Born Weird

One of the (many) objections conservatives and libertarians have raised to one of the (many) health care reform proposals presently being bandied about in Congress is the funding mechanism for any sort of public option. One current Democratic proposal on the table would levy taxes on the rich to help foot the bill (“rich” in this case I believe starts at $500,000 annual income for couples). Predictably, this has been decried as a “redistribution of wealth” that should be opposed.

How stupid is this objection? Let me count the ways! Read the entire post »

Continuing a long, long history of such rumors, AppleInsider.com posted yet another “The tablet is coming! The tablet is coming!” article last Friday. Adding fuel to the fire, which has been burning for some time now, on Monday the Financial Times published a piece suggesting said tablet could be arriving (or at least announced) as soon as this fall (the AppleInsider piece only posited “early next year”).

But unless Apple’s been hiding some major new software development from us — always a possibility — I just don’t see it happening. Because right now Apple doesn’t offer an OS that’d be appropriate for a 10″ screen.

If there’s one thing the designers and engineers at Apple have understood since Steve Jobs retook the helm, it’s the importance of seamless integration between hardware and software. The beautiful marriage between the two is largely what enabled the iPod and iPhone to quickly emerge as leaders in fields where devices with similar features already existed. And their tight control over Mac hardware (Psystar be damned!) helps software engineers build an OS that is more stable and more intelligent than its competitors.

Read the entire post »

I’m pleased to report that I’m writing this post (and wrote the previous one, for that matter) on a shiny new 24″ iMac. Yep, Apple finally got me one that worked. And they even apologized for it.

Not long after publishing my earlier post on the dead iMac saga, I received a lovely automated email from Apple asking me to please rate my recent AppleCare phone call. As you can imagine, I gave my experience very low marks. Lo and behold, the following day I received a call from Rachel at Apple’s online store customer care center, saying she’d received my responses and wanted to hear about what, exactly, had caused such negative ratings.

So I explained what had transpired. She apologized for my having received a dead machine, but really what she was concerned with was the poor communication and assistance I received after the machine got here. She agreed that not being able to return the machine to my local Apple store was pretty stupid, but explained that’s just how things work with their system. But the folks I spoke to should have known that and gotten things moving with the return label and such on Friday.

Anyway, after agreeing that things weren’t handled well, she said my replacement machine was already in-process and would arrive in a few days, at which point she’d call to follow up and make sure I was properly taken care of.

The machine arrived on Thursday the 16th, and worked. Which was nice. I spoke to Rachel again on Friday. She was happy to hear the new machine was in working order and offered $100 worth of stuff from the online Apple store, with free expedited shipping, as a way of apologizing for Apple not handling the situation better.

Martha and I took her up on that offer, of course. I had her send a miniDisplayPort-to-DVI adapter, and Martha got an anti-glare cover for her iPod as well as nice sleeve for it. It’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing, expecially given the obscene amount Apple charges for the display adapter (we’d bought one at the local store already, which we subsequently returned).

I love the new machine; it’s noticeably faster than the old one, though I must say 24″ feels a bit ridiculous to me (its network id is “Jumbotron” for a reason).

All of which means I’m now selling the old one, if you’re interested.

Last night at dinner, I ran into the mother and brother of Minnesota Vikings OT Ryan Cook, which was kinda cool. Our brief chat inspired me to actually lay down some of my complaints about the way the Vikings and Timberwolves have been managing personnel.

The Vikings

While I’ve never been a huge Vikings fan, I’ve followed the team ever since I was a kid growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs. To me, the good wide receiver Carter on the team was number 81 Anthony before Cris entered the scene. I remember quarterbacks like Wade Wilson and Tommy Kramer.

My first exposure to poor front-office decisionmaking in the Minnesota sports scene was the 1989 trade in which the Vikings liquated their future for RB Herschel Walker, a trade so massive it has its own wikipedia entry. As an eleven-year-old I remember thinking to myself, “All this for just one player? Does that make sense?” And of course, it didn’t.

Read the entire post »

(Note: If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may have already caught wind of this…)

Last Monday I ordered a new iMac for myself. Rather than go with one of their stock configurations, I customized mine a bit, upgrading the 2.93ghz machine with the ATI Radeon 4850 video card. I’m not a gamer, which is what high-end cards are usually for, but I’m of the belief that getting a fast GPU is a great way to future-proof a machine these days, as CPU speeds are starting to level off.

