still fairly small and Mini-esque, has four doors, four real seats, and all-wheel drive. And it drives like a charm, even when you keep it under 4,500 RPM (as recommended during the break-in period). More details and photos will follow later, but for now, enjoy this handful of shots from purchase day:

So, I’ve been playing around with the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview, a pre-release version of Microsoft’s next flagship desktop operating system. The pundits and techies seem to be very critical of Microsoft’s direction, and with good reason, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it’s been made out to be. In fact, with a handful of relatively small changes, Microsoft could make Windows 8 really great.

Actually, Windows 8 already is really great…on tablets and small laptops. Oh, it has its rough edges (what do you expect from an early preview?), but on the small screen it’s a real pleasure to use. You see, the biggest change to Windows 8 is that Microsoft has made its ‘Metro’ interface—the tile-based system used on its surprisingly-good Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system—the primary way of interacting with the machine. When you’re navigating with your finger on a tablet, or even with a touch-pad on a notebook, Metro gives you a quick and easy way to move back and forth between apps, see an ‘overview’ of your incoming emails and schedule, and then move into an immersive single-app experience.

The included Metro apps—for email, calendars, weather, etc.—are obviously unfinished, but as the universe of Metro apps grows this will get better. It is obvious that the system has a lot of potential to give Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android a run for their money in the tablet space, if the hardware is up-to-snuff and if the development community rallies around the platform. continued… →

In 2001, I bought my first Mac—a Power Mac G4 ‘Quicksilver’ 733mhz. It ran Mac OS X 10.0.4, which was still considered something of a ‘beta’ so the machine booted by default into the ‘classic’ Mac OS 9. Previously I had been running a Compaq with Windows 98, and as resident ‘tech support’ on my floor in the dorms I had plenty of unpleasant experience with 98 and its successor, Windows Me. I longed for a usable alternative to Windows, and found it in Mac OS X. Beta or not, it was clear that Apple was on to something great.

I was something of an early adopter back in ’01. Some people, including my freshman-year roommate, had been dedicated Mac users all through the platform’s dark ages in the mid-1990s, but most techies and nerds had eschewed the ‘classic’ Mac platform during this time. Mac OS X—a powerful, Unix-based platform imbued with the Mac’s easy usability—changed that. During and after my ‘switcher’ period, lots and lots of my fellow techies switched too. But I still remember very, very clearly how few Macs there were in 2001. Even on a college campus, Apple’s traditional bastion, we were a tiny minority.

I was a dedicated Mac user for ten years. I switched back to Windows just over a year ago because Microsoft has improved their system enough that, in my humble opinion, Macs no longer warrant anything close to their 50%-or-more price premium. But I still have a soft-spot for Mac OS X and its easy pairing of power and ease-of-use.

This weekend I have been attending a conference here in Northern Virginia, and I’ve seen first-hand more clearly than ever before just how drastically things have changed for Apple. Every single presenter at every session I’ve been to so far has been presenting from a MacBook Pro. The conference loans out iPads pre-loaded with a conference app instead of the old-fashioned conference binders. Among attendees who have been taking notes on their own equipment during sessions, I’d ballpark that upwards of 50% have been using MacBooks or iPads. And this isn’t even a vaguely Apple-related event; it’s focused primarily on Java application servers and general web development. Even so, the whole place is positively awash in MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones.

Of course there are notebooks, tablets, and phones from HP, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and Nokia at the conference too. Get a bunch of techies together and you’ll get a whole mix of equipment on display. I even saw one guy holding an absurdly over-sized Samsung Galaxy Note phone (tablet?) with its 5.3″ display to his ear. But the single largest hardware presence is clearly and undeniably Apple, even if we don’t count the conference-provided iPads. This is noteworthy on its own, but when you consider that these are a bunch of Java and web developers in the notoriously stodgy government-dominated DC-area market, it’s downright incredible.

Oh, how times have changed.