When I was in the Apple Store San Diego, the Genius at the bar intimated that, if rumours of the kerfuffle between Apple and Chinook Centre were true, Apple probably wouldn't be opening a Store in Calgary for three to five years. Presumably out of spite. But he mentioned that a Store in the West Edmonton Mall was in the offing, and it looks like that's true.

For years now, lots of companies have tried to develop "the iPod killer"--the holy grail of personal electronic widgets that will finally end Apple's strangehold over the personal electronic widget department.

Today we have finally seen the face of the iPod killer. And Apple makes it.



The iPhone needs a few things to really be successful, though:

• More capacity. The biggest iPhone holds 8 GB; my iPod holds 60. True, it's only half full, and I've put all kinds of random shit into it (do I really need to have the Burger King "I Am Man" commercial with me at all times?) but 8 GB sounds pretty tight. Particularly if I'm meant to be watching full-length movies on it.

• A screen protector of some kind. iPods scratch like a motherfucker. And I hate to think what one would look like if I were intentionally painting it with finger grease.

• More software. I use my PDA for a lot more than just my contact list. I use it for Bejeweled. And Pocket Quicken. And for that program that controlled other people's TVs. Since the iPhone runs OS X, I imagine that new software for it will be coming out very soon, though.

Right now, the thing looks pretty friggin' sweet, but under sober reflection, it wouldn't actually replace my Palm or my iPod. It would replace my phone, but honestly, my phone doesn't do all that much apart from make calls.

One thing I'm really wondering is: doesn't Linksys own the name?

Happy ho day!

Last weekend was our gaming Christmas party at Jason's house. We decided that Lisa would drive, and therefore I could drink--drink like I've hardly ever drunk before! In a fit of insanity, I even decided that I'd let Jason mix most of them.

That's not something one should ever do.

This was taken in the brief period between when I was awesome fun drunk and when I was flat on my ass. See how I'm green? That's not from gamma rays. Though I did hulk out a few times.

It's been about twelve years since I did that the last time. Hopefully it'll be twelve years before I do it the next time.

Everything's pretty much set for the holidays: I even got my MacBook back from the repair shop the day after I took it in, which has got to be a new record. A few weeks ago, the battery suddenly died--as in, it worked on Friday night and on Saturday morning it refused to believe the battery even existed. It's apparently a new and common problem.

"You're cursed," Mom said. Nine logic boards on my old iBook, two repairs on the new computer so far--it's a good thing the damn machines kick so much ass otherwise.

I took the computer in a couple of weeks ago and switched the battery with one of their MacBooks to make sure it was the battery that was at fault--and sure enough, my computer charged their battery, and their computer wouldn't charge mine. So I left them with just the battery and kept my computer, congratulating myself for my cleverness.

Ten days later I phoned and Alan said that they actually did need the computer, too, thanks so much. So, so much for that. However, evidently it just needed its power management system tweaked and that was it; now it's back and my replacement battery is on order.

Ten days off work! Well, nine days now. I plan to use this time to finally put up my surround speakers, assemble the Lego and My Little Pony cabinets, and finish putting together my full-colour, thirty-four page Lulu book of artwork. There's four months still to go before the Expo, but writing all the blurbs is pretty hard.

We're also going to drive to Medicine Hat to visit my grandparents, who are getting pretty hesitant to make the drive themselves. Can't really blame them. Plus it'll be our first road trip in the Caravan, which I'm looking forward to. It's like we rented a car a month ago and never took it back!

They still owe us a personalized license plate for it, too. Any suggestions?

Remember my old iBook? After eight logic board replacements, I got Apple to agree that enough was enough and they replaced it with a brand spankin' new MacBook.

Which had just come out the day before. I had a qualm about getting the first edition of any computer hardware, but I wasn't going to argue with free. Or, almost free, since I had to pay extra for black.

My brand new computer's heat sink expands when it gets too hot, and it touches the heat sensor's cable. The insulation on that cable has now melted, so when the computer reaches 60 degrees, it shuts down without asking. Or saving.

