Download audio file (iphonesupport.mp3)

What Are People Saying?

That was HYSTERICAL!!!!!!!! Honestly, better than most Saturday Night Live skits by far. Just great! As they say, the best comedy is centered in the truth. This is a MUST listen to anyone having issues. You’ll still have issues, but it WILL make you feel better. If you don’t agree, press 5.– Apple Discussion Forum User

It was really hard enduring the first hour of the book. If I had to read the print version, I’m sure I’d have tossed it out my window before the second chapter. It got to a point in between him telling me all the blue ribbons he won at science fairs and how he was the only one in the world who could do x, y, or z, that I had to shut off part one, and go to part two. It was a bit better, but not by much.

The problem is that Steve Wozniak doesn’t stop talking about how great and smart he is. Yes, I get it. He is a genius, a brilliant man. But to have to hear him constantly telling me as such really gets annoying. There were times I would burst out laughing, and actually speak to myself out loud, “I know Steve, I know you are,” quietly reassuring him of his brilliance. Basically, this guy pissed me off. I never really had any connection with him, though I always idolized Steve Jobs, the other Apple co-founder. But after listening to (most of) this book, I had to delete it with probably 3 hours still to listen.

Woz comes off as annoying, obnoxious, and just a rather impossible person to spend any meaningful time with. He’s someone who will let you know at every turn when you are doing something wrong. And what’s more, he’ll tell you how he does it to perfection. My advise for Woz– let other people write your history and tell us how brilliant you are.

PS- Yeah, it was a waste of $14.95

How annoying are flash ads? How hard does Flash hit your CPU, fans, and RAM? If you are using a desktop, chances are you don’t have to worry about overheating and jet-turbine fans. However, if you are running Flash on a laptop, you may notice your lap getting a bit hotter, your fans getting a bit louder, and your system overall acting a bit more sluggish than normal. This is Flash.

The problem, or feature as it were, is that once Flash is installed, you cannot choose for which sites you would like it to be enabled. This means that if a web page has ten Flash objects, you end up loading them all. With Flash, it’s usually “either or,” meaning the Flash content is either an advertisement, or a video– and sometimes it’s both!

So what if you could choose only to run those Flash items that you wanted? Better yet, what if you could choose which websites to allow Flash, and block it for the rest? Well I’ve found the solution and I’m wondering why I didn’t search for it sooner.

The solution is called ClickToFlash. It’s a flash-blocking plug-in for the Safari web browser on Mac OS X. It works like a charm in Safari 5. I highly recommend it. No longer am I annoyed by those terribly annoying Flash video advertisements. My MacBook Pro also runs faster, quieter, and cooler now too!

Some of the features ClickToFlash boasts are:

• Block evil Adobe Flash. Flash only when you want it.
• One-click Flash loading. View blocked Flash with just one click.
• Higher quality YouTube. Play videos in QuickTime, not Flash.
• Website Whitelist. Allow Flash on certain websites.
• Lowered CPU usage. Browse the web more quickly.
• Better battery life. Browse the web longer on your laptop.
• Less fan usage and heat. Browse the web quietly and cooly.
• Automatic Updating. Download updates when they’re ready.

I didn’t get the upgrade price of $199, but I didn’t get the top price of $599 either. My price fell square in the middle. Not much to say about the phone now, other than it’s awesome. You can visit the official page for more information.

My first recollections of Pac-Man were from inside a dark arcade. A little yellow character eating dots being chased by ghosts, all the wile being encased in a soft, blue glow from the maze pattern. Even until this day, when I see that blue glow I instantly go back to the early 1980s. Thankfully I have an original arcade “cocktail” machine, so I can pretty much get my fix anytime I want. You can find out more about my Pac-Man machine and the restoration I performed on it. I don’t know which was more fun, playing the game or fixing it.

Without A Thought For Tomorrow

When I was a kid back in 1982/1983, I was a total Pac-Punk. I had the stickers, cereal, Mac & Cheese, video game, slippers, and countless other Pac-Paraphernalia. And don’t forget about the cartoon! It wasn’t until The Transformers about a year later that I gave Pac-Man a game over. But I never really forgot about him. Besides my arcade machine, I have Pac-Man on both my iPhone and my iPad. The iPad version is really nice. However, you can’t hide in a “T” anymore. Don’t know what that means? You’re probably too young. For a great Pac-Primer, visit The Virtual Pac-Man Museum.

Being only a few years older than Pac-Man, I’ve literally grown up with him. I was lucky enough to be the first generation where video games were standard household fare. Many my age can measure their life not in years or decades, but what video game systems they had during any particular era. I can break my life up into segments– Atari 2600, Colecovision, NES, Sega Genesis, Playstation(s), N64, Xbox, etc. I don’t know what you were doing in 1990, but I was playing my TurboGrafx-16 system with CD-ROM unit! Six years later, the Nintendo 64 was king.

As complex and involved as games are these days, it goes to show that a simple and fun game can be just as satisfying. Pac-Man got the fire started in 1980 and the rest as they say is history. Here’s to another 30 Packy.

And now for some interesting Pac-Phacts.
Information courtesy of Pacman.com.

• PAC-MAN was released in 1980.
• The name “PAC-MAN” comes from the sound paku-paku, which in Japan, represents the sound one’s mouth makes while eating.
• Guinness World Records has awarded the PAC-MAN as “Most Successful Coin-Operated Game” in 2005. In addition, Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2010 notes that PAC-MAN is the best known of all videogame characters and is recognized by 94% of American consumers.
• PAC-MAN was designed by NAMCO employee Toru Iwatani.
• The memorable title chosen by Bandai Namco Games for their popular character, PUCK MAN appeared for the first time. With simple rules which are easy to understand and cute characters, the game attracted a lot of people, and created a craze all over the world, which included Japan of course.
• It was released in the US in October 1980.
• It became a huge hit worldwide.
• Sold over 100,000 a year.
• Each of the 4 ghosts has its Japanese and English names. In Japan they started as Fickle, Chaser, Ambusher and Stupid. Their English names are known as Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.
• PAC-MAN became an economic term. When a company that is about to be acquired instead takes over the hostile company that was attempting to acquire it, it’s called the “PAC-MAN” defense. The name was coined after the role reversal that occurs when PAC-MAN eats power cookies.
• First released as PUCK-MAN, the name was later changed to PAC-MAN.

First a brief primer. The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a law intended to protect copyright holders from copyright infringers, in theory. The umbrella is quite large, and makes illegal, amongst other things, the reverse engineering of DRM or any methods used to circumvent copy protection tied to digital products. The principles of protecting copyrights is noble, as there needs to be a way to prevent others from improperly using someone else’s creation or content. Sadly, the DMCA is being abused by companies to limit and restrict the free-flow of information and technologies.

For a more in-depth look at the DMCA, head on over to Wikipedia. Now, let’s get to the part where this concerns scriptedLizard.com.

Beware The Ides Of April

In April of 2010, MacRumors.com posted an article about Apple Inc.’s new serial number format. The article didn’t get much interest, and it didn’t help that it was ten paragraphs in length. Yes, ten, all to talk about a serial number. Within hours MacRumors received a letter from Apple and the article was taken down. We were left with the single line, “Information Removed at Request of Apple Legal”. Then people started talking about it.

Being one of the forum readers who thought this was an over-reaching use of DMCA, I decided to find the article, which I found cached on some remote server, and make it available on this website. The article happily lived here until May 14, 2010, when my web host abruptly terminated my account without warning, and all my websites within it. However, I didn’t know why my account was terminated at the time, because HostMonster didn’t give me a chance to speak to the violation, they just sent me an email that my account was terminated. If you use HostMonster, beware, as this could happen to you too. This could have a chilling affect on free speech.

A Change Is Gonna Come

So, I moved my sites to a new host– all six of them. I spent the entire weekend moving sites, updating settings, creating databases, etc. In short, it was a real bitch. So after all my sites were up, and to my surprise, I received another email from my new web host, stating my account was suspended due to a copyright violation. However, they had the courtesy to include the original correspondence from the entity who contacted them. Now I could finally see who has been stalking my site for a week.

And the winner is… Apple Inc. I was really surprised to find out it was Apple. Apparently, they used the DMCA to claim I was offering “trade secrets” on my site, by posting information which discussed the methods of how to read their new serial number format. In the email they claim “this information is confidential and is provided to third parties only subject to a non-disclosure agreement. Dissemination of confidential information knowingly obtained or derived from someone in breach of non-disclosure obligations constitutes trade secret misappropriation.”

This may be true, but I never signed a NDA, and I did not know this was confidential information. Why would I even assume this would be confidential? I’m used to companies wanting you to know how they serialize their products, such as Gibson USA. I used that info to find out when my guitar was produced, at what plant, what day, etc.

So come to find out, it’s been Apple who made my life miserable over the weekend. It’s a good thing I have a sense of humor. Actually, it doesn’t really bother me too much, only to the extent that free speech has been quashed in this instance. I could simply create a hosting account off-shore, where the long arms of the DMCA won’t reach, and upload this information. But I don’t think it’s worth it. Anyone who can compile several lines of code could probably look at ten computers with the new serial number format, and write an algorithm that would determine where each was made, which week, etc. Let them worry about it.

For your amusement, I am posting the original email sent from Apple’s lawyers to my web host, as well as my response to the lawyer. Happy reading.

To Whom It May Concern:

We represent Apple Inc. (“Apple”). It has come to our attention that a website you host, scriptedlizard.com, has posted Apple confidential trade secret information concerning Apple’s serial number format at http://www.scriptedlizard.com/thevault/apple-tweaks-serial-number-format-with-new-macbook-pro.

This information is confidential and is provided to third parties only subject to a non-disclosure agreement. Dissemination of confidential information knowingly obtained or derived from someone in breach of non-disclosure obligations constitutes trade secret misappropriation. See, e.g., Cal. Civ. Code 3426.1(b)(2)(B)(iii). This information can be used in falsifying warranty claims and therefore its confidentiality is of paramount importance to Apple.

Apple therefore requests that you take steps to immediately remove this post.

The foregoing is not intended to be a complete statement of the facts, and shall not constitute a waiver of any of Apple’s rights or remedies, all of which are expressly reserved.

Please notify me by reply e-mail when you have complied with this demand, and feel free to contact me if you any questions or concerns.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation,

// Contact information for law firm removed //

DMCA Certification: Pursuant to Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I hereby state, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that the activities described above are not authorized by Apple, that the information in this notification is accurate, and that I am authorized to act on behalf of Apple in this regard.

This message and any attached documents contain information from the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP that may be confidential and/or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not read, copy, distribute, or use this information. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and then delete this message.

And now my response…

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a bullshit claim. However, I don’t have the desire to get into a fight with mighty Apple Inc. I love those guys, but their tactics as of late, especially towards competition, or what they deem competition, are pretty sleazy. Besides, removing this post may help my chances of getting into the WWDC next month:)

The post in question has been removed from the website in question. Any questions? I would request Apple send a DMCA notice to my head, as it is currently in violation of “trade secrets” and is readily disseminating them via the mouth to every Apple customer I run into. Psst.. Apple stamps a serial number onto every piece of hardware. They use letters and numbers. They like numbers. Pass it on.

By removing this post, I’m not accepting or claiming responsibility for originally posting it. I just happen to have access to the admin area. If I ever find the culprit who posted this… he gonna get it!

PS- Any inside info on that lost/recovered iPhone 4G? Steve is boss.

Have a better day than Thai protesters,

Bryan

In the United States of America, we have the 1st amendment, which provides everyone the RIGHT to freedom of speech. This right not only extends to polite and good-intended speech, but thankfully, speech which is offensive or hateful. In short; you get the good with the bad.

Sitting here on a rainy day, iPad in hand, a few things are going through my mind. Firstly, how secure is this device? I mean, it has a 4-digit password and offers the ability to wipe the drive after 10 incorrect login attempts. But is that really enough security?

I use the 1Password app on my iPad to encrypt and store all my login and sensitive information. My 1Password database has a master password of 20 characters– both alphanumeric and symbolic– so I’m not really worried about that very sensitive data. But what about my email accounts and notes, etc.?

The more I use the iPad as a replacement for my MacBook Pro, there is bound to be a larger amount of sensitive data spread throughout the device– residing as both encrypted and clear text. And since the iPad is smaller, lighter, and more portable than my MBP, there is a greater chance of me losing it or accidentally leaving it sitting at a table and walking away.

Greetings and Permutations

There is a maximum of 10,000 combinations, or permutations, for any 4-digit passcode. Since there are 10 possibilities for each of the four spots (numbers 0-9), this equates to 10 x 10 x 10 x 10. Because the iPad will wipe the drive (if you enable this feature) after ten incorrect login attempts, you really don’t have to be concerned with someone guessing your passcode. You figure, someone would try 1-2-3-4, 0-1-2-3, or 4-3-2-1, so you’re already down to only seven login attempts, with 9,997 possible permutations remaining; providing that you didn’t use one of those weak passcodes. Odds are that your passcode won’t be guessed, and the drive will be wiped. That’s the good news.

Now the bad news. What if I knew which 4 digits you used for your passcode, but I didn’t know the order of input? You might think the chances of someone knowing which numbers you use are slim to none, but what if someone could and did find out?

How about this. What if you just cleaned your iPad screen, typed your passcode, used it for a few minutes and then locked it and left it sitting on your desk. Depending on how clean you keep your iPad and how clean you keep your fingers, this may or may not present a problem. However, if you had greasy potato chip fingers or sweaty hands, you could potentially leave a finger mark where you entered your passcode. What’s more, you could leave a mark on each of the four digits you entered to unlock your iPad. Try it!

You Read My Mind

Now, if I know the digits you use, but not the order of input, I can sit down and methodically try to gain access. How hard it will be depends on two things– having clearly visible finger marks where the digit was selected, and how many unique digits are in your passcode. If your 4-digit passcode only contained two unique digits, such as 1441, the chances of me gaining access is 1 in 1, or 100%. If your passcode were 1997, or containing three unique digits, I would have an 83% chance of guessing your passcode within the allotted 10 attempts. Even if you use four unique numbers, such as 1845, there is still a 41% chance I could guess the password just going through each permutation, of which there are 24.

