Nice People at the Apple Store
The other weekend, I have to say, I had a better than expected experience at my local Apple Store. For the past week or so, I had been having a problem with my Macbook Pro. The left click on an external mouse and the onboard trackpad would just get hung. Only rebooting the system would clear it. It is very frustrating when you are in the middle of editing a Word document or writing emails, etc. I thought it might be a software glitch, or more hoping that it was. If it was hardware related, I was past my Apple hardware warranty. After having lunch with a friend, he mentioned a new laptop hybrid hard drive with 4GB of SSD. It is a Seagate Momentus. It was on sale at TigerDirect for $119. Well that was a no brainer. After purchasing and installing the new HD, I opted for a clean installation of OS X Snow Leopard, just to hopefully eliminate the mouse issue. No such luck. I started experiencing the problem during the OS installation. So, after the installation completed, I thought, well lets see what the good folks at the Apple Store can do to help. My expectations were low.
I set off for the nearest Apple Store at the nearby mall, around 1PM on a Saturday afternoon. It did not really hit me that it was a Saturday afternoon until i drove up to the mall. After seeing the crowds of people, cars, etc., I started to have second thoughts, but then….well I was already there, might as well try it. I made it to the Apple Store, and discovered the store was a mad house. It was packed. I walked in just for the hell of it, and was promptly met by an Apple Store employee. How they saw me in the crowd of people, I do not know. I explained I thought I had a hardware issue with my trackpad on my Macbook Pro. I was shocked when he responded that he could have someone look at it on about 15 minutes. I responded in surprise….REALLY? So about 20 minutes later, a young woman calls my name. So, although I was impressed with the fast service, I had little confidence that they would be able to figure it out and/or was dreading hearing the cost of the repair. I was sure they would blame it on the new HD I had just installed.
I walked up to the counter, pulled out my Macbook Pro and explained my problem. I added that I had just reinstalled the OS, to eliminate a software issue. The young woman considered what I had said for about two seconds, flipped my Macbook Pro over and popped the cover off where the battery and the HD are. I though to myself, oh no, she is going to see the new HD and blame it on that. So much for getting this fixed. However, she immediately popped out the battery, and placed it on the counter. She looked up at me and said, see how the battery wobbles, it has gone bad. Multiple cells in it have gone bad and it had warped. When it heats up, it presses on the trackpad right above it, thereby causing your problem. I said, so to fix this, we need to replaced the battery. She replied, exactly. I sighed and asked how much was that going to cost. She responded, nothing. I was shocked. She left and went into the back of the store and came out a minute later, popped in the new battery and said have a nice day.
I was shocked. Talked about exceeding my expectations.
When did the US become the wimpy kid on the playground?
The United States of America is still a superpower, right? After reading this article how how we are complaining and filing protest letters that China is harassing our ships in international waters, I am a bit worried.
Two of the vessels closed to within 50 feet (15 meters) of the USNS Impeccable, waving Chinese flags and telling the U.S. ship to leave the area, according to a Defense Department statement. The Impeccable sprayed its fire hoses at one of the boats in order to protect itself.
Come on, really the best we could do was squirt them with a water hose – really! I would hope that the United States Navy would command a bit more respect that this, and that we were more capable of defending ourselves. Geesh!
The U.S. Embassy lodged a protest during the weekend with Chinese officials over the incident, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said today.
“We felt that our vessel was inappropriately harassed,” Wood told reporters in Washington.
We sound like the wimpy kid on the play ground…..sigh…
Indeed, Farewell George W. Bush
I missed President George W. Bush’s farewell address last night. However, I just read a couple of articles about it this morning.In farewell speech, Bush says he kept nation safe
13 minutes, is that all we get. Bush was handed a nation in good shape, and is leaving us a nation in shambles, and all we get is 13 minutes. As Jon Stewart mentioned in The Daily Show, is there an area of the nation that he has not messed up. Internationally, our leadership in the world: the only thing any one respects is our military power, which we have trouble now using due to the mis-management of two concurrent wars. Domestically: We have the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of it cause by Bush Administration agencies not doing their job. To add insult to injury, the Bush Treasury department refuses to account to $300 billion in bailout funds. They actually say, they do not know where they went. Is there ANY accountability in the Bush Administration for anything? The best we get is 13 minutes of his time.
Good riddens George W. Bush. Do not let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!
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Safety Council Calls for Cell Phone Ban
So the National Safety Council wants to ban cell phone use in cars. Not just the use of the hand-held device, but bluetooth, non-hand-held devices as well.
Safety Council Calls For Cell Phone Ban
So talking on a cell phone while driving is bad, because you are not concentrating on the road. I do not think anyone disagrees with this. The article says that talking on a hands-free device makes you four times more likely to crash.