Apple has acknowledged the problem. The solution? Logic board replacement.

Right now the thing is functional because I'm using a utility to force the fan to run at maximum speed, which keeps the CPU cool enough to stay running. The keyboard now feels frosty cool to the touch, which is kind of goofy.

Recently I explained the parable of Job to Lisa. Baby, I'm livin' it.

I guess it's nice that I can do this. But it doesn't seem like something one ought to be doing. Especially not to just to be able to run one little program. Okay, two: OS X just won't run Windows Media Player very well.

As a followup to a discussion I had at Dan's house last week, while it's possible to run Windows on a Mac, it's not officially possible to run OS X on a PC. You certainly can't just put the DVD into a Windows machine, as it won't boot it. If Apple actually did allow that to happen, it would kill their hardware sales: people would just buy the cheaper PC hardware and install the superior OS on it. Wouldn't you?

Unofficially, the project to get OS X on a PC is called OSx86. It's currently a race: with each new release, Apple prevents OSx86 from running; several weeks after each new release, someone circumvents Apple's prevention.

Unrelatedly, cribbed from Neil Gaiman's blog: this is for all of you who tell me that proper grammar doesn't matter.

It looks like we'll have to buy a house sooner than expected. Currently the rent on our apartment is $849 a month, but yesterday Kyle let me know that our suites are currently renting for $1249. And that's now. What will it be like in October, when our lease is up?

It doesn't make sense to pay $1300 in rent. And if we did that, we certainly wouldn't be able to save for a downpayment. Or anything else.

The first step is to see a mortgage broker and find out what's available to us, and what we could find in that range. It seems stupid to buy when prices are so high, but I don't think they're going down anytime soon. Plateau maybe.

( In better news, my replacement computer arrived this week. )

A few weeks ago I took The Visual QuickPro Guide to Panther Server out from the library. I'd have gotten the Tiger Server Guide instead, but unfortunately it does not yet exist.

Ordinarily I learn computery things by just monkeying with them, but I've been going through the manual page by page, section by section. Tiger Server's administration may be graphical, but it isn't intuitive. At least, it isn't to me.

This weekend I got to the end of the book.

Updated mikeintosh.net DNS to point to my own IP: accomplished.

Updated fernish.com to also point at my own IP: done.

Mail server set up and running: done. E-mail addresses for Lisa and I plus catch-all admin account: working fine.

Web server running: yep.

Redirect for incoming fernish.com requests to Lisa's home folder instead of mine: not there yet. I think both domains are still going to my user folder. I will have to work on that.

Installed Gallery: miserable, miserable failure.

Gallery is an open source image hosting thingie that's, well, pretty much just like LiveJournal's service, really. Maire used to run it on her server. It makes the creation and maintaining of art sites a lot easier.

Gallery 2.1.1 has a pretty, pretty web-based installer, which gets to the point at which it connects to the mySQL database, which it then refuses to do. One has to pre-create the database in Terminal, which I've done. But the web interface won't connect to it. I've reinstalled mySQL and PHP, both of which Tiger Server already comes with. It didn't help. It probably made things worse, since now I have two mySQL interfaces which don't really get along with each other. I beat my head against that brick wall for a few hours today.

I tried installing Gallery 1.5 instead. It requires image editing software: either NetPBM or ImageMagick. The version of NetPBM that Gallery helpfully provides is missing one of the components that Gallery specifically needs. The newer version requires UNIXey compiler things. ImageMagick also wants a C compiler, which all systems should have and I apparently don't. I only beat my head against that wall for one hour, until Lisa made me stop.

This command-line stuff is so alien to my Mac experience. Does anyone have any advice? arcadiax especially?

First Mac OS X virus found in wild. Are we a real operating system now, bitches?

I was in the Medicine Hat Staples with my grandparents. No salespeople to be seen.

"Time for the Can I Help You Riff," I told Lisa. We slammed the doors of the floor-model printers open and shut. Slam! Slam! Slam!