Below is a table showing the number of permutations for one to four unique digits in your passcode. As you can see, the odds of guessing your passcode if you only use 1 or 2 unique digits is 1 in 1, or 100%. Even with the most secure passcode, four unique digits, someone still has a 41% chance to guess it. This table data assumes you know which digits are used in the passcode, but not the order of input.

More Security

If Apple added one more digit and made passcodes 5 digits long, rather than 24 permutations there would be 120. This means that a person would have less than a 10% chance of guessing your passcode within the 10 tries. Even if you only used two unique numbers, there are still 15 permutations, 5 more than the allotted 10 attempts. Again, this assumes someone knows which digits are used in the passcode, but not the order of input.

Now, do I really worry about this lack of security? In theory, a little bit, but not in practice. My screen is usually pretty marked up after a few minutes and it would be nearly impossible to find the correct numbers. But, it could be done in certain instances. We “press” when we enter our passcodes. Pressing offers a different mark than swiping. I’ve done some testing, and with a clean screen, I can see my passcode marks most of the time. But after a few minutes it gets harder.

Bass Ackwards

Incidentally, if you constantly lock and unlock your iPad with the intention of having an additional layer of security, this could actually make it easier for someone to figure out the digits in your passcode. By continually pressing the same location on your screen over and over again, this can leave heavier marks that won’t go away during normal use. Ironically, a feature intended to offer greater security actually makes you more vulnerable.

I sent Steve Jobs an email and will be waiting for a reply, maybe forever. Some alternatives could be having the passcode box randomly appear on the screen so you enter the digits in a different spot each time, or have numbers that appear randomly in order, that you slide into the correct order. This way, you may slide the number two position twice in a row, but it would be a different number each time. I’m sure the minds at Apple could think of much better alternatives than I.

Sent from my iPad.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. –Steve Jobs

Reference: Hit With A DMCA Takedown… From Apple Inc.

Magic | ‘Majik
Noun

The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

To say I wasn’t overly impressed when I first watched Steve Jobs debut the iPad, is an understatement. I hated it. I didn’t believe the claims, the hype– I guess I was thinking inside the box as opposed to outside of it. That’s why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and, well I’m not. To be fair, seeing the iPad in a web stream and holding one are two completely different things. Sure it looked nice and all, but I just didn’t see a real need for one. Then I held one. Magic.

A New-Phase Computing Device

The iPad is not a computer per se, but it’s not a pocket calculator either. It takes the mundane things one does on a PC– writing email, browsing the web, and offers a much simpler approach to accomplish the same tasks– only faster and with much more joy.

At the time of writing this review, on the iPad’s keyboard no less, I find myself going to grab my iPad for things I used to pick up my laptop for. If you always wanted something more than a smart phone and something less than a laptop, this is the device for you. The user interface is completely intuitive. I mean, how hard is it to point and touch with your finger? The iPad takes the innovation of the iPhone and really goes yard. The apps that are natively written to run on the iPad really take advantage of the added screen real estate and computing power.

This last last week, I’ve been on somewhat of a self-imposed hiatus from my MacBook Pro. I’ve been trying to do as much as I can with the iPad and not resort to cracking open the computer. So far, so good. Granted, I’m not going to be doing image editing or web design on the iPad– yet, but when apps hit the iPad which allow more complex tasks and content creation, I may end up doing much more on this platform. Truth be told, I did have to edit this article on my computer, as well as post it and do the image editing for the title graphic. But with a few iPad apps someday, I’d be able to do this entire article on the iPad alone.

Life Is Good

Aside from the overall experience, I am really excited about the battery life. Usually when manufacturers say five hour life, it’s two. When they say seven, it’s four. When apple said ten, they lied too– I got eleven one day. Yes, you read correctly, eleven hours. And I’m not talking about no brightness, no sound, and just writing email, I’m talking about hours of games, web browsing, book reading, music, video, and more. I literally charge it at a night, and wake up in the morning and I’m good all day. I thought my new MBP had great battery life. It’s ridiculous. Apple’s engineers have created a truly remarkable battery.

But, like any piece of hardware, it can only be as strong as the software it will run. Out of the gate, the iPad has some really great titles, with many more in the pipeline. Apps such as Apple’s own Pages, Numbers allow for productivity, and Plants vs. Zombies makes for great fun. The Apple iBooks app is great, and I already purchased a few books. Reading is fun again! I’ve totally replaced my RSS reader on my computer and now read all my news feeds exclusively on my iPad, using the NewsRack app.

If you scroll up to the top of this article, you’ll see a quickly drawn picture of an iPad. I did that using the Brushes app. Not only can you export/email your paintings, with the free companion app for your Mac, you can even create a QuickTime movie of your drawing, stroke by stroke, until completion. High-resolution exporting is also available with the desktop app.

Growing Pains

However, with any new product, and especially for the early adopters, there are bound to be issues. One such issue going round is a problem with WiFi access. People are finding that their WiFi signals are somewhat diminished, even at the same distance as another device using WiFi. I do find that the signal is stronger with one router versus another. The location that I require a signal most, my apartment, gets almost nothing. This is partly due to me “borrowing” my signal. But I do get full strength on my MBP, but just not my iPod nor my iPad. Strange. I did return my first iPad, but the second unit exhibits the same behavior, which is probably normal. At least I did get to return my first iPad, with a dead pixel.

Ten days in, I can honestly say that the iPad is a real game changer. There are going to be a load of tablets coming out during this year. A good many (if not all) will be complicated Windows machines, with just a new interface. The genius behind the iPad is that it isn’t Mac OS on a tablet, it’s a entirely new experience. It’s hardware limitations require it to do things much differently, and focus on the things one would want to do, rather than hundreds of other uses the average person would never need. Full-blown Mac OS would hog the resources and probably end up cutting the battery life in half. I suspect that these new tables coming out will have very poor battery life, compared to the 10 hours you can get with the iPad.

The age of the internet appliance is finally here, and the iPad has opened the gates. Only time will tell how this sector turns out, but if history is any telling of the future, Apple will come out head and shoulders above the competition. I officially revise my iPad review and give it 5/5 stars.

Sent from my iPad

Get ready to soil your plants in an all-new action-strategy game from PopCap! A mob of fun-loving zombies is about to invade your home, and your only defense is an arsenal of 49 zombie-zapping plants. Use peashooters, wall-nuts, cherry bombs and more to mulchify 26 types of zombies before they can reach your front door.

Each zombie has its own special skills, so you’ll need to think fast and plant faster to combat them all. But be careful how you use your limited supply of greens and seeds… as you battle the fun-dead, obstacles like a setting sun, creeping fog and a swimming pool add to the challenge. And with five game modes to dig into, the fun never dies! –Developer

Though the iPad is the greatest eBook reader, and does a bunch of other cool stuff, it seems that the genre of video games is where most of the buzz is. WiFi issues aside, I’ve been loving my iPad since minute one.

I usually shy away from games on mobile devices, but the iPad’s larger screen and faster processor allow for some great gaming experiences. PvZ takes advantage of both features.

It’s a “tower defense” style game, meaning you must use anything and everything in your weapons arsenal to stop the invading foes– who happen to be zombies in this game. Your weapons are various plants and other objects you can readily (in some cases) find in your background.

The game takes place in your backyard and you must stop the zombies from getting in your house and EATING YOUR BRAINS! Believe me, in the later stages, it’s harder than it sounds. They just keep coming and coming!

I have purchased some other, shall we say, more productive apps, but I’ll talk about those at another time. PvZ is stealing the show right now!

FYI, this game is also available for Mac + PC, as well as iPod and iPhone.

Living in Massachusetts, we already have a form of universal healthcare, so I’m really not excited either way. However, I do love watching and listening to all the right-wing nuts who are calling for repeal, etc. They keep telling me this isn’t what the people wanted. Hello? The people voted Republicans out of office just for this reason. Change! If you listen to some of these whackos, you’d think the apocalypse is near.

Obama won. The Democrats (finally) won. Get over it! You want change, put a Republican back in the White House.

I have never seen a public figure with such thin skin. It seems it doesn’t matter how petty or ridiculous a joke or jab may be thrown at her, still she gets her panties in a ball. Whether it’s David Letterman, the “elite” media, the Obama Administration, or now Family Guy, does she really think she can win these silly battles? What’s more, who in their right mind would want to fight them?

At one point it may have worked to play the victim to the big, bad, elite media. Now she just sounds like a real bitch. She has cried wolf a dozen too many times, and now she just serves as fodder for the news media. But I guess this is to be expected. After all, Sarah couldn’t handle the rough and tough Alaska media, so how in the hell are we to think she is capable of functioning in the national spotlight?

The root of all Palin’s problems is simple– she dumb. In medical terms, I believe the correct word for her is imbecile. She is like a parrot, being able to perfectly mimic the talking points of the right-wing agenda… or so we thought. Having to write some keywords on her hand for a softball interview doesn’t sound to me like the voice of a party. But if you listen to Fox And Friends, Gretchen Carlson seems to think Palin wrote on her hand on purpose. Yup, that sounds pretty logical. Even Steve Doocy wasn’t buying it.

Now, her latest run-in with the media is an episode of Family Guy, where Chris takes a girl out on a date who happens to have Down Syndrome. Chris asks her what her parents do, and she says her mother is the former governor of Alaska. Of course this was making fun of Palin’s baby son, Trig, who has Down Syndrome. Of course this was an evil attempt to mock people who have Down Syndrome. Of course Palin is full of shit!

The world is full of cruel, cold-hearted people who would do such a thing. When is enough? And when are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren’t really funny. –Sarah Palin

First of all, the episode featured a girl with Down Syndrome. Trig is a boy, and a baby. At most, this is making fun of Sarah Palin for being “defective” and having a child with Down Syndrome. But I don’t even think it goes that far. It’s a funny line about a public figure. I’ve been watching Family Guy for years and I can’t tell you how many people they have made fun of. Palin is the first person I ever heard of that had a problem with it, and took it deadly serious.

And what’s worse for Palin is that the voice actor, Andrea Fay Friedman, who also has Down Syndrome, spoke out and basically told Sarah to lighten up, and that she has no sense of humor. Wow, pwned! She got it good from a slow girl.

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes. –Andrea Fay Friedman

Only Sarah can look stupid twice on the same topic! But you know the old adage– garbage in, garbage out. You can’t make diamonds from a pile of shit.

PS – Please Republicans, choose Sarah as your 2012 nominee. That would make me so happy:)

And if you need clarification, yes, those are Michael Jackson’s children in the picture above.

I keep hearing that the boy has Jackson’s nose, or the girl has Jackson’s eyes… I guess that’s subjective. The one thing they don’t have is his color. I even have read web posts that say since Jackson had such light skin, his children obviously would share the same complexion. Yeah, except for the fact that although Jackson’s skin was white on the outside, his DNA was black on the inside. You can’t bleach DNA, at least not to my knowledge. Unless Michael was doing some serious genetic engineering in the lab, the jury is in about the status of him as a father, and it’s “no way in hell is Michael the father of these kids.”

Now, at the expense of being called racist, I’m not. I don’t care if his kids are purple. But any sensible person can only conclude that these children are nice, white kids. From the eyes, hair, complexion, etc., they all white. I wish them well. When they get older, they are going to have a hell of a time in this world answering for daddy.

You know that old saying? Once you go white, you hope that everyone else will not notice the gradual change of skin color, lighter and lighter every year until one day you accept the fact, and hope others accept the fact that you are no longer black and now officially a white person, all the while trying to keep some connection to your previous culture although you never really cared too much for it to begin with.

On January 27th, Apple finally announced their long anticipated “tablet device” called the iPad. While iSlate, iTablet, or even the rehashed iBook would have been good choices, iPad is fine I guess. I would like to see Apple drop the “i” prefix one of these days however.

As expected, the fit and finish of the device is amazing. In keeping with their recent designs, the iPad sports a unibody aluminum back plate and the front is all glass. I’m sure it really feels great in-hand, and I know the glass surface is going to be super-silky smooth to the touch. For the materials, I give an A+. You can’t get any better in my opinion.

Now, the way the front looks is not as impressive as the back/sides of the unit. The front has beautiful glass with the now traditional home button, but there is this really thick black bezel around the edges, just like a MacBook Pro and iMac has. On the iPad, it is kind of distracting as the screen is much smaller than the MacBook Pro or iMac. The one thing you’ll quickly notice is that the device does not sport the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, but rather it uses 4:3. This is surprising, since Apple has moved to a wider 16:9 ratio for their new iMacs, and probably will use the 16:9 size for the MacBook refresh coming soon.

If Apple is touting this device to be a great movie player, why 4:3? Even with 16:9 screens, you almost always will get black bars at the top/bottom of your screen because the actual movie uses a still wider aspect ratio. But with 4:3 and some of the widest movies, you’re going to see a tiny strip of movie in the center of the screen, the rest will be all black. Rather than black bars, the movie strip will be the only noticeable bar. Not what I call a better viewing experience, which leads me to my next thought.

At the Apple media event, Steve Jobs proclaimed the iPad a new category of technology. It’s not a phone, not a computer, but a new kind of computing device. He went on to say that unless you make it the best of it’s class, there is no point in even creating a product. I agree with him that it’s the best of its class, partly because there is no competition. But why does there need to be this new class?

He then went on to say, with the help of his slideshow, that this device must do some things better than a phone and better than a computer. He used the iPhone and MacBook Pro as examples. The things he said this new device must do better are Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, and eBooks. I’m going to take these one-by-one.

