Brad’s Life

So I just logged into my AT&T Wireless account, and saw this:

I mean, for real.  Does anyone here think a *FREE*!!!!!! Pantech whatchamacrapit is a good upgrade to my iPhone?  I’m sure Apple uses the same upgrade screen for everyone, but I’m not even eligible for an upgrade at the moment, and if I were, it’d sure take more than THAT to make me want to drop the mother of all cellphones.  <sigh>  The Death Star still has a few things to learn, eh?

So I waited in line all day, starting at 8:00 AM. I was the first person in line at the Waco Dr. Cingular/AT&T store, and the first to walk out the door with a phone. Along the way, I met several great people, including Michael, who acutally makes his living blogging about Apple products (what a job!). He sat next to me while we waited all day.

On first impression, this phone is solid. No freezes or hangups yet, which is already a million times better than the Cingular 8525 the iPhone replaced, and it does what it does very well and…dare I say it…prettily.

Below are some unboxing images for those of you who haven’t seen what the whole shebang looks like yet.

The only feature I can say so far I’m really going to need is a way to easily turn off the email notifications when I’m asleep, while keeping the ringer active if a call comes in during the night. So far, the only thing I’ve figured out is to go into settings->sounds->New Email and turn it off, then back on in the morning, which is a little too much of a pain to be a good long-term solution. Ideas, from any other iPhone users out there?

So, normally I only sync my iPod when there’s a new podcast I want to throw on there. But today, as I was getting ready, I started listening to TWiT. By the time I went to go meet Jenn for lunch, I wasn’t finished, so I synced it onto my iPod to finish listening. So maybe this shouldn’t be exciting, but it sync’ed over to the iPod the place where I was in the podcast. When I went to pick up the TWiT episode and listen to it, after having carefully noted where in the audio I needed to scroll to pick up where I’d left off, the iPod was already there. It knew where I was in the podcast from my computer.

Simple thing, perfectly obvious, but until today I never knew this was part of the package. Yet another plus on the “little things” for Apple!

So, if that headline didn’t catch your attention, I don’t know what will.  Actual, not-so-dramatic story below:

So the magsafe adapter on my Macbook Pro started showing signs of wear a few weeks back.  Just small signs, really.  There’s a little plastic sheath that goes over the part of the cable that connects to the magsafe head, and it had started to split a little bit.  Not a big deal, right? Well, it wasn’t until yesterday.

See, yesterday, I got home from work and pulled up the trusty MBP, plugging it in to charge back up.  Just after I sat down, I noticed my screen backlight kept coming bright and dark (a signal that it was switching back and forth between battery and outlet power).  So, I looked at the magsafe plug head, and it wasn’t lit up.  I adjusted the cable a bit ’til it lit up, and all was well for a few seconds.  Those precious few  seconds later, though, there was a spark from the plug head, some wires began to glow, and there was a bit of smoke coming out.  Luckily, I caught it quickly, no damage done that I can tell.  Good thing this didn’t happen when I was asleep one night ,eh?  It was at this point that I decided to unplug the power supply, and call Apple.

It’s pretty clear to me from the conversation that ensued that this wasn’t Apple’s first rodeo with this sort of issue.  They asked a lot of questions about if I was harmed, if any furniture was harmed, the color of the smoke, how long the smoke lasted, do I feel ok, did my computer appear to be ok, did I take any pictures or video, etc.  In the end, they are sending me a replacement adapter, and having me send back the original.  The only problem I have with that is that I’m sorta left hanging all weekend.  It’s possible the new adapter will ship today and get here Monday, but it’s also possible it will go out Monday and get here Tuesday or Wednesday.  So, I’m rationing battery very carefully.  This post is being typed at maximum speed so I can get it up and get the MBP shut back down for use tomorrow as well.  I’m having to move some of my bored-browsing to Jenn’s computer for the time being.

