This Is What I'm Talking About

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No sooner do I post about all the undeserved crap Apple takes on a daily basis than Joe Jaffe posts "Instant Hype, just add 'i'" on his blog.  This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - painting Apple fans with a wide brush and implying they're a bunch of mindless sheep who will buy anything Apple puts out. Apple detractors who want to be dismissive of Apple fans in this manner should consider the contributions Apple has made to interface design, usability and reliability in addition to style before they render judgment.  Consider this:

  1. It's a fact.  PC's crash a lot.  They also require the occasional "fresh start."  Every year or so, my PC becomes so slow and unstable that it's necessary to back up my data, reformat drives, reinstall everything and start fresh.  Macs don't require this.  They just work.  Can you fault someone for being a fan of that?
  2. What MP3 player achieved the intuitiveness and ease of use that the iPod did, without following Apple's design lead?  None.  Every digital music device I've had has been more complicated to operate and less reliable than my iPod.
  3. I have yet to find a small form factor PC that can match what my Mac Mini can do.  Many small PCs have the same issues a regular size one does, plus problems with overheating and limited expandability.

You want to paint with a wide brush?  How about all those Wintel addicts who won't leave the mainstream, even when presented with a superior machine that can do everything their PCs do and more.

The Dinosaur Room Is No More

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The previous owner of our house seemed to have a thing for two-toned rooms (and awful taste in color selection to boot).  We called one of the bedrooms upstairs The Dinosaur Room, owing to the fact that it had an awful-looking border with dinosaurs on it midway up the wall, running around the entirety of the room.  I spent most of my three-day weekend turning this into a habitable room. I have no idea what type of glue was used to adhere the aforementioned dinosaurs to the wall, but it took a thorough soaking - about 8 hours - in undiluted DIF to get the glue to loosen up.  From there, it took several hours' worth of elbow grease using a wallpaper scraper.  And I still didn't get all the glue off.  Here's a tip to remember - when you use a wall sander on a wall that still has semi-moist wallpaper glue sticking to it, your sander will start going through sanding discs at an alarming rate and flinging glue boogers all over the room.

Once the walls were sanded, it took two coats of primer to cover the awful colors on the wall.  Above the dinosaur border, the walls were an ugly cobalt blue - the type of paint that probably was more popular on Dodge SUVs than it was on the wall of a bedroom.  Below the dinosaur border was a color green that was quite close to what the production team on The Simpsons used to paint the control rods in the Springfield nuke plant.

Two coats of primer later, Lauren and I went to Home Depot and picked out a teal green color that matched the rug I brought from Wading River.  It took two coats.  So, effectively, I've painted this room four times.

I moved Rob's desk and all the other stuff from my office into the new room.  I hung some shelves in the corner and unpacked a ton of books that have been sitting in cardboard boxes since I moved from NYC to Wading River.  My computer is up and running, and I relocated the cable modem and router from the old office to the new office.  This required pulling the cable wire and a phone wire through the wall from my prior office.  There was an existing hole, but the cable wire wouldn't fit through it.  Lots of finagling with long drill bits and fish tape.  But it's in.  When I get home, I have to swap out our Linksys router for the Netgear MIMO router I had in Wading River, which I brought with me.

Last night, I dropped by Wading River hoping to pick up my fish tank, but Rob and I discovered it was way too heavy to move without taking all the rocks out.  That's a project for next weekend.  So I picked up the basement freezer instead and helped Rob get the basement fridge out of there and pushed to the curb for the garbage man.

Needless to say, I'm very sore this morning.  But at least I have a new freezer and no dinosaurs on my walls.

Stupid Senators...

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Why is it okay to have these things?

  • An HDTV/DVR cable box with a SATA cable plugin in the back, making it possible for people to save content and view it whenever they want, and offload it digitally to a hard drive
  • A radio with an analog or digital audio recorder (CD-R, cassette recorder, digital recorder, etc.) that can record terrestrial radio signals
  • Home boxes that allow for time- and place-shifting (like Slingbox) that can allow people to consume content any way they like

But not these things:

  • A device that receives satellite radio and allows users to record and play back content.
  • A software-based recorder on one's computer that picks up online radio feeds and allows for recording and playback

I think this smacks of legislating to protect outdated business models.