Browsing

For me, this is the bread and butter of such a device. A large 10 inch screen, touch sensitive, with the ability to quickly read news, search Wiki, or do most things you can do at home, but on the go. I think the potential for browsing on the iPad is there, but the current implementation is still lacking. On my MBP, I can view a site, download a file, save it to my desktop, and share/sync it using MobileMe quite easily. Not much effort. If the iPad offers a “Downloads” folder like MacOS and has an easy way to sync these files with your MobileMe account, I think I would feel much better about the browsing experience. It could easily be almost as good as my MBP.

However, one glaring hole still exists– the omission of Adobe Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad will not be able to properly render websites which use Flash. Now, we can get into a debate about how Flash is becoming obsolete, and how HTML5 is coming down the pike. But Flash is here now, and here to stay for the foreseeable future. By not allowing Flash to run on the iPad, you are effectively breaking millions of websites. How you can say the iPad does browsing better than a computer when you can’t even see Flash content, I don’t know.

To add insult to injury, it has been shown that Apple used deceit in it’s iPad promo video by faking the New York Times website, and showing the site with Flash working. If you watch the video, pause it at 1:15 and then screen-zoom to view the web address bar. You’ll see it’s pointing to www.apple.com. Busted! Later in the video, they show the NYT site again, this time with the correct URL. Looks like someone forgot to change the URL before they took that screencast!

This directly contradicts Steve Jobs’ demonstration, where he went to the New York Times website (I can’t imagine why) and the Flash content did not render, instead showing the missing browser plugin icon. My question, why would they try to fool people in the video? I mean, they made a conscious effort to fudge the Flash, they had to have known that Mac geeks would see that in a hurry.

At first I thought maybe it was a demo site by The New York Times, maybe made to support the iPad with no Flash content. But the video and the live demonstration show that not to be the case. So Apple basically is lying to it’s customers. Am I surprised? No. When you see a commercial, the first thing that should pop into your lead is the word lie. I heard that somewhere, don’t know who coined it.

While writing this article, Apple has quietly edited its iPad video and has removed the flash content, and now shows the plugin icon where the flash content would have been. Way to get caught with your pants down Apple.

Email

While the email app looks nice, and it appears to have many useful features, the iPad does not do email better than my MacBook Pro. The Apple Mail app on my computer does 100 things that I’m sure the iPad version won’t or can’t do. Just because I can view my mail with a flick of my finger doesn’t mean it does it better. It may do it better than the iPhone, but not my computer.

Am I to believe that I can type an email faster on the iPad than I can on my computer? What about attachments? If I get an attachment the iPad can’t read, I have to wait till I view it on my computer. That doesn’t sound like better email.

Photos

Again, just being able to use your finger to see your photos doesn’t mean it’s better than iPhoto on my Mac. Also, having the ability to turn the iPad over and have the photo re-adjust its orientation so the person in front of you can see it properly doesn’t make this a slam-dunk. If anything this is iPhoto Light. Sure, it looks cool, but it doesn’t do anything better than my Mac. And, my Mac has a camera for actually taking photos, something the iPad lacks.

Video

This one is really laughable. A 10 inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio is better than watching movies on a 17 inch MacBook Pro widescreen or a 27 inch iMac? The iPad does better video than a computer? Again, no video camera on the iPad, yet my MacBook Pro has one. Why would I downgrade features? I really don’t know where Steve was pulling these nuggets of wisdom from, but every time he said something I felt embarrassed for him as I know he knew it was a bunch of crap.

Music

If you are talking about playing music, you don’t really need a complicated interface. The original iPod proved that. Thus, the iPad can handle music equally as good if you just intend to listen. But if you want to start ripping, burning, or doing anything special with your music, the iPad isn’t your tool. This is probably the closest I’ll come to saying the iPad does something better, but it still doesn’t do music better than my computer.

Games

I’m not spending too much time on this one. This is totally ridiculous. A computer will always play games better. I guess it’s the type of games for which you can get into an argument about. Small, hand-held games typically play better on the iPhone than a computer. But the idea of using the accelerometers in the iPad to play games… I think people would look really silly holding this 10 inch device and moving it in all directions. You certainly would bring attention to yourself.

eBooks

Finally…. the one thing the iPad does better than my MacBook Pro or iPhone. It can read a mean book. So wait, the iPad is just a book reader with a bunch of extras? In a word– YES. This is what the iPad really is… a book reader. This is what it was really meant to do. For me, I would love to ditch paper books and start reading all digital versions. Plus, I’d like the idea of being able to read various print publications digitally as well. There is nothing like subscribing to a magazine and have it electronically sent to your device.

So for me, Apple was 1 for 7 on it’s feature list. Don’t get me wrong, browsing, email and the like are welcomed, but they don’t do anything better than my computer. So again, we are going to pay a premium (starting at $499) for a book reader that can do a bunch of other stuff. Plus, if you want internet access, you’ll pay $15/month for 250MB of bandwidth, or $30/month for unlimited bandwidth.

As a revolutionary device, I have to give this 2 1/2 out of 5 stars. It’s the best eBook reader, but I was hoping for much more from Apple.

Update 4/11/10: Ignore everything you have just read. This is probably the most breakthrough device in all my years of computing. It actually has replaced my MacBook Pro for certain uses. I can really foresee this platform, given the apps I use on my MBP are offered, being able to handle *most* of what I do with my computer. Right now, the iPad is really a content consumption device. But with better tools and more power, this will allow for creation as well. I will write a dedicated review in the days to come.

I’ve tried a handful of different companies, from Amazon S3, Carbonite, Mozy, JungleDisk, to my MobileMe account via iDisk. So far, CrashPlan is the only one with zero issues. All the others I mentioned had some limitation. CrashPlan is also the most widely available, having versions for use with MacOS, Windows, Linux, and even the Solaris operating system. It’s FREE to try and definitely worth it. It’s only $54.00/year for unlimited storage, which makes it the cheapest service out there.

What sets CrashPlan apart from the others is that you can choose to backup to a local device, such as a USB drive, or allow a friend to backup to your computer via the internet. Both these options are included in the FREE version and you don’t even have to pay for the service if you wish to backup in this manner. I use SuperDuper! for my local backups and there is no other software out there as good as that for me.

CrashPlan has a small footprint and doesn’t need to be running for backups to occur. It takes up almost no system resources, unlike Carbonite did. I haven’t noticed any computer slowdown on account of crash plan. I haven’t really used it to restore much, except a couple test items, which worked perfectly. Once I use it more, I’m sure I’ll come on here and have more to say.

So for now, if you need online backup, I think CrashPlan is the choice for you.

Maybe next season, the Vikings can make it official and call him a player/coach. Hell, they might as well make him GM to boot. I don’t know what kind of Kool-Aid Brett gets these owners drink, but they seem to give him total freedom, not bound by the constraints of coaches or management.

One last wish… Please Brett Favre, go away.. FAR AWAY. It’s time for the most selfish player in the history of professional sports to go on permanent vacation.

The entire stone is painted, with the bottom being a “cream” color and with the artist’s signature– and even the turtle’s tail! The turtle already had his name, and comes with a certificate. I only spotted it in the window for a second, but it was enough time for me to walk in the store and buy it.

I usually only collect things that are blue, but I made an exception here.

Let’s reminisce… 9-11 was God’s way of dealing with homosexuality. Katrina was God’s way of telling us we are aborting too many fetuses. But this one, this is Robertson’s best… the Haiti earthquake was God’s way of showing anger at the people of Haiti for making a pact with the devil hundreds of years ago. Yes, even the babies and young children. They all are condemned to die. Sighs… a pact with the devil.

Robertson is a right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, nutbag, who is waiting patiently for the rapture, and would like nothing more than to witness the second-coming before his time here on this Earth is done.

Here’s the rub. The main religion of Haiti is Roman Catholic, with some 80-85% of people following some form of Catholicism. Would Robertson speak ill of Haiti if 85% were born again Christians? Of course not! Because the people of Haiti don’t practice the “right” religion, they are a condemned people.

It’s very clear-cut in Pat Robertson’s whacky world– if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, you are going to hell. Period. Convert or you will burn eternally. Sounds like they are on par with fundamentalist Muslims, who also support convert or be killed doctrine. If Pat Robertson can justify the death of tens of thousands of children and their proper path to hell, I can justify my statement… I wish Pat Robertson death. I wish him a death as horrible as being crushed in a hole.

In other asshole news, I can’t (or should I say can) believe how Rush Limbaugh can politicize this tragedy. If this had happened during the Bush administration, Rush would have priased Bush for quickly taking the international lead. But because Obama is in the White House and he wants Obama to fail, as he has so stated, he’d rather Obama not send any money and have the international community look down upon this country, all for the sake of the capital “D” next to Obama’s name.

Actually, Rush wouldn’t want us to know about any tragedy, for fear that it could make Obama look good in the eyes of the world. That hurts too much, even if it means letting thousands of people die. It’s more important Obama fail than our country be a shining beacon in the eyes of the world.

Thank goodness for Michael Savage. That’s all I want to say. If I understand Pat Robertson correctly, I can deduce that Pat is stupid, God is an asshole, and the Christians who support Pat are monsters. It’s times like these when I’m proud to be an atheist.

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp. –Dylan

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how he inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

George Bush is the only president who SHOULD HAVE used a teleprompter. If he did, gems such as these wouldn’t have crossed his lips:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee… that says, fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

“Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYN’s aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

Need we (GW) say more?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

GW didn’t have a desire for the high life. He felt much more at home in Crawford Texas, where he spent about 50% of his first 8 months of his presidency right up until that pesky 9-11 thing happened. He was having so much free fun that he didn’t have time to read the intelligence brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” That would be a funny line, if it weren’t actually true. Note: 9-11 cost > than Obama trip.

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If not for the Obama administration, GM would no longer be a corporation, and your GM stock would have been reduced by 100%. That is, if you were still actually working in a US facility. Thanks to GW, most of those jobs headed across our border.

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

Absolutely not. At one point in his early life, GW surely must have competed in a special olympics tournament… and lost. I would never make fun of anyone’s disabilities.

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

George Bush couldn’t even tell you the DVD region code for the US, let alone a foreign country. Bush gives gifts that keep on giving, like a perpetual war in the mid-east.

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

This one is cruel. No one, especially the Queen of England, should ever be subjected to any speech, ever, by George Bush (see quotes above). Also, the chances of Bush actually syncing an iPod with iTunes would be less than his chances were for privatizing social security, which in essence, is an oxymoron. How can you privatize something that is social?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

Bowing would have been more graceful than walking around holding the hand of the Saudi Prince Abdullah at his ranch in Crawford, Texas back in 2005. The sad part is, I think the Prince was leading him.

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent “Austrian language,” would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

George Bush always makes reference to his nonexistent language– English. Bush is more proficient in pig-latin than he is using English grammar. Some of his favorite words, including some he just made up are: misunderestimate, Strategery, nuc-u-lar, and my favorite, Amurkan, which I’m proud to be.

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

That would never happen under GW. He would have proposed congress lower the tax rates for his rich buddies. Those top 1% of income earners have it really bad these days.

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

Oh, like the time, on spanish television in 2001, when Bush was showing off his spanish, mispronounced the prime minister’s name. Bush later said “I have to practice this very lovely language. If I don’t practice I am going to destroy this language.” And that would make two.

If George W. Bush had mis-spelled the word “advice” would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoe as proof of what a dunce he is?

This one is too easy, so I’m skipping it. The list of words GW has used and abused could fill a dictionary.

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he’s a hypocrite?

Probably not. But planting a tree is creating life, the opposite of what Bush is best known for. Specifically the thousands of brave men and women who are now dead thanks to a war of choice in Iraq and a failed and flawed war in Afghanistan. Also, global warming is a myth, so why would Bush want to plant a tree in the first place?

If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11?

Is that worse than Dick Cheney having the “presidential” powers of being able to authorize a shoot-down of a US plane. And worse, the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9-11 was likely shot down and not crashed, as the debris field was “miles” wide, rather than centrally located in a crash site, as would be expected. Maybe Bush okay’d that one?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major on-going political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

George Bush first heard about Katrina on TV a week after it happened. People were sitting on roofs for 5 days before Bush had the noble idea of flying a helicopter over New Orleans and giving a presidential wave to all the victims.

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

GM asked the government for help. They gave up certain rights when they did that. What’s this, a company within a capitalistic society asking the government for socialism? If something is unconstitutional, take it to the Supreme Court. Justice shall prevail.

If George W Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

Oh, this must be the new math. Bill Clinton left the white house with a surplus. GW took over and never once vetoed a spending bill and dug this country into deficits and a trillion dollar war(s). And to add insult to injury, he and the Goldman Sachs crooks cost the country 700 billion in TARP relief right as the presidential door was hitting him in the ass. Remember the one page relief plan Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman presented? It stated that he could dole out the money as he saw fit and that there would be no legal recourse against him. Not surprisingly, Goldman got tens of billions from that deal.

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

10 years? Bush would have needed just half a third term and he would have tripled it!

We started the day by visiting the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex, located on Mercer Street in SoHo. The Annex featured some very nice exhibits, including personal items from Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, The Who, Jimmy Page, and many of the great artists of the 20th century. Sadly, photography was not allowed.

As great as seeing all those Rock relics were, the featured attraction was the John Lennon exhibit, which mainly focused on his “New York City years.” Many of the items in the exhibit were instantly recognizable, such as his “New York City” sleeveless t-shirt, “Hair Peace” sign from his 1969 “Bed-In” for peace, and the Army shirt he wore for his ’72 Madison Square Garden concert (which also can be seen in the Nobody Told Me video). Other notable items were an upright Steinway piano he kept in his bedroom and hand-written production notes for the Double Fantasy album.

It was fascinating and eerie being so close to Lennon’s personal items. One piece in particular, the paper bag with John’s possessions that Yoko Ono received from Roosevelt Hospital after his death, put the day in perspective. Sadly, the Annex will be closing its doors for good January 3, 2010, so I just managed to see it before it’s gone.

After leaving the Annex, we ventured up to Greenwich Village to see Washington Square Park. The park had a nice, wide-open space, and it looked as if they were landscaping on the east side, maybe adding some new features. The famous monument was there in all its glory. There were plenty of people walking around, with many children playing in the center circle.