"Can I help you guys?" said the sales kid when he reached the end of his rapid, nervous beeline.

"Why yes my good man!" Lisa said. "We'll take the Brother HL-2040, please!"

("I thought you didn't LIKE Wayne's World," Lisa said in the checkout line. "I like comedy," I told her.)

When my grandparents bought an iMac DV a few years ago, the sales guy talked them into an extra 128 stick of RAM, which was okay, and a Lexmark inkjet printer, which made my mom's head spin around. They print about two pages every six months, which means that their cartridges always dry out, which means that they have to keep forking out for new cartridges. But my grandparents do what salespeople say because they don't want to disappoint them.

Eventually grandparental tech support became my job, because my head spins around a lot less often.

They decided to get a black-and-white laser printer, I assume because my folks explained that a laser printer's toner ain't gettin' any drier. I know I've mentioned it, as I refuse to buy an inkjet printer myself.

Last week I received an e-mail from Grandma. "We went to Future Shop yesterday but they just moved to a new store and were quite busy so we didn't get much help there." What that means is everyone was very busy and we didn't want to bother anyone so we stood around hopefully for a while and then we went home.

I sighed. "Can you wait two weeks? We can go buy one when we visit." They were very relieved.

While I was there I upgraded their machine to OS X. They've been on OS 9 all this time because we'd managed to get them fairly confident with it. Unfortunately the background printing extension conflicts with something because OS 9 is sad and medieval. Sad and medieval are also good words for lots of things in Medicine Hat, but we'll all be happier when their machine quits throwing the bomb every few months. And, as Lisa pointed out, they're not that well acquainted with how things look in 9 anyway.

I made their Dock huuuuuge. It has six programs installed on it and it fills the whole bottom of the screen. I also installed iChat. "This is the Call Mike For Help button," I said.



Neil Gaiman's blog posted a link to Garfield strips with Garfield's thought balloons taken out. Without them, they become the surreal, pathos-filled story of a broken, lonely man talking to his perfectly ordinary cat, and therefore vastly improved. Click em while they're holy!

My iPod arrived at work on Monday morning. The first thing I did was to leave it untouched on my desk for three hours because I was very busy.

The next thing I did was to tear off the shipping plastic. I hate leaving shipping plastic on things, possibly because my grandparents insist on keeping their remote controls in their original shipping bags, and pushing the buttons through the plastic. That and their couch.

Lisa kept the plastic shipping sticker on her camera's LCD for a long time, until I finally and purposely ran my thumbnail right down the middle of it. Then she took it off.

The thing about iPods, though, is that they scratch like motherfuckers. So I stuck the shipping plastic back onto the front, which thrilled Lisa no end. She gloated a bit.

( pictures! )

( 4 things meme )

GOOD NEWS: My iPod shipped yesterday! It should arrive in 12 days, according to Apple--hopefully before we go to Medicine Hat next weekend because boy, will I need it then. It's big and black and therefore I've decided to name it Nemesis, as a song reference only Michael will get.

BAD NEWS: After over a year, my iBook's logic board blew out last night, as I was at Jason's place. Moving them around has always been their downfall, although I've been taking it to games for months without a hitch.

Apple will replace it irrespective of my AppleCare warranty, as usual--but that warranty expires in May (I think) and I'm thinkin' I may want to buy a new laptop pretty immediately after that. The Intel-based laptops look pretty slick, goddamn them.

(I bought AppleCare for my iPod right out of the gate, because on Tuesday I tipped my water bottle right over my PDA's screen as it was synchronizing. It didn't seem to mind. I also drop it frequently--twice last Friday, once off the loading dock. Fortunately it has an metal case, which the iPod will also be getting.)

Premier Ralph is buying me an iPod!

( Help me engrave it! )

My new G5 arrived at work yesterday. I put it on top of my desk instead of underneath it because it pulls in a lot of air and is very big. And it's also very pretty. It's a dual 2 GHz with 2 gigs of RAM. Its name is Rex.

