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Bad day on bourbon street and Apple news

Posted on August 31, 2005

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all i can say about this is i’m glad i’ve been to New Orleans so many times and have experienced that great city and its people. because, New Orleans is no more thanks to Hurricane Katrina. at least the one that i knew and loved. of course, i also feel bad for the people that were hurt and killed and happy that the death toll isn’t higher.

it could have been worse, i guess. now, of course, there is looting, people shooting each other and all the other things that come out during a time like this. most will rise to the occasion and try to help. some will see this as an opportunity and exploit it. i feel sorry for the ones that are going to exploit it. they must have very empty lives. or maybe they are just assholes.

it sort of seems strange to talk about other things going on around the internet but what the hell. here goes:

first, some related stuff. the New Orleans version of Craigslist is being used to help Katrina victims reunite with family and friends. if you know something about someone who is there or want to find out something, it might be a good place to go.

over at yahoo, they have a slide show of Katrina images. some are hard to look at.

apple is preparing some stuff for the devoted mac user (myself included) that should arrive, or at least be announced shortly. among the new items is a major update to the .mac service featuring the new, improved backup 3.0 and exclusive dashboard widgets just for .mac people (try to control yourself).

if they can fix all the problems with isync and get my stuff to sync correctly, i would be really happy. really, that’s all they would have to do. i don’t need new backup software. just make isync work like it used to before you “improved” it.

also, apple is expected to announce the long-rumored iTunes phone the week of september 7th. they have even given out invites to a “special media event” at the moscone center in san francisco to show off whatever they are going to show off. could be interesting. or maybe it could even be a video ipod. after all, they do let you download music videos at the itunes music store. september 7th is right around the corner.

i for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.

People are crazy and other news of the world

Posted on August 16, 2005

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this is sad. its a shame what people are willing to do to save some money. i love the mac too but really, get a grip people. and i have to wonder if the Richmond Police slept through the lecture about crowd control at the police academy.

in other more positive news and tidbits from around the web:

the Xbox 360 is about ready for production (i want mine)

want a Dell computer? here’s how to get the best deal on a new piece of Dell technology from a guy who should know.

Intel (my new fav chip maker) is going to deliver dual core chips sooner than expected. now if only Motorola and IBM could have delivered something earlier (or even on time. 3Ghz G5 anyone?).

run Windows on your PSP. wasn’t that supposed to be impossible? much like running IntelOSX on non-Apple hardware was supposed to be. but that didn’t take long either.

an interesting take on the future of gaming on the mac, especially with the pending switch to intel chips. personally, i hope the switch leads to more games for the mac. and really, it should be easier to code now that we are all one big Intel family. maybe we will even get games released on both platforms at the same time? i can dream, can’t I?

and, hurry before this is gone. if you want one of the cool, black Motorola Razr phones for free (after rebate) check this out at Amazon.com. looks like its Cingular only but still, free is pretty cool.

Apple – the final countdown

Posted on August 11, 2005

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no, not a mid-eighties rocker ballad. it is, in fact, come to the final countdown for my g5, still in the hands of the glendale apple store. but here’s a miraculous bit of news that i got just yesterday. a nice young man from the store called and told me that due to them having my computer “for so long” and not being able to repair it, they have decided to give me a new one.

yes, you heard it right (or read it, actually). apple is giving me a new computer to replace the one they cannot fix. is this a great country or what? kudos to the entire team at the apple store glendale and especially my new best friend conan. i think this is what could be called outstanding customer service.

granted, i did originally pay over 3 grand for the computer only a year and a half ago and i do have apple care and i did leave the computer there to be fixed almost a month ago and i already replaced it with a new g5 tower at my expense but hey, at least they are finally doing the right thing. i think its very cool. it makes sense. if they can’t fix it, they should just replace it.

i have heard of apple doing this before but not very often. i’m sure this is a last resort type of thing. not something that they want to do. but its nice to know that they will, if they have no other option. and i didn’t even have to ask them to do it. it might also help that my mac consulting company is a preferred consultancy for the store and that i am personal friends with the top managers. so, as they say, your mileage may vary if you try to get them to replace your mac.

regardless of my personal relationships, its just nice that a company will take the steps necessary to satisfy a customer. it gives me hope in these uncertain times of intel chips and sagging ipod shuffle sales. despite all the turmoil, i think things are going to turn out ok. at least in my little apple computer world. its the rest of the world i’m not so sure about.