From there we walked north and found Electric Lady Studios; a dream fulfilled by Jimi Hendrix in building his own recording studio. Taking note of some other landmarks along the way, we made our way east to St. Mark’s Place. There we saw the building where Lenny Bruce had an apartment. The building facade looked like it was chiseled from a single piece of stone, with the windowsills and other elements being hand chiseled (or so they appeared). Making our way farther east, we walked by the building used as the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album. The building has these cool looking faces over each window and door opening of the first and second floors. There was only one more point of interest for us in Greenwich Village– fitting it was last.

We ended up in Tompkins Square Park. The phrase “ended up” is used here in the pejorative. Now, I don’t know what the park looks like in the summer, but I sure know what it looks like in December, and that was enough to scare me. Don’t take my word for it, read some reviews.

If you like creepy looking black squirrels running up and down some even creepier looking trees, and are fine with the even much more creepier characters trolling along the pathways of the park, you should find this park to your liking. As for me, I found myself looking over my shoulder more than a couple times, just to make sure the scent I smelled coming towards me was actually going in a different direction. Yes, the odor. As I walked towards the center of the park, off on a winding path, I noticed some “less fortunate” fellows sitting on a bench and found a strong smell of what I can only describe as human feces. I quickly turned around.

To paraphrase one reviewer on Yelp (see reviews link above), the park was very shady, and it wasn’t just because of all the trees. I definitely wouldn’t walk through this park at night alone, and probably not with a two or three others. Compared to Washington Square, this was like a scene out of a Tim Burton movie– dark and cold. Thankfully, a taxi whisked us up to Times Square.

Now you’re talking… Times Square; the “Crossroads of the World.” Times Square is right where Seventh Avenue and Broadway meet, and goes from 42nd Street all the way up to 47th Street. The actual street area only takes up about six acres of land, but there is so much to do and see in those six acres. The pizza at Sbarro is amazing!

From Times Square, we headed up Broadway. Our first destination was the Brill Building. Some of the biggest hits of the late 1950s and into the 1960s were written by song writers who called the Brill Building home. A real-life “hit factory,” its prominence quickly faded as the 1960s matured with more and more artists writing their own material, making the need for such song writers less necessary. The British Invasion, most notably The Beatles, had much to do with the demise of the Brill Building “business model.”

Some guy working the elevators in the Brill Building exclaimed “no taking pictures of the lobby,” and off we went.

From there, we continued up Broadway and made our way to the Ed Sullivan Theatre. Now home to the David Letterman show, this is the theatre that was used for the televised Ed Sullivan Show. Anyone who was anyone played the Ed Sullivan Show back in the day. Often, Sullivan could make or break you.

After a couple photos, we headed onward to Columbus Circle and continued on Broadway until we hit the Upper West Side Apple Store. It’s one of Apple’s most elaborate designs, featuring a glass roof as well as a glass spiral staircase that brings you to a subterranean heaven with more Macs than you would ever need. I bought my Magic Mouse there.

From there we headed over to Central Park West via 67th Street and walked up to 1 West 72nd Street, or as it’s more commonly known, The Dakota. The Dakota is an amazing building, taking up one full street block and a quarter of an Avenue block. Although the architecture is beautiful, it’s because of who lived there that we were standing in front of the building, along with about a dozen others. It was the building John Lennon called home from 1973 until his death in 1980, having been murdered outside the main entrance gate along 72nd Street. Aside from Lennon, a long list of other notable and famous people have called The Dakota home, such as Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, and Boris Karloff.

Just across the street is the Strawberry Fields Memorial. You could hear a crowd of people singing songs and see the brisk activity along the main entrance to Central Park on 72nd Street. Standing in front of The Dakota, I met some guy whose name I can’t remember, nor where he came from. We spoke of John Lennon, The Beatles, and then ventured far off on a tangent, ending up talking about the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission, as well as other topics for which my memory fails me. Maybe I’ll see you next year!

From The Dakota, we headed across the street to Strawberry Fields in Central Park. There were probably 75 to 100 people standing all around the Imagine Mosaic, with a couple guys with guitars and a karaoke machine, belting out Beatles tunes. The crowd joined in as well as the dozens of other people on the periphery. The weather couldn’t have been nicer as the 8th was the warmest day of the week. It definitely was something to experience. Twenty-nine years on, John Lennon is as much a part of New York as he was in 1980.

After hanging around Strawberry Fields for about a half hour, we headed up north into Central Park, then made our way back down Central Park West, admiring the architecture of the buildings, then cutting through the park near the Tavern On The Green restaurant. From there we got to Sixth Avenue and headed back to Times Square, cutting over to 47th Street. After another pizza break at Sbarro, we walked down Seventh Avenue to Penn Station and our trip to New York was over.

Prior to 2009, the last time I was in New York City was the early 1990s, spending a handful of hours there walking around. I was only like 13 or 14 years old and really didn’t see much of the city. When I was much younger than that, I guess we drove to New York, once serving as a taxi and another time I don’t know why. But I could count on two hands the amount of time I was in New York.

Within a two-week period in late 2009, I was in New York City for 6 days. I easily walked 14 miles during that time and in between trips my left foot was so sore I could barely put any pressure on it. I injured my foot because of two reasons; running across the streets when I didn’t need to (later learning the proper way to cross by watching the locals), planting my foot on the hard curbs, and walking too fast for too long, about 5 miles the day I initially started feeling the pain.

To say there is a lot to see in New York City is an understatement as large as the city itself. In 6 days, I saw many things, but still never managed to get East enough to get to Grand Central Terminal and The Chrysler Building– my favorite building. Do people have favorite buildings? Well, I do, and that’s it.

I’ll probably have another article on all the other places I visited in New York City, but that’s for another day. If you ever get the chance to visit the city, take it. There are only a precious few cities of such magnitude in the entire world. Once thing is for certain, you’ll never look at your native city/town the same way again. Most likely, it will never compare with New York City.

Click the image below to view the photo galleries. More of New York City to come.

Presentation

The game’s interface is not slick or polished and features one of my biggest pet peeves. So my question… why do all games that show some type of computer display on-screen, and as part or the GUI or in-game experience, show a flickering screen with scan lines? Hello? CRTs have been dead for years. There are no scan lines in LCD screens, which obviously is the equipment depicted in the game. Seems this game is trying to capture the realism of displays 15 years in the past. Enough already. You can also see scan lines when you are connecting to server, deploying to your missions, and a few other places within the interface.

The interface looks dated– badly.

Gameplay

Of all the areas of the game I’ve commented on, this one I’ve had the least amount of time to consider, as I’ve been unable to get in many games due to technical issues on “their” side. What I have noticed is that movement feels clunky. Also, when using the sights on my rifle, the screen doesn’t zoom gracefully, it sort of “pops” into zoom. Very jerky. It would also be nice if the world map was in the lower left portion of the screen instead of the upper right.

The weapons seem very weak. It appears to take a lot (of time/bullets) to kill people. At least every other close-quarters battle I’ve had involves me and the other guy doing a “noob dance,” just moving around in a circle trying to shoot one another. The firefights don’t seem to be too much fun. Also, every bullet seems to have a tracer, not good if you have a silencer… sort of defeats the whole purpose of not wanting to be noticed.

Environment

The maps in this game are big just for the sake of being big. However, the area you are dealing with feels small and crowded, despite the overall large footprint. In all the maps I’ve played, you can’t really walk 20 or so feet without bumping into something, whether it be a tree, fence, rock, or other obstacle. Things seem to be randomly cluttered around the map, if only to provide cover to some camper waiting for you to walk by. There are no wide open spaces with nothing in-world to give you the sense of scale. The world doesn’t look like it could actually be a locale in the real world, and that takes away from the user experience. Trains look like toys and bridges look like walkways.

Because of these flaws, the environment feels to take place on a 2-D plane. Almost the entirety of the game takes place on flat ground, offering no high vantage points for snipers. You can barely get into the 3rd dimension, often not being able to jump or walk over very small obstacles, but rather have to go around them. Objects you would think you have access to you don’t.

The colors and lighting are not very realistic. Colors are cartoony and shadows are jaggy, darker shades of the regular color. Actually, the graphics are quite bad. The game feels like a FPS lost the World of Warcraft environment with less creative content. There are no physics to speak of and everything seems rigid and not fluid. Poor explosions, no destruction, and the lack of being able to shoot enemies through thin in-world materials makes gameplay really suffer.

MAG lacks the freedom of other games, even though it’s supposed to be grand in scale. With no open spaces, the world is just too cluttered with polygons. In one map there is a train yard. This should be a nice vast expanse of land, however the area seems to be only about 50 feet across, cluttered with objects strewn every 20 feet. It’s as if you are playing a game with Battlefield sized maps, and with COD gameplay… but without the fun of either game.

Audio/Sound Effects

The game really suffers in this area. The music is cheesy and the in-game effects don’t feel realistic in the slightest. For instance, BFBC2 beta had unbelievable sound, and that was just the beta. At least it would have been nice if the audio took away from the poor graphics but this game suffers badly in both departments. I guess it can’t help much that I’m getting static sounds from the music during the beta.

The music sounds like it’s straight out of some redneck bar down south. My apologies to rednecks.

Gimmicks

This is a gimmick game– the gimmick being that 256 people will be in the same “world.” Having said that, if this were the same game that supported say 24 or 32 players max, nobody would be talking about this game. The amount of players is the hype. That’s what gets people talking. It’s certainly not the graphics, gameplay or overall user experience. Other than the perception “this game rocks with 256 players,” there is nothing else redeeming that would make this game be a winner. It’s really average and mediocre in most areas.

Verdict

Too much ambition and not enough product. If the tone of this sounds too harsh, there are a couple reasons. First, I’ve been trying about 20 minutes to get into a game and I wrote the draft of this review on a crappy Windows PC. I was too lazy to go into the other room and get my MacBook Pro. God, PCs suck and Windows is a nightmare.

The game gets 2 out of 5 stars.

Anyway, I’m not writing because I care about him or what he said, I’m writing because each time I saw his name, either in print or on TV, it was spelled differently. I know the news business is cut-throat, but can they get some people on a conference call and maybe agree on the guy’s name? Even bin Laden didn’t have to go through this and he’s a much bigger ass-hole.

So here are some of the different ways this guy’s name was spelled. Also, I’m only talking about the last name, let’s not even worry about the first name. That’s a bag of hurt.

Is it Gadhafi (AP), or Qaddafi (Fox News), or Gaddafi (Reuters), or Kadafi (LA Times), or Khadafy (New York Post)? Who knows, and who really cares.

Right now I’m listening to She’s Leaving Home by The Beatles

Update 09.08.09: Both MONO and STEREO box sets have been shipped. STEREO by FedEx and MONO by UPS. I won’t be posting here for at least a week… will be too busy listening to Beatles music:)

ProTec Ace Helmet (Chris Doyle)

Not one who likes to wear hats or helmets, I wanted something low-key. All the helmets I’ve seen are always really long, and shaped rather silly. I wanted a regular shaped, nice fitting helmet. I think I got that in the ProTec Ace.

Serfas RX Lycra Lite Cycling Gloves

Having good grips is one thing, but having your skin rubbing against them for 20 miles is another. These gloves fit very nicely and even have “pull cords” so you can get them off quickly. My hands haven’t hurt me in over 80 miles.

Bulletproof BMX Pedals

Pedals are one of the three contact points of the bike, along with your grips and saddle. The pedals that came with my Townie were small and plastic. I needed a much larger pedal and certainly wanted metal. These pedals are everything I wanted, and have adjustable hex pegs that keep your foot on the pedal. They feel great and make riding much more enjoyable.

Ergon GP1 Grips

Another important part of the bike. There are a million different styles of grips, and a million more levels of quality. The stock grips were alright, but without gloves I’d kill my hands. The GP1 grips I could safely use without gloves and still feel very comfortable. These grips are divine. The shape of the grip contours to your hand while riding. Once you adjust them to the proper angle (so your wrist stays comfortable and without bending) you can lock them into place. They don’t move if installed properly. If there is a more comfortable grip out there, I’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Serfas E-Gel Cruiser Elastomer Saddle (EG-8966)

Along with grips, the saddle is the most important part of a bicycle. This is where you really feel it in the morning. Some people like firm saddles, some like soft. I really like the Serfas gel saddles. They provide a very nice cushion and it provides a buffer between your body and the hard seat beneath. The saddle I got is a bit wider, more for comfort/cruising. But I get my speed up there above 20 MPH without having any problems with the saddle. I usually average 12-13 MPH and this seat is very comfortable. Since I’m just getting back into riding, it’s going to take time to get used to it, but a good saddle makes all the difference.

Trik Topz Blue Glitter Dice Valve Caps

I had some when I was a kid, and they look good on my bike. ‘Nuff said.

CamelBak M.U.L.E. Hydration Backpack

Do you think a water bottle is going to hold you over for 10 miles? Think again. I never heard about CamelBak until I bought my new bike, but it only took me my first long ride to realize that these things are such a blessing. You can store up to 3 liters (100 oz) of liquid, and there is enough room for ice. The easy drink tube works wonderfully and the reservoir is easy to clean. There is even space for my iPhone, gloves, bungie cords, lights, and a few other things.

Schwalbe Marathon Supreme Tires (HS 382)

Seeing as I popped my stock back tire on my maiden voyage, I was led to understand that tires are very important. A small piece of glass put a split in my tire about a half-inch long. I wanted a set of tires so I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying a patch kit or fear of being stranded 10 miles in the middle of nowhere without a spare. These tires let me rest easy. In doing research online, these are one of the best brands of tires you can buy. The inside of the tires are lined with all kinds of goodness, some high-tech woven fabrics, Vectran I believe. They ride great and I’m not worried about glass anymore.

Pletscher Zoom ESGE

A cool-looking bike needs a cool-looking kickstand. This is it. It does what it’s supposed to– but in style. Not much more to say about a kickstand.