Anyway, the day after I ordered the Mac, I got a call from a friend in a tech crisis needing to quickly procure a new PC for her boss. By helping her out I’ve managed to get roughly parallel experiences with Dell and Apple. And right now, Dell is wiping the floor with Apple.

Why? Well, sure, there were a number of irritating things about using Dell’s website to configure a machine. For one, the online chat feature didn’t seem to work in Safari. For another, the configuration options were bizarre — why is the “Windows Vista to Windows XP Downgrade” option (stupid enough on its own) available on Vostro desktops but not Studio ones? And so on…

But I’ll give Dell credit for delivering the goods when all was said and done. According to the Dell site, the machine I configured wouldn’t ship until July 13. Instead, it shipped the day after placing the order (July 8) and arrived the following day (July 9). And it cost less than $800. And since I haven’t heard any complaints, I’m pretty sure the machine works.

Contrast this with my iMac, which cost over $1800, shipped July 7 but arrived the afternoon of the 10th, and, uhhh…. doesn’t work. And when I say “doesn’t work,” I mean the thing doesn’t even power on. Pressing (or holding) the power button on the back of the machine results in a faint-sounding series of clicking noises (from the HD, perhaps?) and nothing else — no LEDs light up, no power hits the screen, nothing. I tried several outlets and even tried the power cable being used in my current iMac, all to no avail.

After this brief troubleshooting, I called Apple. The two people I spoke to, while friendly, were pretty much useless; I was told I’d get a call back from someone in “Sales Support” to figure out what to do about the situation within a business day. Of course, it being Friday afternoon, that meant I’d have to wait through the weekend just to know what the solution might be.

Unable to wait that long, I called AppleCare this morning with my case number to see if I couldn’t grease the wheels a bit. Eventually I got handed off to someone who told me I should have already received the return authorization and shipping label details via email. Um… what?

First, I was never told to expect such things. No one told me the plan was for me to ship the machine back to Apple. Nor did they indicate I’d be getting any specifics via email. After poking around I managed to find the emails in question in my spam box (my SpamSieve is quite aggressive).

Second, why do I have to ship it back to Apple anyway? I live less than 3 miles from an Apple Store! Wouldn’t it be easier (and cheaper for Apple) if I just brought my shiny new doorstop right into the store? Wouldn’t that mean they could ship me a replacement (since they certainly don’t have my exact machine in stock) sooner?

Apparently not. Instead, I get to slap some labels on a box and Fedex the machine back to Apple.

Once Apple gets confirmation from Fedex that my machine is in the pipeline, they’ll begin processing my replacement. That means it’ll take “1-3 days” to get the machine ready, and then 2-3 days to ship it (they said they’ll expedite shipping, but “expedited” apparently doesn’t mean “overnight”). So if I’m lucky I’ll get my new new iMac the end of this coming week.

If Apple really wanted to blow my socks off with their customer service — which, really, I think they ought to be trying to do, seeing as how they shipped me a completely unusable product and I’ve been a loyal Apple customer for well over a decade now — they would have said, “Just bring the dead machine to the nearest Apple Store. When you’re there you can decide if you want us to ship you a replacement machine with the same specs, or, as our way of saying we’re sorry, we’ll upgrade you to a machine we have in stock that has a faster CPU but slighter slower GPU, if that’s what you’d prefer.” If Apple had offered that, I could have cruised over to the Apple Store on Friday, swapped my brick for a working machine, and had the entire weekend to play, configure, transfer files, and so forth.

Oh well. I’m sure once I get a machine that works, I’ll be much happier with it than I would be with a plasticky Dell tower that cost less than half as much, and eventually I’ll have forgotten this whole shit week. Right? Right?? (It doesn’t help that I also ordered an iPod Touch for Martha at the same time, which arrived the day before my iMac and works great, giving her a fun new toy to play with).

In the meantime, though… I must say Apple looks a lot worse than Dell.

We’re currently in the “dark days” of the sports calendar. No football, no college basketball. It’s too early in the season to care about baseball much. I’m stuck with golf, tennis, NASCAR, and cycling. Occasionally a soccer match of interest will come along (¡viva FC Barce!) but really I’m busy pleading with the calendar for NFL training camps to start.