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in other news not necessarily about me (yes, there is some, believe it or not):

apple scraps their shiny new “switch” campaign without firing a shot.

apparently, the rumors of drm preventing you from installing osx for intel on a non-macintosh are not so true after all.

martin sargent, late of the screensavers and unscrewed fame, returns to the web, ready, it seems, to get back to work.

CBGB’s gets to stay put.

and, my favorite news anchor, peter jennings, died recently of lung cancer. he was a class act and loved the daily show. was he cool or what? RIP peter.

Follow the money (or not)

Posted on June 9, 2005

it’s odd to me. one of my jobs is in the technology field doing consulting and such. so, i feel that i have a pretty good idea how things like computers work. at least, i know enough to make them work when they are bad. at least until things get really, really complicated.

Imagine my surprise then when not one, but both, of my primary computers, my g5 tower and my powerbook, decided to take a dump in the same week. i know, i was as amazed as you are. these are apple computers after all. known for their quality and reliability. or so i thought up to this week.

i think something is going wrong with apple computer. no, not that they basically abandoned all of their “64 bit computing is the bomb” hype they have been spinning for the last few years to make us not feel the pinch of the speed gap with pentium chips. no, i’m talking about a simple thing like quality control.

in the good old days, around the time right before the first iMacs and the return of iSteve, apple computers could be counted on to be well-built and last a long time. but, for the last few years, i have seen the number of problems with various apple products increase quite a bit. my own machines have also been affected.

i had one of the first white iBooks and it had to have the motherboard and video assembly replaced. then, i had a bad video card in my G5 tower and it had to be replaced. now, the G5 has a bad power supply and also has some odd freezing issues (when it will turn on at all) and it needs to be fixed again.

and, my powerbook is also starting to show signs of a bad video cable with wavy lines appearing on the screen when the screen is at certain angles. and its not just me. i haven’t done the math but a rough guess would put the number of hardware problems at about 20% at least for my mac-based clients. everything from bad power supplies, melted capacitors, bad motherboards (or mid-planes as the call them sometimes), dead hard drives and a host of other issues that never cropped up with this kind of frequency a few years ago.

i know, as things get more complicated they tend to have a greater chance of something going wrong. and, as apple sells more computers, the number of people reporting problems is also going to rise. i worry about all of this because i see a pattern. the once great company seems to be heading down the road where it must sacrifice one of the things that made it great in order to appease the bottom line.

apple has never been the company for everyone. they are a niche player either by accident or by design. and of course, market factors are also a consideration. i just hope that in the pursuit of dollars and expanding market share that they don’t loose sight of what made the company “insanely great”. they need to remember to “think different”. (i just wanted to see how many slogans i could get in one paragraph).

money is great. we all love money because we can buy shiny things and pay the rent. but in the end, all we really have is who we are and what we do. people and companies alike are defined by it. apple needs to remember where it came from and who it is before it does something really stupid like switch to intel processors or something.

actually, that might turn out to be a good idea. if ibm can’t deliver then they needed to get the boot. i kind of wish that apple had turned to amd instead of intel. you know, one underdog to another. i guess it would be no big thing to make another switch to amd if intel can’t do what iSteve needs it to do.

i can see the future and its a shiny silver box powered by quad pentium 5 processors running osx 11. maybe that’s when the machines will realize that we humans were the problem all along and deal with us accordingly. it could happen. or maybe i saw that in a movie once. either way, it looks to be an interesting next few years in the tech world.

in other news, while in Vegas over the weekend we ran into that kid from “home alone” and the dark haired girl from “that seventies show” at the Mandalay Bay while playing blackjack. you would think that after all those movies and several years on a hit tv show they would have been at a higher limit table. i guess they like their money too. as in, they like it where it is. in their pockets. we could all learn a lesson from that.

This time the rumors are true

Posted on June 6, 2005

Yes, its true. Apple is switching to Intel. I can feel hell freezing over right now. However, I think its a smart move if Intel can provide better, faster, stronger chips than IBM can. Apple needs faster chips and needs them in large quantities and for less money. I think Intel can deliver on this.