Sigma Wireless Bike Computer (BC 1706 HR)

If you do a lot of riding and want to keep exact figures of your times and distances, this is a device you need. The Sigma bike computer keeps track of MPG, average MPH, distance per trip, total distance, as well as a host of other time/distance functions. This one also has a heart-rate monitor which will let you know your heart-rate and pulse, and let you stay within cardiac or fat burning zones.

Blackburn Flea Combo Lights

The first thing I did when I got my new bike was remove my reflectors. I figured, “I’m not riding at night so I don’t need them.” Bad call. I’ve done about 75% of my rides at night, albeit on bike trails. These front/back lights are great. They are LED and you get 3 hours front light on one charge, and 6 hours back light. Also, the charging system is ingenious. You can hook it up to any battery off the shelf, from AAA to D. The charger comes with magnetic connectors that attach to the battery. Good show!

Nitto Seatpost (S-83)

This one is a biggie. The first thing I noticed on my new bike is my saddle was moving. It was moving up/down, and side to side. To save on money, manufacturers will often give you a cheap seat post, then attach a post clamp so the rails of your saddle can be fastened to the clamp. It works, but it adds one more point of failure. Also, setting the angle of the saddle with these clamps is clumsy at best. This post remove the clamp as a point of failure and incorporates that into the post. The result is no movement of the saddle and much easier adjustment of the saddle angle.

Nite Ize SpokeLit LED Safety Light

These LED lights go on the spokes, and take the place of the reflectors that were there. It has two modes, always on and flashing. I like the always on because with that and the flashing back red light, it looks like a police light.

For this list, these are all movies I’ve seen in the theatre. I’ve seen more 2009 movies on DVD (and other sources– wink, wink), but I won’t include those here. This is only for the true experience of the cinema.

You’ll notice some of the “big” movies of 2009 are missing… Yeah, I won’t waste my time with rusty robots or aged comic book heros. Those franchises stray so far from the original premise that I have no connection with them anymore.

And without further adieu, the list.

1. Inglourious Basterds- Spots one and two were a hard choice. Both movies were worthy of multiple viewings. But, I have to give the edge to Inglourious Basterds.

This movie was a refreshing, new look at WWII. Refreshing and new I say because it’s a fictional take on the war, and not the same real-life drama that all WWII movies seem to recreate. If you watch the trailers, they focus on a group of men called “The Basterds.” This group administers Nazi justice in their own unique way.

Anyway, the movie isn’t as violent as the trailers may suggest, although it does have its moments. You’ve never seen so many rounds go off in a basement:) This movie has a winding story, which comes to climax with two competing plots against Hitler, both existing with complete autonomy. I thought the acting was impressive, the script superb, and the overall product brilliant.

The primary antagonist, a character named Hans Landa, is the quintessential Nazi… ever! Christoph Waltz gets my vote for best supporting actor. This one has all the Tarantino charm you’ve come to expect in his movies.

2. UP- I’m going to keep this brief. You can read my entire review on this movie here. Yeah, it’s that good it required me to write a detailed review. In one word, this is the best animated movie I’ve ever seen. I say animated movie, and not kids movie because this one really isn’t for kids. It can be watched by kids, but it is only truly absorbed by adults. I can’t wait for this on Blu-Ray I tell you!

3. (500) Days of Summer- Along with Drag Me to Hell, this is the other “under the radar” movie that was really good. It barely made any money at the box office, but that doesn’t reflect the quality of the movie.

This movie borrowed from Amelie, in that a narrator often spoke about people in quick biographic blasts– such as their likes and dislikes, trying to humanize them with a sentence or two.

As the movie states, it’s not a love story, but more a breaking up story. Not being groomed as a blockbuster, the movie could take more chances– like animation and an outside group dancing scene that I would have thought a bit silly in just about any other movie. But it works here.

4. Drag Me to Hell- A quality, low-budget (well by today’s standards) movie that offers plenty of action, suspense, and a bit of humor. I’m a big fan of “B-style” horror movies. Most that I watch wouldn’t warrant a cost of $10.00 to view. This one however was different. It had a certain something that was better than the stuff I find in my streaming NETFLIX account. The ending of the movie is great, and one that is totally unexpected. I won’t give it away however. This wasn’t playing in 4,000 theaters like The Transformers, so if you didn’t get a chance to see it, get it on DVD when it comes out.

5. Bruno- Bruno is the almost sequel to Borat. Bruno however, stretches the limits of cinema, and some would say decency, to a new boundary. Full frontal nudity, both male and female, is considered “whatever” in this movie. However, this movie does provide many, many big laughs. Bruno, visiting a Psychic and wanting to kiss Milli (of Mili Vanilli) once more, as they had a romantic encounter before Milli died, was hilarious– the first time around. The first time you see this, you’ll be in stitches, but it has no lasting appeal. A second watch and you’d be hard-pressed to do more than crack a smile here and there. Watch it once.

6. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian- I thought the first movie was OK and funny at times. I thought they could have done more with the story line, but overall it was a decent movie. For the sequel, they tried to do more, and did do more– too much. The main problem with the movie, besides a flimsy plot, was that they introduced sooo many new characters in this movie. And because so many characters are in this movie, little time is given to each, and there is never really any time to get to know each. It’s like a potpourri of action, with nothing really happening. At times I was really wanting the movie to be over. Obviously they spent some money producing the sequel, but it was really mostly a bore.

7. Public Enemies- This movie reminded me of an A&E Biography. I love Johnny Depp, but this movie did nothing with his skills. There was no real action, no great moments– it just told a story most people already are aware of. Nothing new here. The characters really had no “soul.” They just went through the motions. I can’t recall any great scenes from this movie. I did sit through it. Also, memo to Christian Bale: talk normal. This isn’t Batman or the Terminator.

8. Monsters Vs. Aliens- Boring. A nice movie to look at, but really boring. There were several times when I wanted to leave. Not a Pixar movie. The #7 spot isn’t far behind.

The warm recollections of a summer’s past
Casts a cold shadow at autumn’s feet.

Is it anger or fear which finds itself
At the moment of universal truth?

To be one with the spoken word
Is to feel the vibration of meaning.

I was once to be reborn in the eyes of the world
Only to realize that to be born is to have been dead.

We are dead before we see
And we are born before we understand.

To enemies of friends and friends to enemies
I cast my shout across the universe.

Bryan Los 09.03.09

The solution? Edit the code yourself.

In a couple easy steps you can have high quality, at least 800 x 800 (depending on your screen resolution) artwork for your new Beatles albums. If you choose to buy digitally (when that happens), you’ll get the art and won’t need this. But if you plan on buying the actual CD, you may need the artwork.

Here’s how to do it.

Go to any Amazon.com Beatles CD page, such as this one, and click the zoom button under the image of the CD. When the zoom window comes up, save the page as HTML source. Then, in any text editor, open the source and simply find the lines below, then make the change from 420 to 800.

All you have to do is change the 420, 420 to 800, 800. Once you do that, save the file.

After the file is saved, open it in your web browser. Then scroll down and click the zoom button, and the image will fill the 800 x 800 box. Simply use your mouse and click the image to move it over to the left, so the far right side isn’t cut off.

Then, simply take a screen shot and use an image editor and trim. That’s it. Because the cover isn’t a perfect 1:1 aspect ratio, the finished image won’t quite be square. So trim as much as you can without taking too much off, and then just resize a 1:1 figure, such as 600 x 600. The small “distortion” won’t be noticeable at all.

Need the art and don’t want to do the work? You can download all the art here, already finished for you at 600 x 600 resolution.

It’s all because of the new Yahoo! home page… in a word it’s stupid. Just about everything you hover over causes a pop-up or some larger area to open up. It got to the point where I couldn’t even move my mouse on the page in fear I would open another pop-up. What’s worse, because there is so much “hoverable” content, trying to click out of something often gets you into something new.

What a mess! Just because you can pack 10,000 items in a 1280 x 1024 screen space doesn’t mean you have to. I’ll go back to Yahoo! when they go back to sensibility.

As for Google, the page meets my minimalist taste.

This is NOT a new operating system… this is a service pack. How to tell? Well, you need to have Leopard installed before you can “upgrade” to Snow Leopard. Want to do a clean (erase and install) install? You need to install Leopard first, then Snow Leopard.

Most changes are “under the hood,” as Apple says, but people don’t pay money for those types of refinements, they pay for eye candy, the interface. In that regard, nothing really has changed. All the changes in Snow Leopard could really have been made via their software update service. You didn’t need to actually sell a hard-copy disc.

I will say the OS appears to run a bit faster, and I do like the minimal refinements that you can actually see. I’m an Apple fan, and I usually buy anything with that apple logo on it, but having had a couple days to think about it, Apple should have given us this update for free. They needed to take some hype away from Windows 7, and they did, but I don’t know if it was in a good way.

Memo to Steve: Take $30 off the next real OS you guys release.

Update: Why did Apple take away features (like the Preferences pane) from QuickTime 10? It seems they really stripped it down, almost to the point that it makes viewing/listening to content a chore. Why take out auto-start? Now I have to open a movie, then click to watch it? C’mon guys! At least give me my Preferences menu back to I can turn auto-start back on…

Test 1, Test 2, Test 3

The bottom line is that the vast majority of PS3 players DO NOT have headsets. The ones that do end up sounding like transistor radio broadcasts, and it’s usually the noobs who are talking anyway. It’s as if voice communication was an afterthought. I blame Sony for this as they don’t pack a headset with their system. Microsoft included headsets with their Xbox Live subscription kits. Sony, unlike Microsoft who has a pay online service, offers theirs for free– and it shows. My advice to Sony: charge a fee to use the online service, and take some of the profit and include headsets with your system.

Do You Hear What I Here?

Communication is key in online games, especially if you’re playing with people you don’t know. You must be able to communicate to play effectively as a team. After all, that is what online multiplayer is– teamwork. If nobody is talking, how does anyone else know that one class is over-weighted, and that people need to switch to another class? You don’t. This means that for games that require good teamwork, it often comes down to the team with the most “friends” wins. And, they probably have more players with headsets too!

What Did I Do To Deserve This?

It’s too bad, as I was just getting used to the PS3 controller and I purchased a couple downloadable titles– Battlefield: 1943 and Fat Princess. Fat Princess is an unbelievably fun game… if you actually could communicate with your team! You can have up to 16 players on your team (90% of whom have no headsets) and in this game teamwork is the only way to win. You can’t go at it alone. But you have to.

I’ve seen posts in the PS3 forums where people are putting together lists of people who actually have headsets in hopes they can play an effective game, not just running around solo. Although the game is fun, creative, and a breath of fresh air, it’s just unplayable without communication. You’re better off sticking to the single player mode. At least there your computer buddies will actually follow your commands.

A Sucker For Punishment

I’m sure I’ll try to play a bit more and see if my experience changes for the better, but I’m not holding out any hope. Battlefield is playable and enjoyable even without communication for me, as I’m pretty handy with a rifle. But the experience would be so much better if I could storm a base with my team, everyone on the same page as to what’s happening next. As for Fat Princess, the bugs and glitches aside, I just can’t have fun playing this game for long. Considering, with communication this could be arguably the most fun I’ve ever had in an online multiplayer. Sadly, this is a PS3-only title, so I won’t be able to play this properly on the Xbox 360.

Guess I’m going back to Microsoft, hands out, begging to be forgiven.

Hughes was a film producer, director, and writer. He was a modern day Midas, turning any movie or script he touched to solid gold. But don’t take my biased word for that! Here’s a partial list of movies he either produced, directed, or wrote. After you read this, go find any real works on 1980s culture and see how many references to these movies you find!

National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Weird Science (1985)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
The Great Outdoors (1988)
Home Alone (1990)

Oh yeah, he wrote that really successful 1990s movie Home Alone as well.

Thankfully, I had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime back in the 1980s, so I was able to watch all of these masterpieces over and over again. I’d be a different person if not for these works of art. Like a da Vinci painting or a Lennon/McCartney song, a John Hughes movie will stand the test of time because it was honest, thought provoking, and written with the skill of the best Renaissance artisans.

Hughes died suddenly of a heart attack on August 6, 2009, while walking in Manhattan, where he was visiting his family. The 1980s can now rest in peace.

I checked out several stores from South Eastern Massachusetts to Providence, Rhode Island. These were not department stores, although I did check out Dick’s Sporting Goods, but rather bicycle specialty shops. They carried a higher class of bicycle, thus the higher prices. I was delighted to see some innovative new designs. Obviously, bicycle technology has come a long way since my bike riding days.

Click to zOOm Image

The bicycle I decided upon is the Electra Townie 21D. The Townie uses a new technology, interestingly enough, called “Flat Foot Technology.” In short, the bicycle has a lower center of gravity, so you are sitting lower and able to put your feet flat on the ground at any time. It also pushes the pedals several inches forward so you are using less downward force and more frontward force. Lastly, the normal riding position is rotated 23 degrees backward so you can ride in a more comfortable position, and not have to lean forward when riding. You have to try it to feel the difference!

About Electra

Think of our bikes as vehicles for discovery. If you let them, they will transport you to places beyond your average spin down the road. Even if your mission is nothing more than riding to a friend’s house or stopping by the corner cafe to grab a latte, Electra bicycles fill the experience with memorable moments that really define you — because we design our bikes as extensions of your imagination, style and sense of adventure. With excellence, expression, innovation and progression as our driving forces, Electra bikes speak to your individuality and quest for quality, while their smooth, efficient ride allows you to kick back, relax and enjoy the free flow of a lazy afternoon along the bike path, a free-parking evening pedaling around downtown or an energizing commute to the office. Whether you ride for fitness, fun, convenience, conservation or recreation, the Electra experience is offered in an assortment of flavors to suit your style. Try a Townie, Cruiser, or Amsterdam on for size, and experience the Electra Way to Roll.

www.electrabike.com

What drew me to this bicycle was it’s brilliant curves, nice matte blue finish, and the Flat Foot Technology. Also, this bike has front shocks which make the ride so much smoother than traditional forks. I tried bikes back-to-back, and the Townie (with shocks) beat out a nice Royce Union, without shocks.

