May Contain Nuts

So yesterday the most wonderful thing happened… I finally got a new Mac.  Y’know, to replace the one that I had sold on consignment at the end of May?

Last night was spent getting applications and personal effects moved onto the machine from the extenal life boat drive and setting up not one but two installations of Windows XP (one for Boot Camp gaming, the other for running 3DS MAX in a VM so I don’t have to restart the computer all the time).  This in and of itself took almost an hour to set up for, because I needed to create a slipstream disc with XP SP2 on it (I was unsure of the slipstreamable status of SP3, and didn’t want to risk it), and the process for doing so, while not necessarily complicated, was hampered by a lack of certain pieces of software that ultimately became unnecessary once I found nLite, which did all the hard work for me.  Trying to do it on Vista was also not entirely conducive to the process, as said missing pieces of software were incompatible with the new OS, but in the end I managed to get it done.

So now I have three different computers running on one machine, each with their own name (the new iMac’s name is Apollo, courtesy of Oscy, the Boot Camp partition is named Hephaestus, ’cause I thought the fact that he forged lightning bolts was somehow appropriate and amusing, and the VM machine is just called “MaxBox” because I was feeling incredibly uncreative by the time I got to that install).  There’s still a little bit of work to do to get everything back exactly as it was on my PowerMac, and I need to max out my machine’s RAM as soon as financially possible, but beyond that, I’m back in the saddle again.

So now comes the apology part…

Over the past three and a half months, my only computers have been the one at work (which I’m typically supposed to, y’know, be doing work on), the Dell hooked up to our television for the original purpose of watching downloaded movies and TV shows, and a G4 eMac running Tiger that probably wouldn’t have even been able to serve as a boat anchor thanks to its lack of a handle on the top (language warning on that link, btw).  Needless to say, this was not supposed to be a long-term solution to the problem of me consigning my G5, and with regular platitudes promising payment “early next week” for the better part of two months, I was never really motivated to come up with a seriously functioning secondary setup for my needs.  As a result, my access to (and general tolerance for reading) forums, chats, IMs, and even emails was rather substantially degraded, as I had no interest in setting up a whole ‘nother machine with my accounts and preferences and whatnot when a new iMac was perpetually just around the corner, and using a TV for a computer monitor (even an LCD TV) is something I regularly refuse to wish upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the thrust of the above paragraph’s worth of justifications is that I have been rather remarkably unreliable this summer, for which I sincerely and humbly apologize.  I’m doing my best to get back up and running at full capacity as quickly as I can, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be moving full steam ahead on several things that were supposed to be done mid-last-month, and following up on some emails and other communications that have sat far too long unanswered.  As far as inconveniences go, I realize that being stuck with a computer attached to a TV is far less problematic than having one’s house flooded by a hurricane, but this has been a pretty crappy summer for me, performance-wise, and the computer issues only compounded my general apathy towards the world.  God help me if I’m ever stuck in a hurricane, you may never see me again :P.

Also, Mister Cloak, I want to apologize directly to you for not only not answering your IM last night, but dropping offline almost immediately after you sent it… my connection to Steam last night was not exactly reliable… I think I was on and off about 10 times in the space of 5 minutes at one point.  Finally I just gave up and signed out completely.

This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately.  Work deadlines suck (the life out of me).  Anyway, on with the funny.

They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.

- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)

The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) - as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website - touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy.  The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really.  With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin).  Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you :P).

Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers.  Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu).  Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.

This is going to be a pseudo-live blog post; basically, I’m writing as it happens, and will just post it at the end of the event.  I’m also about an hour late in getting started, so I’ll just jump right in…

A lot of folks (including the live commentators at Engadget) have been complaining about the volume of 3rd party demos in the keynote thus far.  While I do agree that at 11:00 they seem to be continuing with no end in sight, I think it’s sort of a good move on Apple’s part to really play up the mass-adoption of the iPhone SDK and showcase as many different ways of using it as possible while the cameras are rolling.  I wouldn’t read too much into the current stock drop being indicative of anything… Apple’s stock always plummets during and after the Keynote because Jesus did not, in fact, appear on stage as predicted.

Some of these apps are pretty slick.  The games all look fabulous, and the social2.0 location-aware apps from Loopt and Associated Press sound very impressive.  The push notification service sounds impressive, though I’m sure a lot of folks will question the stability and scalability of a unified point for all service updates to the user’s iPhone… RIM’s service outages and .Mac’s occasional freak-outs come to mind as negative points here…

New features in the 2.0 software look cool: full Office and iWork document support, bulk message delete (yay!), save images from emails, scientific mode calculator (also yay) and contact search are niceties.  The parental controls aren’t really that fascinating to me, but that may be due to my lack of parentaling duties.  The $10 price point for the Touch2.0 update is also a much nicer pill to swallow than the $20 update for 1.1.3.