Who really cares what is under the hood? It’s still the same great OS and the same great hardware. In other words, its still a Macintosh. Let’s hope this leads to less expensive Macs. That would be cool.

Laying Low and Putting Tiger To the Test

Posted on May 6, 2005

TigerDesk

I have been busy for the last week or so. Thanks, in part, to the good folks at Apple Computer putting out a new version of OSX that has, shall we say, a few “issues”. There are many things to like about Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger. Features such as Spotlight, the new iChat AV, new Mail, improved speed and a host of other features make it a great upgrade in most cases. There are some problems and some annoyances that I have been dealing with not only on my own machines, but on machines of people I work with as well.

As always, MacFixit has the scoop on many of the problems as well as some solution that have worked for other users. Macintouch also has a cool matrix of reported software incompatibilities. And, there is, of course, the Apple Tiger Discussion Forums. No matter what, always make a complete backup of anything you care about on your computer before installing a major upgrade like Tiger. Better safe than sorry.

It’s no secret that people are having problems. Take your pic as to where to find a possible solution or work-around for any issues you might be having. There might be one or it might take a little time for one to be available. No matter what third-party software vendors do, i’m sure we’ll be seeing Mac OSX 10.4.1 sooner rather than later.

I’m not a crook (or maybe I am)

Posted on October 4, 2004

I just found out that I’m a crook because I use an iPod and iTunes. At least according to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’ whipping boy.

I wonder if he might be biased in favor of his own company when it comes to who should be your music vendor of choice? He also thinks that Apple and the Mac are the wrong platform if you want to have a digital home of the future. I really think that Steve has been sipping a little too much of the Microsoft Kool-Aid.

I know, I am not the best person to speak in an Apple versus Microsoft debate. I make no secret of the fact that I think the Mac is a superior platform for most things that most people want to do with their computers. I am writing this here entry on a Macintosh right now.

In my more recent career as a tech guru I am often asked which computer to purchase by one or more eager folks with some money burning a hole in their pockets. Many of them are paying clients and some are just family members or friends looking for some free advice. Either way, my answer usually leans towards the Macintosh.

However, the real answer depends upon what the person or the company is doing and plans on doing with their computer or computers. For the individual, who is doing basic computing such as e-mail, browsing the web, digital pictures, music and that kind of thing, The Mac is a fine product and can do all of those things, and much more, extremely well.

If the person or company want to go farther and more importantly, want to have some sort of collaborative environment with group tasking, calendars, etc. then I would tend to steer them towards the Windows side of the street and go with something like Microsoft Exchange.

I’m sure many of you are gasping for meaning with this revelation and to that I can only say that my job as a tech consultant is to provide the best solution that best fits the needs of the client. As much as I might want it to, the Mac can’t do everything and has some severe shortcomings when it comes to the corporate environment.

Now, I realize that their are probably many ways to put together several applications that will do close to the same job as Exchange but kludging together a solution is not in the client’s best interests and therefore not what I am going to recommend to them.

What does all this mean to the average user? Not too much. For the normal user and small business that doesn’t require complex collaborative software and is looking for basic file, print and web functions, the Mac running OSX would be a fine choice and I have recommended it many times. The Mac is shown in the best light when it is used for creative endeavors such as photos, music, graphic design, video editing and the like.

When it comes to more specific needs, especially for the business customer, Windows can fit the bill and does so quite well. I would actually choose it over linux at this point as well until linux emerges more into the consumer space and out from the “geek” closet.

That said, I still prefer the Mac over Windows, especially at the consumer level, because of its ease of use and reliability as an OS. I have many computers (too many, really, just ask the wife) but I still use a Mac daily to get my work done. It just works.

Oh, I also want to plug the good folks at TiVo for one of the greatest invention of the last ten years. I just picked up a new TiVo series 2. It was very easy to set up and also joined my wireless network with ease. Now I can stream pictures from iPhoto and music from iTunes into the living room and play them over the television. All with the included Home Media Option. That’s cool.

If you don’t have a TiVo, go out and get one. It’s that great. You can trust me, I’m not really a crook.

Later.