The Townie was by far the most comfortable bike I’ve ever ridden. The saddle, or seat as we non-riders call it, is very comfortable with a generous seating area. It’s a 21-speed and uses high quality hardware. I’m looking forward to taking this bike for a spin along one of the many bike trails in South Eastern, Mass.

I placed a deposit of $100.00, which is 20% of the cost and the bike should be delivered within the next week or so. That will give me enough time to go and sell something to cover the balance due.

I’ll be sure and write a full review once I get my hands on the bike and give it a good test drive. I’m sure I’ll be very happy.

Sears Tower No Longer

Another foreign company has bought a home-grown symbol of American ingenuity. Residents of Chicago refuse to call it anything other than the Sears Tower. Good for them. Denver Broncos fans went through the same thing, and the company that bought the naming rights had to keep “Mile High” in the official title.

The Wise Latina

I so much enjoy Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and all other right-wing, conservative nut jobs squirming in their seats, hot-headed over the eventual nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. It’s a done deal. Put a fork in it and get the ketchup ready.

Tired Old Man

I wish this jerk would just retire. Brett Favre is once again holding a team hostage. When will teams grow some balls and tell this guy “we don’t want or need you.” I wish he would just go away. He’s overstayed his welcome in the NFL by about five years and counting.

Not Much To Meet The Eye

This will go down in history as the worst $300 million dollar movie ever. I watched the first 45 minutes (not in a theatre) and shut it off. I then tried to watch the rest and couldn’t do it. It’s all action, a lot of stupidity, and not cohesive plot-line to be found. It’s just one explosion after another. All the Decepticons look like Megatron, and Megatron doesn’t even look like himself. Go figure that one out. Pixar’s “Up” is still the finest movie of the year.

A Real Dick Cheney

As if the world didn’t know Cheney was an evil son-of-a-bitch, news comes out that he was directly involved in some CIA “hit squad,” going after terrorists. I’m all for killing terrorists where they dwell and taking the war to them, but there’s the little issue about Congress needing to know what’s going on. I’d like to see this guy on trial, or at the very least, under oath in front of Congress explaining all his dastardly (bastardly) deeds.

Ms. Pacman or Ms. Palin

The soon to be “former” Governor of Alaska is in ethics hell again. But I guess it’s just another elite media, liberal attack on her. Isn’t it all about the jobs, really? I thought Newt had ethics problems? Is this the best Republicans can hope for in 2012? Obama won’t need to waste campaign funds to run against her. He should put that money into a stimulus for the middle class.

I’m going to briefly visit each area of concern as it pertains to starting your own website. I’m assuming you will not be hosting your own web server and will be using shared hosting, which is the most common method of hosting.

The Host

The first thing you should do is find a good web host. Ask around, do a Google search. Now, this can be subjective, with people even using the same web host offering differing opinions on service. But usually, the brand names and the big companies are the most reputable. They may not be the most cost effective for your needs, but you can be rest assured that your site isn’t hosted by a fly-by-night company and that you won’t wake up in the morning with your site offline and gone for good– along with all of your data.

My Choice? HostMonster. I’ve been using HM for about 5 years now. I host 5 of my own sites and another 3 for others. They are a solid company that offers e-mail, phone, and live chat support. All support is answered quickly and in a timely manner. I strictly use the live chat and average wait time is only about a minute or less. They offer great pricing and they support all the latest web standards– PHP, CGI, MySQL, amongst other technologies.

The Domain

This is where people often fall into a trap. When deciding to go with a certain web host, they often see an offer for a “FREE domain with your site.” This sounds good until you understand the implications. Generally, you do not own this domain. The hosting company retains ownership. So although this domain will work fine while you are with said company, if you leave, it may be difficult to get them to transfer it over to you. Often, you may pay an additional “processing” fee, and transfer could be delayed by weeks, or in some cases, even months by unscrupulous hosts. At worst, the company goes belly-up, and sells the domain, and then you end up paying much more if you ever want it back. All the while, you cannot have a website using that domain name.

My Choice? GoDaddy. They are a great company, have been around for years, and have really worked on their web interface to allow for easy changes and updates to your services. Per my advice on domains, since GoDaddy is a reputable registrar, you can purchase both the domain and hosting from them if you wish. It will still be registered to you and you can do as you wish with the domain.

The Web Design

Even with the great and advanced technologies that web developers and designers have at their disposal, you can still build a website the old-fashioned way– by hand. There are many great HTML editors out there that will let you work with raw code, or offer simple templates for you to use. Some better than others. There are also advanced suites, such as Dreamweaver by Adobe, that offer very advanced features. Most newbies don’t use such applications for two reasons- learning curve and price. Aside from low and high-end development, there are a myriad of other options to choose from.

My Choice? Freeway Pro for development, and Coda for advanced, hand coding. Freeway Pro offers the best of both worlds– a true WYSIWYG environment, and the ability to use advanced features, such as JavaScript, PHP, and pretty much any markup you can think of adding. Freeway Pro has many plugins, called actions, built in, and many more user-created actions. Freeway Pro will automatically build WC3 HTML valid code.

Coda offers a stripped down editor without the eye-candy, but offers many advanced features for hand coders. With a built-in CSS editor, you can easily build CSS stylesheets and add them to your website. When you need to dig down into the code, or quickly make some edits, Coda is a great choice. ***Freeway Pro and Coda are only available on the Mac platform.

The Web Apps

This is where your site comes alive. Ever wanted a discussion forum? How about a blog? Thanks to web standards such as PHP and MySQL, you can install thousands of web applications for your website to use. Many are FREE and can do amazing things. Now, there are hosted solutions already available for many services, such as blogs. You can sign up at WordPress.org and get a free blog. You don’t have to pay anything, except some ad-supported pages. Or, you can download WordPress and install it on your site, no ads, and control every aspect of the service.

My Choice? WordPress and phpBB. WordPress, as previously mentioned, is a blogging system which allows you a place on the web to publish articles as well as allows visitors to offer comments and feedback. You can include images, audio, even video in your blogs very easily. Plus, WordPress has thousands of plugins for you to take advantage of, such as plugins to let you know who’s reading your blog, and plugins allowing you to add other functionality, such as advertising and revenue creation.

phpBB offers you a web community on your website. People can register and start discussions and if you have a website relating to a particular topic, a discussion forum is a great way to generate traffic to your site as well as help your visitors. Both are FREE and both are great.

Best Practices

Of all things discussed, this is probably the most important– ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA AND KEEP LOCAL AND REMOTE COPIES. Even though your web host probably keeps a backup, you don’t know how often they backup or if the backup is any good. Most hosts will allow you to download your complete site or public folder.

Take them up on it and use this feature. Not only is it good to have a copy in case files become corrupt, or your host has a web server die, and you lose some recent data, but it’s good to have a copy of your data in case your host shuts it’s doors in the middle of the night and you no longer have FTP access to go and download your stuff. Believe me, the latter happens more than you think…

Just think of all those custom images you made, or all that work you put into a blog template. Also, if you use MySQL for your blog or any other web applications, make sure you backup your databases too! Many people don’t and you can lose years worth of blog posts. Most hosts offer phpMyAdmin. It’s very easy to backup your databases. An ounce of prevention is worth 500 pounds of hurt.

Starting your own website should be fun and stress-free. But just remember that everything must come to an end, and when it comes time to move to a new webhost, you want a process as seamless and easy as possible.

From the Acid3 website:

To pass the test, a browser must use its default settings, the animation has to be smooth, the score has to end on 100/100, and the final page has to look exactly, pixel for pixel, like this reference rendering.

I’ve taken the time to test some of the modern, popular web browsers. Some scores may or may not surprise you. If you have any doubt, take the test yourself.

Mac (10.5.7)

Safari (4.0.2): 100/100
FireFox (3.5): 93/100
Camino (1.6.8): 53/100

Windows (XP SP3)

Safari (4): 100/100
Google Chrome (2.0.172.33): 100/100
FireFox (3.5): 93/100
Internet Explorer (8.0): 20/100

Conclusion

I think what we can learn from this test is that you have very capable browsers running on both the Windows and Mac platforms– as long as your browser doesn’t have “Internet Explorer” in the title. Thank goodness Microsoft doesn’t make a Mac version anymore…

It’s funny, the browser newcomers, Apple and Google, with Safari and Chrome, respectively, are at the top of the pack. I would have thought FireFox would be on top having had many years of development under their belts. It goes to show you how serious Apple and Google are taking their technology. I can’t wait for a Chrome version for the Mac. I’ll try it out. Even though I’m a loyal Safari user, I think Chrome does some great things and it’s a powerful browser packed in a small binary footprint.

Which browser do you use? And will you switch based on The Acid3 Test?

Here’s a more in-depth reference.

So, I’m writing to give them one last chance to keep me as a customer by offering me something worth my while to keep my account. Do I think they will even read my letter? Maybe. Do I think they will accept my terms? Probably not. But that’s OK because I’ll be going to my closest T-Mobile store and signing back with them come October, 2009.

I’m posting my letter to AT&T below. I’ll write back if they ever respond.

AT&T Mobility
PO Box 536216
Atlanta, GA 30353-6216

To whom it may concern:

I have been a loyal at&t customer for almost two years now. I have had no problems with the service and have enjoyed my Apple iPhone tremendously. Other than the higher prices I’ve had to pay (I switched from T-Mobile) per month and almost no signal when I travel to Holyoke, Massachusetts, I’ve been satisfied with my iPhone.

Unfortunately, my iPhone has seen its better days and I would like to upgrade to the new 3G S iPhone. Although the 3G S at&t rates are higher, I would like to take advantage of some of the 3G S features, specifically the GPS services.

I am writing at&t to request a 16GB iPhone (black) at no extra charge, with a one-year contract extension to my current contract, and my current wireless plan rate (Edge) for the period of one year. After one year, my rate plan will be the advertised rate plan for the 3G S iPhone, as listed on the at&t website.

Another option for at&t, is to credit my wireless account for the price of the iPhone 3G S and the difference in rate plan pricing for the 3G S iPhone, for a term of one year, per the one-year contract extension. These credits will be applied to my account on a monthly basis. I will pay for the 3G S iPhone out of pocket.

Over the last eight billing cycles, I have paid at&t $1,170.40 for wireless services, and over double that since my original contract almost two years ago. I’ve been a good customer, and I would like to be rewarded for my loyalty.

If at&t does not want to honor my request, I fully understand. I just want to put at&t on notice that in the event my request is denied, when my current contract expires in October 2009, I will be canceling my at&t wireless account, unlocking my iPhone, and switching back to T-Mobile. I realize I would be losing some features, such as visual voicemail, but there are unlocks/hacks that will allow me to do almost everything I can do with my iPhone presently. Easily and legally. I am very technically savvy and an advanced electronics consumer, so I will have no problem employing these techniques for use with my iPhone.

I own this piece of hardware (iPhone), and when my contract is up, I will take advantage of all technologies that will allow me to use my phone any way I wish. I would prefer to stay with at&t, but this decision is financial and one I will make with no regrets.

I look forward to hearing back from at&t regarding my proposal. If I don’t hear back by October 2009, my account with at&t will be cancelled.

Thank you very much,

Loyal at&t Customer

Seriously, what a quitter. Her resignation speech was just as convoluted and brain twisting as her interviews with Katie Couric. This woman has all the qualifications of a “hockey mom” and none of what it takes to be a leader. If ever a government post is created that involves a lot of eye winking and acting like a middle-America type moron, I’m sure she’ll be the first person they call to fill it.

I’m loving how some Republicans and conservative radio talk show hosts are spinning this in favor of her. They are making it sound like it’s a good thing she is a quitter and this can only help her 2012 (cut and) run. I can’t wait for Limbaugh’s take on this. I’m sure it will be just as entertaining as all his other political gobbledygook.

The bottom line is that Sarah Palin is a full-fledged moron. She’s political eye-candy with no substance and lacking in any real vision for the future of this country. She simply regurgitates the same failed, conservative party line. She is a big reason why the conservative movement is on life support.

Back to her resignation speech, I’ve never seen such a conniving, manipulative, and lying bitch on television. The reasons she gave for resigning are laughable. First, she doesn’t like the idea of working as a lame-duck governor, as she doesn’t want to seek re-election. Then she is putting the state first, because $2 million has already been spent on “baseless” ethics allegations. Later, she puts herself first and says it’s costing her $500,00 to defend herself, and the strain is too much on her family.

The only reason she didn’t give for quitting was the truth.

Yes, this is a special 4th of July. Alaskan’s finally get their independence from the fool on the hill. With any luck, we won’t have to hear from this fool for a year or more, or until she decides to put her 2012 run into full swing. I wonder if she’ll hire any of the McCain campaign strategists? You know, the one’s who essentially said she ruined John McCain’s chances of becoming president.

Don’t let the political door hit your ass on the way out Sarah. Just nod your head, wink, and exit gracefully. Your political future is over.

But what if you don’t want to spend $600.00 and still want Photoshop? Photoshop Elements may suffice.

I’ve been using Elements 6 for about two weeks now and there is only one thing that I miss from the full version of Photoshop– the Pen tool. I’m sure Adobe knows what they are doing, and purposefully kept the Pen tool out of Elements. If Elements had the Pen tool, I wouldn’t even consider paying $$$ for Photoshop. I’m sure others wouldn’t as well.

Of course there are other differences. The menu system in Elements isn’t laid out as nice as Photoshop and you don’t get all the filters and extras. But for 95% of what I do with image manipulation, Elements is enough.

For just $79.00, Photoshop Elements is plenty worth it.

To add this feature to your toolbar, simply right-click anywhere within the toolbar area and choose “Customize Toolbar.” Then just drag the “Mail” icon to the toolbar. That’s it.