I’ve got an Austinite friend who might be kind enough to pick me up a new secondary adapter from the Apple store before she comes into Waco tomorrow, so let’s hope that pulls through.  If I get around to it, I might add pictures to this post later so you can see the [overdramatization] charred, blackened remains of what was once my MBP power supply [/overdramatization], but that will have to be when I’ve got new power ready to go.  I won’t chance the upload time on the battery right now.  It’s like I’m in a bomb shelter using up the last bits of clean water…

The real question is, is it better for battery economy to keep the MBP asleep when I’m not using it, for a light battery draw and quick-and-ready access, or is it better to shutdown and start back up, for no intervening battery use, but a huge waste of power at the beginning and end of each session?  A penny for your thoughts…

Here I am back on my mac soapbox…

I was looking recently for a reliable way to backup my computer, and came across this article, which seemed like the perfect fit. It’s geeky, it’s solid and simple, and it makes use of the power of the Mac OS X’s *nix underlying framework in a powerful way…at least until you get to Page 2. There, it goes from a nice, geeky CLI “rsync” command to using AppleScript and iCal to run it daily. Now, AppleScript and iCal are great apps, and both have their uses, but has this guy ever heard of “cron”?

Cron is one of the most powerful and awesome things that a *nix system has. I don’t know a whole lot about it’s inner workings, but I know that creating a crontab with this script would be ideal. It would run completely in the background and be perfectly reliable, instead of requiring a lightweight Apple program to run an Applescript just to run a CLI command.

It seems these guys are just musicians who happen to be Apple fans, so I guess I’ll cut them some slack, but I’d really like to hear from someone who knows a little more about Cron, so I’ve got the chance to take the great CLI instructions given here, and rewrite page 2 into a detailed set of instructions for setting up a crontab. Anyone? If not, I’ll learn Cron myself just to write the instructions. Help!

So, I came across this webpage today that shows an attempt at a Linux tack on the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads. I’ve seen several tries at this before, the most prominent being one with Milton from Office Space in a Tron suit, but it seems someone’s finally come up with an ad that not only is funny, but feels right, and is functional.

I believe that this was written for an internal Novell conference, but if I were John Q. Viewer seeing this as one of my first real introductions to Linux, it would make me interested enough to want to check it out. It makes Linux seem warm, friendly, attainable, yet not…smug.

Don’t get me wrong, I own a Mac. I’m writing this post on it. But we Mac users are smug, most of the time. We believe our software and our OS are better because…well, because they are, damnit. But being right doesn’t always win the court of public opinion, and this is one case where we sometimes do ourselves a disservice. We (and by this “we”, I mean the Mac community en masse) come off as almost brainwashed into believing in the unquestionable superiority of our computers, which can be a turnoff to outsiders, much like religious zealots with in-your-face proselytizing can scare away more people than they ever win over.

But Linux is finally in a positing, after years of skulking about on server racks and Comp. Sci. majors’ desks, to have a shot, albeit ever so slight, to go mainstream, in a positive way. (ed. note — I realize that one more comma would likely cause that entire sentence to collapse, but I’m not here to keep it reading smoothly, I’m here to keep myself entertained. I’m the only one reading this garbage anyway, right?) Here is an OS that is powerful, stable, secure, beautiful, and all-capable — in short, all the things Vista wants to be, though it ends up looking like a tranny with a good surgeon. You can’t quite put your finger on it: everything looks right, but it still looks…wrong, somehow. Linux is also open, free, and ultimately user-configurable. And, if I had to pick my biggest gripes with OS X, they’d be the price of upgrades, proprietary nature, and assumptions about some settings that are very difficult or impossible to change (<rant>Oh, InsomniaX, if only you’d let me close my MacBook Pro without it sleeping away on me…UPDATE PLEASE!!!</rant>).

All in all, I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here. I guess the only conclusion I can draw is, Linux might finally be ready for the desktop, and ads like this might be just the trick to get people to realize it. My only fear, after listening to this week’s “Security Now”, is that Vista might finally be Microsoft getting it right, or close enough that everyone that was starting to look for alternatives will come back into the fold before they actually make the right a move.

So, for now, you must all do your part. Find your “Aunt Edith”, be it a friend, grandparent, neighbor, etc., and get them exposed to Linux. Start with the flavor of the month, Ubuntu, if you want. If we can each get one person, just one, to give it a shot, this world might just be a better, freer place for us all.

Who’da thunk that a simple domain transfer would get so messy? As I write this, no one will be able to see it for (hours? days?) because my domain currently exists in some sort of lingo between 1and1 and Dreamhost. I’m not even sure of the status of the transfer, and I get a different response from each attempt to find out, and each company seems to be blissfully unaware of what the other is doing. Despite all I had heard about the competence of Dreamhost, I’m beginning to doubt my decision to make the fateful move. In the meanwhile, email seems to be swimming along happily, at least. Maybe someday everything will propagate and all will be well. For the now, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best. I’m still dreaming of hosting heaven in ‘07!