Mobile Me: Still not 100% sure about the name of the service, but if the stills from Engadget and MacRumors are anything to go by, this is going to totally kick .Mac’s ass in the usability and awesomeness categories.  Still $99/year, but they’ve kindly doubled the storage to 20GB.  Huzzah!  And I can finally view my calendar online!  Huzzah again!  Early July, with the iPhone software update.  Not quite as huzzah, but I’ll take it.  No mention of bookmark sync to Windows Safari though… grr…

Cheap As Free iPhones!  8GB for $199, 16GB for $299, whee!  Now, drop the price on the plan and I’ll sell my Touch ;).  Seriously, I love my Touch, but the lack of reliable Wifi around here is kind of a killer (there’s plenty in downtown Spokane, but it’s not free, and the signal is questionable… to say nothing of coverage out here in the Valley).  Just wish AT&T’s plans weren’t so damned expensive.  There’s even 3G coverage out here, so I’d be set for data, I’d just be broke at the same time.

I’ll be interested to hear what comes of the 10.6 stuff after lunch, provided any of it is allowed out of the session…

Update: After reading through Apple’s information on Mobile Me, it appears that syncing of bookmarks across platforms (and even browsers) is supported, though Firefox doesn’t appear to be included in that support.  Still, cross-platform Safari bookmark sync is something that should have been built-in from day 1 of the Windows Safari release for .Mac users, so at least that much is working now.  I still might stick with Firefox and Delicious on both platforms because bookmark tags are my new best friend, but I’ll see what Mobile Me’s sync capabilities are before making a final decision there.  I’m also interested in seeing if there are any improvements to iDisk’s performance in store for this upgrade, because that’s been a decidedly torturous experience in the past (though Comcast’s draconian upload speed certainly does nothing to help).

So my Mac has been at the local Apple reseller’s since Wednesday, to be diagnosed and spec’d for a sale on consignment.  I realize there’s more important business ahead of it, like Macs that are actually in need of repairs, but still, I miss my G5.  It’s even weirder because I still have a computer to use, so it’s not like I’m going through withdrawal or anything, I just miss my G5.  I keep trying to tell myself not to get so concerned about it, because the guys at Mac Odyssey are really good people, and all of my data is backed up on my external drive, and there’s nothing to worry about, but I can’t help but be worried.  Hopefully I’ll hear something Monday when the person in charge of consignment deals is back at the store (I called yesterday to see what the progress was, but he wasn’t there on the weekend).

God help me if I ever have a kid go off to summer camp…

It’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness “here’s what’s on my mind while I’m at work” posts.  Feel free to insert your own “and now, for something completely different”s between paragraphs.  The people responsible for sacking those responsible for these subtitles have been sacked.

Costco is a cool place to get movie tickets, apparently.  $15 for 2 adult tickets at Regal, which is better than even the matinee ticket prices… and like $5 cheaper than the evening prices.  There will be serious Prince Caspianage today, followed by even more serious Indiana Jonesing next week.  On that note, we also got the new box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy Wednesday.  Willie?  Still twice as annoying as I remember her being (Osc was ready to shoot her during the first scene at the Obi Wan bar [which amused her to no end] in Shang Hai).

It’s gonna be the future soon.

Apple is apparently expanding on their original patent application for location-based content delivery.  I think I mentioned back when they signed that deal with Starbucks that being able to get on-demand location-aware content delivered to you in places outside the coffee shop would be seriously awesome… ordering movie tickets without waiting in line, buying a soundtrack from a theater’s “now showing” custom wi-fi music store, getting maps of malls or airports… the list goes on.  The iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile internet devices are quickly approaching and even surpassing the absolute utility of concepts like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Seriously, Star Trek’s got nothing on this stuff.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s taking the map angle in a different, more public direction (I think the smart whiteboard application is more useful then 4×6-foot interactive maps, personally).  Did I mention it’s gonna be the future soon?

By the way, I have serious respect for anyone who can sing and play an instrument at the same time with any degree of capability, because I simply fail at being coordinated enough to manage that.

Recently I gave up on the money management app I got in the MacHeist bundle, Cha-Ching, and ported the last month or so’s worth of financial stuff into another app called MoneyWell.  It’s a very different application from Cha-Ching, but it seems to have much better support, is a lot more stable, and makes it possible to really granularly control our spending, which is a really good thing.  It’s amazing what you discover when you actually sit down and plan out all of your finances in a really serious way, and with all of that information in mind, we can make better decisions about how to spend the money we make in the future.

Jonathan Coulton makes any work day better.  I blame linking to “Future Soon” for getting me started listening to him today.

I’m very seriously considering getting a refurbished AirPort Extreme so that we can get the Wii and our Touches hooked back up to the internet at home, because we’ve run out of unlocked networks elsewhere in the apartment complex to piggy-back off of, and I have a very serious need to play LostWinds.  I need to play it very seriously, in fact.

On a related note, I listed my G5 on Craigslist last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it in short order, but if not, I may need to look into alternatives (still thinking that the local reseller, Mac Odyssey, wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the 30% they take for finding a buyer and managing the sale).  I’m hoping to get enough for the G5 and the display combined to cover the cost of a refurbished iMac at $1599, with maybe a little left over for the AirPort Extreme.