Now when you visit a web page that you want to share with others, press the “Mail” button and your mail client will open with a new message which contains the link and the page title as the subject.

That was easy!

I may have to spring for internet access when I get back home.

This article is really just about my feelings and recollections of what I thought of Michael Jackson and what I have to say about this life and death. I did purchase the three aforementioned songs on iTunes in preparation for this article. I imagine with Jackson not around anymore to spend his own money, his debts may get paid off sooner than most people think. As of now, his personal debt has been estimated to be as much as $400 million or more. After that, I’m sure the family, record labels, lawyers, and a slew of others will be in court fighting over rights to his name, likeness, and music. Vultures.

Early Recollections

The Jackson-Five were before my time, so I’ll pick up around 1984, during his solo career. This period of the 1980s was the most “urban” of the decade. Breakdancing and early RAP music were mainstream. Everyone was breakdancing it seemed, and all you needed were a large cardboard box and some sneakers with fat shoelaces. With movies such as Breakin’, the urban culture invaded the towns and suburbs of white America. Madonna was just rising to superstar status at this time, but Jackson was already there.

Jackson’s star was rising at a meteoric pace. I remember seeing everyone and their grandmother with Jackson-inspired red jackets. The merchandising was also out of this world. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing something with Jackson’s face on it or hearing his music. With help from MTV, Jackson reached a vaster audience much faster than many artists before the age of video. White and black kids alike were listening to Jackson, and in that regard, he bridged the racial divide.

Video Killed The Radio Star

There’s no question that Michael Jackson took the music video to the next level. Around this time, music videos were just an assembled piece of randomness, for the most part. All the cliches of slow motion, still framing, something breaking, reverse video, and color effects were present in about 100% of videos during this time. Many were not memorable but for the only reason that this was a new area of art and MTV rammed them down your throat 24 hours a day.

Jackson always used a narrative and the video played out like a mini-movie, with defining acts. It was a formula he would use for his biggest hits of the decade. It worked, and made the video more than just a boring lip-sync adventure. His videos definitely stimulated more of the senses than the average fare.

At The Top

From about 1984 through the closing of the decade, there was no bigger performer than Michael Jackson. Only Madonna could rival in stardom and success. As much a part of the 1980s Jackson was, he only produced two studio albums during this time, Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). There is no album in music history that tops Thriller in pure sales. It’s estimated that worldwide sales are 60 to 65 million. To put that in perspective, based on current world population estimates, about 1% of the world population owns or has owned this album. That is pretty impressive. There are other estimates that put Thriller at 100 million or more, but those numbers seem to be unfounded and not realistic.

Jackson would go on to release three more albums during his career, Dangerous (1991), HIStory (1995), and Invincible (2001). Each subsequent album received less audience than the one before it.

The Music

As I mentioned, I’m not the biggest MJ fan, but a song like Beat It has some appeal. From the great Eddie Van Halen guitar riff and sensational lead guitar, to Jackson’s vocal melody and catchy chorus, the song is a solid example of good music craftsmanship. The song also has much more of a Rock flavor than some of the other titles on the Thriller album. The songs Thriller and Billie Jean are also my other favorites.

I’ve always said that a good song is a good song, regardless of the genre. My tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging. I can listen to Sam Cooke, The Beatles, and Nirvana, then jump to Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan (pre 1966 mostly). But you can throw in any combination of early 1960s girl groups, such as The Crystals or 1950s pioneers of Rock, like Buddy Holly. I like a wide range of music, but the music has to be sensational for me to listen. Life is short, and I don’t want to cast such a wide net that it’s wasted with music of little importance or mediocrity.

I wouldn’t judge Michael Jackson’s career on three songs. I’ve heard much more of his material over the years, but most of it doesn’t grab me nor resonate with me. That is not to say that it isn’t good or solid work, it’s just not for me. Maybe if I had more time to go through his catalog there would be catchy little numbers I’d get to like. But I don’t have that time. All I will say on his career is that there was no one single individual probably ever in the history of the world who could attract more people than Michael Jackson. He had talent and whatever else it takes to become a superstar. The only problem was what it takes to be a human, a real person, he was apparently lacking.

Personal Life And Death

This story has been written time and time again. It’s an old, tired story. A sad, and often pathetic one. The question has been asked countless times, “How can a person with everything wander so far astray in life?” How did Jackson’s life end the way it did?

For starters, this man had no real friends surrounding him. He had business associates, lawyers, and record executive types who were all looking out for their best interests, not Jackson’s. To be fair, Jackson brought most of his problems into his own life, but he had plenty of help in willing collaborators and enablers.

There is no doubt his childhood was screwed up, but his incessant desire to capture youth was clinical in it’s scope and sickness. Sleeping with children, acting like one, and having no sense of reality outside of what he created really hurt him as a person. To him, we were not the “normal” ones, he was. I’m sure he truly couldn’t understand why so much of the public looked at him with estrangement and wonder.

His fascination and addiction to plastic surgery all but rendered him unrecognizable from his early career. This site shows clearly how his face has changed over the years. The website takes a humorous approach, but mostly it’s not pretty. Michael Jackson has admitted to only a few cosmetic “improvements,” but as you will see from the site, nothing could be further from the truth.

Michael Jackson became a caricature of himself. At some point, he morphed into an aging entertainer from a vibrant artist. With allegations of child molestation following him around for the last 16 or so years of his life, I’m sure that had a direct effect on his actions and strange behaviors. But again, he created that monster. He had no one to blame but himself. I don’t know for sure if he was a pedophile or just someone who really wanted to be a kid, or wanted to be around children. In any event, it was a psychological impediment, one that he could never overcome.

Sadly, when his story is fully written, it will contain many sordid and painfully shocking details. Since he was so secretive, who knows if we will ever truly know the real Michael Jackson. What is certain however, is this story won’t have a happy ending.

The End

I received a text message from my sister at 6:32 PM EST on June 25. The message reads, “Michael Jackson is DEAD!” I can’t say I wasn’t shocked, I was. I immediately put on MSNBC and sure enough, it was true. For the next several hours, I was glued to the TV, switching from MSNBC to Fox News to CNN and back. Even in death, Jackson grabbed the media’s attention. Farrah Fawcett died earlier in the day, but you’d be hard-pressed to know about it. Ed McMahon’s death was buried, pardon the pun, even further under the news heap.

In the weeks to come, I think the picture will become more clear, and the abuse of his body will become more evident. When his body was removed from the transporting helicopter and into the Coroner’s van, it looked like a flat piece of wood on the stretcher. You couldn’t even see a defined outline of a body. Obviously, he was malnourished and his addiction to prescription drugs had taken a toll on him physically. If he was 110 pounds, I would be very surprised. What a waste.

I’m listening to Beat It (Single Version) by Michael Jackson

Update 06.27.09: Michael Jackson dominates top-ten album list in U.S. iTunes Store.

I’m again under warranty, and I’ll get the AppleCare plan at the end of the year, giving me an additional two years of coverage.

Update (06.25.09): This MacBook Pro will be traveling to Afghanistan. A serviceman purchased it and is taking it with him when he is deployed next week. Let’s hope it tracks Bin Laden and “fires” the drone that takes the bastard out.

Update (06.25.09): The final sales figure was $1,676.08. Just shy of my $1,699.00 goal. But I’ll take it.

Update (06.24.09): With one last item selling, total sales are up to $1,673.02.

However, I never purchased Apple Care protection, so basically it’s living on borrowed time. One catastrophe, such as the logic board going, and I’m out a computer. So I’ve been recently thinking about replacing it with another MacBook Pro. And I’m happy to say that I finally did. I purchased the computer yesterday at the Providence Place Apple retail store, in Providence, Rhode Island.

I Want That, No That, No That One

I settled on the newly released MacBook Pro, 15-inch, 2.53 GHz model. It comes with 4GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, which I will replace with a larger and faster drive in the fall, integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chip, and a wonderful 7-hour battery. Well, 7 hours in the most “lab restricted” of tests I’m sure, but it’s going to be better than the 2 hours I get now with my 17-inch.

I purchased the “low end” 15-inch for a few reasons. For one, I don’t need the extra power of a dedicated video card (256 shared VRAM is enough for me) nor the faster processor speeds, which are minimal at best when compared to real working environments. Also, I didn’t want to spend $800.00 more to get a 17-inch just for a 1.6-inch larger screen size (diagonally). Also, what put me off is the fact that the new 17-inch displays are now 1920 x 1200 (native resolution). This makes for a fine display, however, objects on-screen tend to be much smaller than my current 17-inch, which uses 1680 x 1050 (native). I’m sure that if the native resolution were somewhere in between the two, there may have been an argument for the 17-inch. But alas, no such argument was present, so I happily went for the 15-inch, and if I may say so, it was an excellent choice.

The Impressionist

I’ve had less than 24 hours to come to my opinions on this wonderful new machine, so anything I write here is subject to change. The first thing you notice, even before you take the computer out of the box is that Apple has focused on environmentally friendly packaging. The boxes are much smaller than even the ones that came with my 17-inch just a couple years ago. I would say they are easily 40% – 50% smaller in volume. And of course, the overall packaging is exceptional, as all Apple products are.

When you break the plastic seal and open the box, you are greeted with the top side of the glorious MacBook Pro. That white Apple logo is staring you right in the face. Just the thought of reaching in the box and picking up the computer is enough to give one goosebumps.

After removing the computer from the box, I took off the plastic protective wrapping. I was surprised at how much thinner the computer was, and how much better looking it was than my 17-inch. I glanced over to the older MacBook Pro and saw a much different computer than just a few moments before. All of a sudden I didn’t like the design of my 17-inch. How fickle I am.

The aluminum unibody design is remarkable. With the screen up, no seams are present on the top or sides of the body, and unlike my 17-inch, no screws are visible. The bottom contains 10 screws that fit a second piece of aluminum which acts as the bottom of the computer. It fits perfectly. I’ve never seen a product with such an intuitive and clean design. The only materials I see are aluminum and glass, a small plastic covering where the hinge is, the rubber-like feet pads on the bottom, and of course the plastic keys of the keyboard.

Wait, There’s More

I’m so impressed with this computer, and I haven’t even turned it on yet! The first thing that you notice once you get into the OS (and go change the display colors to Adobe RGB) is that the screen has the nicest colors and clarity you’ve ever seen, either on a laptop or desktop display. The colors are crisp and vivid and the LED screen brightness will work in any natural light setting. I find myself only needing to ramp the brightness 5 levels or so. Maxing out the brightness looks as if you are staring into a sun.

The keyboard layout is much better than my 17-inch. The only bad thing I can say about the keyboard, and indeed of all Apple’s latest keyboards, is the abandonment of the Apple logo on the command key. I used to fancy saying Apple-S to save, or Apple-X to cut. Now, we are just like the folks in the Windows world, we now say “command.” That’s about all the negative comments I have about the keyboard. The special function (F1 – F12) now offer more of the features I use, like Expose and Dashboard with their own keys, complete with icons.

Come On Now, Touch Me

The touchpad has evolved so much since my 17-inch. The first thing you’ll notice is that the button is gone. The touch pad is the button. When I heard Apple say this a while back, I thought that meant you simply touch it, and it will act as a single click, just like my 17-inch. But no, you can still do that, but when you click down on the touch pad, it actually clicks. And what’s better, you can tell it to do a right click by clicking the bottom-right of the touch area. That’s just cool. The touch pad is made of glass, and it has this fine texture as to not make it too slippery, but still provide a smooth surface. Also, multiple finger gestures can be used, including a cool four-finger swipe that will clear the screen with an up-swipe, and return the windows with a down-swipe. Well done!

The user experience is second to none. The new glass overlay makes it easy to keep your screen clean and it also protects the screen as well. As we all know, it’s much easier to clean glass than the actual LCD or LED screen.

Do You Hear What I Hear

Now, I’m not a total Apple fanboy. I’ll tell you when I think Apple does something wrong, or if I don’t like something. That time is now.

Thus far, the only real negative thing I can say about my new MacBook Pro is that the speakers don’t sound as good as my 17-inch. I don’t know if that’s because the speaker grills are smaller, the speakers are of different quality, or the unibody has anything to do with the sound, but the speakers sound a bit “tinny” and the high-end frequencies seem to overpower the low-end.

Listening side by side, my 17-inch wins easily in sound quality. Now, I never listen to music from the internal speakers, I use a great Klipsch system, but if I needed to, it would be nice to hear better sound quality. I haven’t heard the new 17-inch sound quality, so I can’t say if this is just related to the 15-inch. The larger speaker grills and larger overall size of the 17-inch may prove better for sound reproduction. Also, the solid aluminum may resonate much differently than my 17-inch, which would certainly affect the sound.

Final Thoughts

One word… wow! Forget about the OS, which is the best in the world, I’m just going to focus on the hardware. So much time and effort was spent on the little details. Moving all the IO ports to one side of the machine was brilliant. I hated having cords sticking out on both sides of my 17-inch.

The aluminum body is so minimalist in form but allows the computer to do everything it wants to do in terms of functionality and practicality. If it’s not essential, it’s not there. Apple doesn’t like little things sticking out here and there, distracting the user from the experience. Aside from the recessed keyboard area, you are essentially looking at a flat block of aluminum with nice rounded corners. The razor sharp, 90 degree angles of the computer’s edge are eye-catching, as is the back-lit keyboard. Some didn’t like the black keys, but I find they look great with the black border around the screen.

This is my first LED display, and I must say I wouldn’t use a standard LCD every again. The colors are amazing, and I hear this is the best display Apple has ever used. The resolution of 1440 x 900 (native) is very adequate. I would have preferred something in the middle of that and 1680 x 1050, but it’s not a limitation in my opinion. Since I use my MacBook as my primary computer, I may get the 24-inch Apple display and throw in a wireless keyboard. That would be the perfect setup for me.

I’ve stopped counting all the Macs I’ve purchased since 2005. This could be number 13, or it could be 11. I’ve lost track. I used to go 3 years with a PC, but I often go less than a year with a Mac. I just can’t help but eat up the innovation and style. This one, however, I’m probably the most excited about since my first Mac mini.