I bought my G4 (which is named Rover*) from my boss. Right now it's sitting on the living room floor, installing I'm not sure what. After diddling with its insides trying to set up the 60 and 80 GB drives, I finally established that the kernel panics I get at launch are because of my Panther CD. My Jaguar CD doesn't panic, but it just sits there and spins. My iBook's install CDs, which shouldn't work in the G4 at all, are installing happily--but I can't remember which OS it came with.

The ultimate goal is to create a webserver out of it. I've found PHP and mySQL installers, but the actual real monkeying with the server will have to wait until after the move. For right now I only need to get the OS and Timbuktu installed so that I can give the old monitor back to Michael.

*When I started work at Newdog, the Power Mac 7200 that was there was already named Fido. So I named the G4 Rover when I got it, and when I installed a second 80 GB drive in it last Christmas I named that Spot. Plenty of dog names to go!

Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs. That's bad.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is released on DVD. That's good!

The Frogurt is also cursed.

Today I take my iBook back into the shop.

Ever since the last time I had the logic board replaced (I forget when that was. I could check back, which is why I always post about computer stuff) it's had trouble reading the RAM in the top slot. Usually a reboot fixes it, but after travelling to work and then Jason's house on Wednesday, nothing makes a dent.

At least I don't rely on it to talk to Lisa anymore.

As previously noted, I got my iBook back from service on Friday afternoon, sporting a New Redesigned Logic Board That Will Never Fail, We Promise.

And it hasn't. Yet, anyway. And I take it in to work every day, and I use it at the bar, and I shake it vigorously while it's trying to sleep. Hee hee.

What it has done is freeze. Which is strange because OS X never freezes. Yet it freezes, kind of disturbingly often, usually when I'm first turning it on and it's cold. Then it requires a few restarts to come back. But once it does it runs for hours and hours. (It kernel-panicked yesterday as well, but I suspect that was unrelated.)

Smelled like a software problem, so I ran Norton this morning. Yes, a lot of catalog errors, which it fixed--that happens when you force-restart a lot--but it couldn't run the file test because the computer didn't have enough memory.

Muh?

I checked About This Mac (cos Norton boots into 9) and it claimed to have 128 MB. Should be 256; 128 in the built-in lower slot, 128 in the accessible upper-slot.

Rebooted into X and checked the Apple System Profiler, which said that the lower slot held 128 and the upper slot was empty. Oh. Bad RAM.

So the very very next thing I did was to open the case, pop off the heat shield, and take the bad RAM the heck out. Momma didn't raise no fools about bad chips. You can mess with the RAM without violating the Apple warranty, thankfully--with this machine, that warranty (which Apple has finally acknowledged) is a precious precious thing.

So now: a decision. Apple put that RAM there, so it's covered under the warranty and if I take it in they'll replace it. With another 128 MB stick. It'll take however many days it takes. Although probably less time than the logic board, since Apple won't have to mail the RAM; they have them sitting around, I assume.

Or I could just buy new frigging RAM, somewhat more than 128 MB of it. I certainly could use more RAM, but I've been hesitant to buy anything for this machine, since the damn thing has been an exciting new definition of 'unreliable' for months now. I bought an AirPort card for it, but that card will work in any future computer as well, so as long as I remember to pop the card out before taking the machine in for repair I hang on to that investment. RAM not so much. It's possible (and actually pretty likely) that the G4 iBooks don't use the same RAM as the G3 iBooks.

Is laptop RAM expensive? I don't even know.

From: Apple
To: MIKE RIEGER
Subject: Your Recent Carry-In Repair

Dear Apple Customer:

On behalf of Apple, we would like to invite you to participate in a follow-up web survey regarding your recent carry-in repair experience at a local Apple Authorized Service Provider.

Your perspective is very important to Apple and the AppleCare team. All information you provide will be treated as CONFIDENTIAL and will be used solely to improve our support programs and product offerings.

To complete this web survey, simply click on the web address (URL) displayed below..."

Oh, this is going to be a fun exercise in creative writing. Mom will be so proud.