The New England Patriots open camp on July 30. There’s a lot to anticipate this season, what with the return of Brady and all. In particular, here’s the news out of training camp I’m looking forward to hearing:

Brady’s Timing
By all accounts, the leading man under center’s knee is completely healed and he’s not limited in any way. The fact that he suffered the injury at the beginning of last season (as opposed to, say, Carson Palmer, who blew his ACL in the playoffs) means that Brady is further along physically than most QBs returning from a knee explosion. However, that doesn’t mean he’ll be his old self immediately. In particular, it will take some time to re-establish communication and rhythm with the receiving corps, which features some new faces that weren’t around last time Brady played (e.g. Joey Galloway).

Emerging Secondary
It seems like there’s always a lot of offseason turnover in the Patriots’ defensive backfield, but the changes this year seem unusually extensive, with Hobbs having been traded and Harrison retiring. I’m really curious to see who earns significant playing time. Will much-ballyhooed rookies Pat Chung (S) and Darius Butler (CB) see much time?  How will second-year CBs Terrence Wheatley and Jonathan Wilhite fare, competing with the new additions of Shawn Springs and Leigh Bodden?

Replacing Vrabel
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing among both fans and pundits regarding the gap at OLB the team created after trading Mike Vrabel. While it’s hard to see a veteran leader with gas still in the tank let go, it’s difficult to argue that things were headed in the right direction for the team: he was clearly slowing down (no TD receptions last year!) and his salary was shooting up.

While I don’t think the team’s failure to secure Jason Taylor or Julius Peppers means the OLB spot is now deficient, I’m very curious to see who winds up getting the starting spot. There are a lot of names in the ring: Gary Guyton, Pierre Woods, Shawn Crable… even Tully Banta-Cain is back and in the mix.

Backfield Deployment
Not content with aging the roster by adding Galloway, the Patriots also signed veteran RB Fred Taylor. Maroney and Sammy Morris should both be healthy, and of course Kevin Faulk is still around. LaMont Jordan, on the other hand, isn’t. While it’s clear how Faulk will be used, everyone else’s role seems up the air. How much does Taylor have left? Is Maroney going to cement his status as a first-round bust, or was he legitimately hampered by his shoulder injury last season? It’ll be interesting to see who gets the carries.

Only 23 days until camp starts!

So it’s about time I started writing in this blog. Bear with me; I’ve written very little the last several years so the ride is likely to be a bit bumpy at first. My prose will improve over time. I hope.

Anyway, of the many topics I plan on covering in this space, I’d like to kick things off with a brief discussion regarding Mac software. Specifically, Coda.

I bought Coda last fall after getting tired of some workflow irritations stemming from using a combination of BBEdit, Transmit, svnX, et al. All in all, I love Coda and it has replaced BBEdit as my coding tool of choice. However, it lacks a few features that have me continuing to regularly turn to BBEdit for help. If Coda were to offer the following, I could abandon BBEdit entirely. In no particular order:

Code folding
It’s just so much easier to focus on a particular section of code if you can eliminate the “noise” around it. Plus, I’ve found code folding a fantastic way of identifying problems with other people’s markup (something I find myself doing regularly), such as missing/extraneous end tags.

Auto (re)formatting
Yes, yes, I know I can use HTMLTidy for this as a Mac OS X service. But I find doing so cumbersome, as I need to clean things up with different config settings regularly. Which means either using the command line HTMLTidy or switching TidyService .conf files, neither of which works well in a Coda-contained workflow.

Improved Find/Replace UI
Coda supports multi-file searching and regular expressions, both of which are essential. But I just don’t care for Coda’s interface for these, with only single-line (visible) fields and limited per-directory options. BBEdit’s find/replace gets its own robust dialog, which is far superior.

Tag Wrapping
I often want to wrap a tag around a text selection. BBEdit makes this easy. Coda? Well, it’s true there’s a plugin to do this, but drilling down two levels in a contextual menu to do it seems stupid. It belongs in Coda’s core.

There are other things I’d love to see changed about Coda, of course, but these are the ones that keep me clinging to BBEdit.