consolejockey

In the 90’s I was a serious Apple fanatic. I grew using an Apple IIc, which lasted me from middle school all the way through high school. In college I got one of the first PPC Macs, a Powermac 6160. From then on out I was a total MacHead. One of my earlier jobs was working for Power Computing, probably the most successful of the short lived Mac clone manufacturers. When Apple pulled the rug out from underneath the clone industry, and thus got me laid off for the first time, I became pretty disillusioned with Apple.

I bought myself a Dell PC and used Windows NT, then 2000 and now XP (sometimes even Vista.) I was a PC guy from then on, and over the years as I went from NT to 2000 to XP and Vista I’ve become pretty disillusioned with the PC platform and Microsoft. I tried various distributions of Linux which my experience I can only sum up with the phrase, Linux is pretty cool… considering it’s free. I still have hopes that Linux will someday be every bit as good as the Mac OS or Windows, but it’s just not there yet. And Abobe really needs to support Linux before I can use it as my main platform. I’m hooked on Photoshop, Fireworks and even Dreamweaver. Today I use a Mac at work and Windows at home. Occasionally I’ll check out the latest release of Ubuntu. I’ve become pretty comfortable in any OS, I’m not loyal to any particular brand.

I did break down and buy an iPhone though. My old Windows Mobile smart phone was slowly dying and the price on the iPhone dropped so I jumped on the bandwagon. And pretty much immediately was reminded why despite all the hype, despite all the fanatics calling it the “Jesus Phone,” Apple is still just another electronics company. The iPhone lacked many of the features my three year old Windows Mobile phone had. For example, you can only sync with one machine, you can’t use it as a drive, no MMS, no shooting video, up until yesterday no third part apps, etc. and it cost more than my previous phone. Not that it didn’t do some things well, like web browsing and playing music and videos, but nothing that would make me consider it to be the best smart phone ever, or even a great smart phone.

And today, when I went to update my iPhone to the latest firmware, the long awaited and widely talked about version 2.0, and my phone was essentially bricked. In order to upgrade to the latest firmware, an iPhone owner has to reactivate their phone online. Apple apparently didn’t anticipate the load on their servers that millions of iPhone owners across the world would cause by trying to activate their phone all on the same day. Apple, a company that manufactures servers, apparently didn’t have enough servers. I’ve heard that those buying the new 3G iPhones are having to spend hours waiting in line, then hours waiting in store to actually purchase a working and activated phone.

Complain about Microsoft all you want, complain about Dell, HP or Sony, but you’re going to have to make a pretty lengthy and strong argument about why I should think that Apple is really any better, and in some cases not actually worse.

BTW, after about three hours my iPhone is working again, but I still can’t sync it to my computer.

Amazon has become my second favorite source for legal non-DRM MP3’s (Emusic is my first.) Everyday they have a special in their MP3 store and sell albums for as little as $1.99 (usually these specials carry over into the next day.) Today they are selling The Best Of Talking Heads for $3.99. I’ve been a fan of Talking Heads since the 6th grade and though I have to protest the “Best Of” title (my best of list would be a lot different) this is still a psychotically killer deal.

I was wondering how long it would take before a portable version of Firefox 3 would show up on PortableApps. The answer is about 24 hours. If you’ve never heard of PortableApps, you should check out their site. They host a multitude of useful standalone applications that can be run off a USB drive or the like. It’s a handy way for web coders like me to have both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 installed on the same machine and not have them interfere with one another.

L337 h4×0rz have produced stand alone versions of Internet Explorer, also for web coders to test their sites on, but Microsoft doesn’t support them, instead recommending coders test their sites using Virtual PC disk images with different browsers installed on them. The disk images have an expiration date, so you have to re-download them every few months. Not exactly the most efficient solution.

This via BoingBoing, The US Postal Service has released Charles and Ray Eames stamps! From USPS.com:

In recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, manufacturing and photographic arts, designers Charles and Ray Eames will be honored next summer with a pane of 16 stamps designed by Derry Noyes of Washington, DC. If you’ve ever sat in a stackable molded chair, you’ve experienced their creativity. Perhaps best known for their furniture, the Eameses were husband and wife as well as design partners. Their extraordinary body of creative work — which reflected the nation’s youthful and inventive outlook after World War II — also included architecture, films and exhibits. Without abandoning tradition, Charles and Ray Eames used new materials and technology to create high-quality products that addressed everyday problems and made modern design available to the American public.

I’m sure this has been around for a while, but I just discovered Wikiquote. And today they had a link on their main page to some of Douglas Adam’s more interesting quotes. Here one that stuck out, from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

“What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?”
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.

I think this applies to user interface design as well. By the time you take pretty much any process and break down into actions and steps for an end user, you’ve learned a lot about a lot.

This is beyond description.

Dance Off with the Star Wars Stars 2008

I saw this posted to one of the many blogs I read, I can’t remember which one. Someone has been cool enough to post Douglas Engelbart’s weirdly accurate demonstration on how people would use computer workstations “in the future.” Originally presented on December 9, 1968 this demo, later called The Mother of All Demos, featured such revolutionary concepts as the mouse (which Engelbart is credited with inventing), copying and pasting, hypertext, video conferencing, and a whole lot more. This demo predicted these features decades before they would see widespread use.

I saw this over on BoingBoing Gadgets, a comparison of the Windows Me versus Mobile Me logos:

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” - Steve Jobs after Picaso

I posted this over on We Love Joe but thought I’d post it here as well. A while back gave me a few VHS tapes to digitize of movies Joe made is the days of his youth. One of which was the sci-fi masterpiece Jaunters III. I’ve been meaning to post Jaunters III to YouTube for a while but for one reason or another hadn’t gotten around to it. Now the final chapter in the Jaunters series is available for the world to see. It’s posted in three parts, the first shown below. Links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

I heard about this via the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network but unfortunately they left out some important details, like when the vote was actually being held. So early voting is over, but on Tuesday, November 6, you can vote in the regular election for Proposition 15. From the LiveStrong site:

Prop 15 is a constitutional amendment to establish the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to:

• Conduct research to prevent or cure cancer
• Support existing cancer research efforts in Texas
• Implement the Texas Cancer Plan, a statewide blueprint for cancer prevention and control

If passed, Prop 15 will authorize up to $3 billion in state general revenue bonds to fund cancer research, prevention, early detection and control programs.

I think it’s safe to say we all hate cancer, but there is actual opposition to this proposition. So get out and vote for Prop. 15!

BTW, here is the Austin Chronicle’s description and endorsements of all the propositions on the ballot. And if you’re not sure where your official place of voting is, this somewhat awkwardly designed site can help, Travis County Tax Office.