“Everybody agrees with this study or report that cell phone use
completely should be banned because it’s more of a mental thing. You’re
not concentrating on driving.”
So it is about not concentrating on driving. Hmmm, well what about talking to others in the car. You know having a verbal conversation with others while driving. If I am using a hands-free device to talk, such as a speaker phone built into the car or a bluetooth ear piece — how is that any different? Are they going to ban anything that distracts the driver from concentrating on driving. What about music? What about eating and drinking in the car? If we are going to ban one, we should ban them all.
I am typically against any paternalistic laws, but I can see the logic and restricting the use of hand-held cell phone use. You only have one hand to drive. However, banning the use of hand-free devices is going a bit too far.
Are Operating Systems Doomed?
Found this in my Infoworld feed this morning. Are Operating Systems Doomed.
The new philosophy of application development is making the traditional OS irrelevant, but what are the implications for enterprise IT?
The author speaks about Google Chrome and Adobe Air as changing the landscape of application development, to be OS independent. To be honest I do not see this as a big surprise. My question is why has it taken this long?
I would love to use Chrome, but the good folks at Google have not decided to let Mac OS X users in on the party. Something that continues to urk me as Google CEO Eric Schmit sits on the board at Apple. Rant on the subject: No Chrome for Mac or Linux Users. So until Google decided to put all that money and developer power into making all Google goodness available to Windows AND Mac and Linux users, I am seeing a hole in this progress. Adobe Air is a different story entirely. They support Windows, Linux and Mac. And guess what, there are tons of apps being developed, and more importantly, used by a growing community. So Google Developers, a word of advice; lets start seeing a systems requirements page like this for all Google applications and services (Adobe Air Systems Requirements).
Now for the comments on enterprise IT, and possibly security, in my humble opinion, they continue to drag their feet and find ways to keep their jobs. Consumer technology is the ‘only’ place there is ‘any’ inovation in the IT world. Even virtualization, which has been the hot technology in IT for the last couple of years got it start with consumers in the late 90s. Virtualization has run into the say foot dragging from IT Security and monolithic IT departments wanting to keep doing things the same way. I mean we just have companies wrapping their mind around instant messaging, and only recently have they started to embrace wiki technology. How many of you reading this that work in corporate IT, have a 100MB-250MB cap on your email via Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. While Google is providing the world ~7GB of mail storage with better uptime than most corporate IT departments, for free. For $50/per user/per year, you can get the same for your company. So why is corporate IT, buying and maintaining servers in datacenters and IT salaries for 1990s class services?
I read an article on a magazine last month that talked about the future where companies would stop providing computers and mobile phones in the same way as they stopped providing clothing expenses back in the 50s. Basically it was saying that everyone will have a computer and a mobile phone and all they will need is a way to connect to their data. To do this future the above are the baby steps.
Extra Second Added to 2008
So I am checking Google News this morning and see this in the Tech section.
Tick tock … tick: Extra second added to 2008
The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.
That slowing spin of the Earth’s axis is the part that was a bit alarming. I really hope that this is normal. You know unlike that ‘natural’ melting of the polar icecaps, the regular extreme weather and the much warmer than normal (or should I say typical 70F Christmas) in North Carolina.
So we get an extra second. Hopefully this does not mean IT people have to rush out and patch all the servers to account for this. 
Fireball over Canada
Talk about timing. Just a couple of weeks before the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Fireball Sparks amazement in Canada
Check out the video.
Beware – Clean up your bird poop
Server Room Disassembled
For those that know me, I have and always will be a bit of a computer geek. You just cannot beat it out of me with a stick. Even now that I have taken a position in management and using a Mac, I have still not stopped geeking out once in a while. However, the days of requiring a rack of computers to install the latest beta version of Microsoft OS, Active Directory, Exchange or open source Linux distribution or server application are probably gone. Although I have fond memories of those days, and miss being the guy in the room that technically knows more about the latest and greatest things than anyone else in the room, I have moved on – life goes on. So leaving that era of my life behind, I no longer need a so-called ‘server room’. All of the servers have been shutdown, all the data wiped. I have gone from a potential rack of 8 live servers, plus a bench for assemble and disassembly to one office with three computers. No longer do I have a working Active Directory domain with DNS, DHCP, active mail servers for web front ends, custom router/firewall systems, private instant messaging servers or hardware RAID enabled file servers. On August 11th, 2008, it all came down. Now to be realistic, most of it has not been powered up for the past two years…but that is beside the point – it was still in the room ready to be powered up.
Now the rack sits disassembled in a neat pile in the corner of the room. All the extra computers have been reviewed by friends for possible life in their active server rooms. The rest are all piled up downstairs awaiting recycling. It is the end of an era….
Now on to bigger and better things – mobile computing and the 21st century.