I finished transferring all of my files via an external clone, and I finished adding most of my apps. I’ll be installing MS Office 2008 as soon as I finish this post. I love doing clean installs of my Macs, so this was something I’m accustomed to. I can take a clean install and have the Mac look exactly the way I want it in about 2 hours or so. I have about 40 applications I must install each time, so that takes up the bulk of my time. Thankfully, I have a Mobile Me account and my preference settings I can just sync down from the cloud and I’m good to go.

In Closing

Wait, didn’t I already have a “final thoughts” section? Anyway, I’m gonna go and finish my app installs and enjoy the MacBook a bit more. I’ll be back to post any changes in opinion I might have.

Update 06.20.09: The trackpad, which is made of glass, is silky smooth. Comparing it to my 17″, there is no contest. My fingers just glide across the glass. Nice.

So far, the only issues I have are the sound quality/level. The speakers are not as loud as my 17″ and don’t sound as good. But I’ve been told the 17″ have more speakers and a sub-woofer, which would explain the better sound.

Update 06.19.09: I didn’t even mention that this new model has a SD card slot. And wouldn’t you know, I used it yesterday. I didn’t have my USB cable for a camera, so I just popped in the card. iPhoto opened, my pictures were imported and I was done. Thank you Apple!

So far I’ve not had any problems or negative reaction to my new computer. I couldn’t be happier.

I had the great privilege of seeing Kobe perform in Boston about seven years ago, and he’s matured into one of the greatest players to ever take the court. I’m a big MJ fan, but Kobe has carried the torch with excellence since Jordan retired.

In “Partly Cloudy,” we see the process of how babies are born… just not the way you might imagine. We are talking storks and such. The process starts with the clouds, which create babies of all species, essentially from themselves, with cloud material. The storks then take the bundles down to their rightful recipients. The short has no dialog, just grunting, meowing, snorting, and a bunch of other cool noises.

The story focuses on one storm cloud, not bright white like the others. He seems to be sort of an outcast. Rather than make nice cuddly puppies, he’s making electric eels, crocodiles, and sharks. The poor stork who has to carry his creations to their eventual homes takes some exception to the lot. Eventually, the stork leaves him for another cloud, at which point the cloud gets angry and shows his anger with lighting and thunder. He then gets sad, and the cloud starts raining. It was all for not, as the stork simply went to another cloud to get a football helmut and some padding. The dark cloud gets happy again, and continues on with his purpose.

OK, so the short before the movie was great, but what about the feature? One word– unbelievable!

It’s All About The Little Things

Before I say anything, I would just like to say the attention to detail was second to none. I mean, from the stitching on clothes, to lighting, reflections… nothing was taken for granted. I’m biased towards Pixar as a certain Apple Computer CEO happens to own it… but this movie doesn’t need that bias, it gets a grade of A+ from me on its own.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but the recent Pixar movies are actually moving towards adult entertainment. Now, I can’t say I’ve seen many animated movies lately, well a few, but from what I heard about WALL-E, being almost fully devoid of any dialog, I think Pixar is using the “story” as the main selling point here. It’s from the story that everything revolves, and thus everything else evolves.

A New Direction

In Up, I was shocked to see a scene in where the wife of the main character visits a doctor’s office only to find out she can’t have children. This was after she and her husband spent time painting a room for their eventual offspring. A scene a bit later shows the husband mourning in the hospital’s chapel after his wife passes away. These were two strong scenes, neither of which any child could conceivably grasp the full impact of, especially as it pertains to the story as a whole. Twice my eyes did well up a bit, and once even a tear ran down my cheek. Some scenes were that strong.

The premise of the movie is as follows, Carl and Ellie are husband and wife, and have been best friends ever since childhood. As kids, they made a pact to go on a great adventure. After they got married, they started a fund of sorts, a money jar. Over the years however, life would happen, and they would need to use the money for other things. One day, they wake up old in life, but still young at heart, and realize their dream will never come true. Ellie has kept a scrapbook of their life, with a section marked “things I want to do.” But the rest of the book is blank. Sadly, they never got to do the things they so longed for.

They continued to share life with each other until Ellie is hospitalized and eventually passes away. Carl is left all alone for the first time in his life and is facing the prospect of living the rest of his life in a nursing home, persuant to a court order for assaulting a construction worker. Carl refused to be bought out by a land developer, and as it were, the construction was going forward, all around Carl’s home.

Carl, a former balloon salesman, decides to go on that adventure after all. He promises his late wife as much. So on the morning the nursing home attendants come to pick him up, he declines, and picks himself and his house up with hundreds of balloons, filled with the remaining helium tanks he had left from his job. Carl is off on his adventure, but a little stowaway, Russell, is in for the trip of his life.

The Journey

From there, the pace gets frenetic and the action picks up. They meet creatures big and small, and a pack of dogs that can talk, thanks to their master’s electronical collars. They are chased by a mad explorer who is looking for a very rare bird and barely get back with their lives. The journey almost reminds me of “The Wizard of Oz,” in that along the way, Russell and Carl meet other characters that help them on their journey, each possessing the skills needed for all to succeed. The characters interacted well with each other, and at no time did the interaction seemed forced.

The mad explorer, Muntz, falls from his airship and dies, which was another moment where you had to think twice about this being a children’s movie. After all, this was rated PG, only the second Pixar movie to have such a distinction. The Incredibles was the other one. And I have to say, the PG rating certainly let Pixar do much more with the story to make it entertaining for adults, as well as make the story have more of an impact on the senses. This move was part drama, part comedy, and part children’s movie. The parts were blended to perfection.

Humanimation

And you know what the best part of the movie was? Towards the end, Carl opened that adventure book, the one with all the pictures of Ellie and himself. He saw all the childhood pictures, the newlywed pictures, and then stopped at the part when Ellie wrote “things I want to do.” But this time, he turned the page, and it wasn’t blank. Ellie had in fact done things she wanted to do… with Carl. It turned out that she didn’t need an adventure to fulfill her life. She already had everything she wanted in the world, and her life wasn’t a waste of time, or a missed opportunity. She in fact did the thing she wanted to do with Carl– grow old together. It was a heart-felt moment and a brilliant piece of cinema. All this time Carl assumed that Ellie missed out in life, when all the while she had everything she ever wanted.

This definitely was a movie. Not a children’s movie, but a movie that children can watch, and still get some delight out of. This however was a treat for adults. Two weeks in, and $140+ million in domestic sales, Up is sure to be a big hit for Pixar, who have never known anything but hits. With 10 movies now under its belt, and more than $2 billion in domestic receipts, Pixar has set the standard for computer animated movies.

I can’t say enough about Up and I am considering seeing it again. It was that good!

PS- I didn’t even mind missing the Lakers game…. they are up two games and Kobe is going to get his fourth ring!

I went through the the online process, very simple and easy. After three screens, I was done. My new card was on it’s way. Then something hit me. Were my eyes deceiving me? I just applied for a CapitalOne credit card right? Wait a minute, no! This is another credit card company trying to spoof CapitalOne’s identity. And it worked!

Notice anything different about the logos below?

Bastards!

Yeah, well I did too, but it was too late. I was applying to CreditOne, not CapitalOne. Talk about making a concerted effort to try and trick people into applying for your cards. I’ve seen that CapitalOne logo a million times, and I don’t even need to read it to know it, which is what these bastards were counting on.

So now I go and read the terms on the back of the application. There is a $69.00 annual fee as well as a $69.00 one-time fee, divided into 12 monthly payments. Basically, I’m already in the hole before I get the card in my hands. Now, they do give you 30 days to cancel and avoid these fees “from the time you are accepted.” I was accepted on May 4th. As of today, May 26th, I still have no card. I wonder why they wait so long to send the card? Maybe because they want you to get it 31 days after you join, thereby voiding your refund rights? That’s my bet.

Well, I’m calling them today to cancel my card. I can’t wait to hear the bullshit they will try and spew to keep me from canceling. I tried calling the same day, but they said there was a problem with my application. Right. I’ll be sure to post back after I cancel.

The reason you will never own one is safety!

Safety First

If you get into a car accident today, you can potentially kill yourself, your passengers, and the people in the other car. Start flying around in the sky, and you can start killing many more people, not to mention the kind of terrorist tool this could be. Load this up with diesel, fertilizer, some TNT, maybe a dirty nuke cocktail, and you can take out entire city blocks, if not from destruction, from radiological fallout.

Today, run out of gas or your car breaks down, just pull over to the side of the road and wait for AAA. Run out of gas or stall while flying, and local government pulls over to the side of the road and cleans up the debris and your dead body. Any questions?

Hey, What Are Those Wires…

Plus, the logistics would never work. What do you do about power lines, buildings, airspace control, etc. It’s hard enough tracking thousands of flights per day, do you think we can start tracking consumer flying cars as well? Plus, any moron can drive a car, but do you expect to put teenagers in the air?

It’s a great idea, great for sci-fi visions of the future, but not in our lifetime. How hard is it for car manufacturers to get a decent automobile for under $10,000 – $15,000 these days? So how much you think they are gonna charge for a flying car that can also drive on the road, hover, etc. More than you have.

Here are some of the car’s (clears throat) highlights:

Top speed: 350 mph
Turbo Engines: Four
Body: Kevlar, carbon fiber and carbon nanotubes
Takeoff / Landing: Vertical
Collision Avoidance: GPS
Airbags: Check
Street Legal: Yup!
Ever Going To Happen: Nope

On paper, it all sounds good. In practice, this would be a complete and utter waste of R&D. If you were high, and pipe-dreaming, this idea of flying cars would be akin to that. Just doing some quick math, I’d say you’d have a price tag of about $500,000 or more to start. Actually having this thing capable of flight, that would cost you a bit more.

This reminds me of those robots the Japanese automakers keep on building, the ones who climb stairs… Wow, I’m really impressed. Here’s an idea, nix the robots, and give us more miles per gallon in your automobiles. That would actually be worthwhile.

This year, I’d just like to reprint an article I grabbed off of Prodigy, and put up a screenshot of a Prodigy Poll at the time. I guess people were more wrong than they thought.

If you discover one thing in life, I hope it’s that nothing in life is worth taking your life. Giving up should never be an option. Suicide is a very selfish act and a cheap way to go out. Euthynasia and medical interests not withstanding, anything can be overcome.

SEATTLE–The apparent suicide of Kurt Cobain, just 3 years after his emergence as a powerful new force in popular music, left fans and critics comparing the grunge-rock guitarist to other groundbreaking musicians who died too young.

Radio stations around the country broadcast tributes to Cobain, MTV interrupted its usual programming for a career retrospective and fans mourned the star’s death after his body was discovered Friday at his Seattle home.

“It reminds me of Jimi Hendrix. This is a guy who hasn’t even hit his prime,” said fan Steve Kennedy of Pompton Lakes, N.J. “It’s like Jim Morrison–you’ll never know what else he could do.”

Cobain, 27, had become an overnight spokesman for a disaffected generation of young Americans after Nirvana’s 1991 hit single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The flannel-shirted singer’s woes were well documented: heroin addiction, discomfort with celebrity, domestic spats, and the near-fatal ingestion of drugs and alcohol just last month that left him in a coma.

“Kurt’s passions and feelings about his fame overwhelmed him,” said a statement from Gold Mountain Entertainment, Nirvana’s management company.

Cobain expressed those feelings in his music and lyrics. One of Nirvana’s last songs, recorded for “The Beavis and Butt-head Experience” album, was titled “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.”

“There were all the things in the last 2 years,” said Gus Hosseini, owner of a Milwaukee nightclub where the band played twice. “I knew it was coming. I didn’t know when.”
On MTV, the usual pre-taped programming was pulled and replaced with a look back at Cobain’s career–a particularly apropos gesture, since MTV helped boost Nirvana to commercial success.

“He was the closest his generation came to a John Lennon,” Rolling Stone writer David Fricke said on the MTV tribute. “If you don’t see the connection, you’re missing something.”
The tribute first aired Friday and was repeated Saturday. The band’s videos and clips from interviews and live appearances were interspersed with remembrances of Cobain.

Record stores reported increased business for “Nevermind,” the band’s debut album, and “In Utero,” its acclaimed platinum follow-up.

At Tower Records in Los Angeles, the band’s videos played in the store and the mood was somber. “It was upsetting because he was so young,” said shopper Jennifer Chouinard, 23. “His lyrics were different and they touched a lot of people in a lot of different ways.”

The apparent suicide was front-page news across the country, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Music critic Jim Farber of the New York Daily News offered this eulogy for Cobain:

“Having long ago equated failure with credibility, the world’s embrace carried its own kind of rebuke. … [He leaves] a legacy of self-expression as moving and true as his end was tragic.”

(From AP)

Copied from the PRODIGY(R) service 04/10/94 11:42 PM

Listening to Poker Face by Lady GaGa

It’s been so long I don’t even use Gmail anymore. Maybe I’ll check them out when they hit…. version one? WoW.

It was kind of sad to uninstall Carbonite as I had high hopes for the application, but the CPU issues were too much for me to make a commitment at the moment. Maybe in the future the service may solve my issues. I’ll check back again.

Now, on to the solution. I already had all the pieces, it was just a matter of putting them together to make a beautiful picture. The three pieces were iDisk, Transmit, and Automator. Once fit together, these three pieces do everything I need, including keeping a 1:1 backup of my data off-site, and automatically uploading new changes every night. By scheduling, I save CPU resources by constantly having software checking and uploading files all day. I rather have this done at night when I’m sleeping.

I’m using a Mac, so these things come much easier than for Windows folk.

Mobile Me iDisk

iDisk is the storage area within Mobile Me. You get 20 GB to use at your discretion. I wasn’t using mine, so I had all that unused space. For an additional fee, I can upgrade to even more storage, but 20 GB is fine for now.

I used to use Apple’s Backup software with iDisk, but it doesn’t make 1:1 backups. It wraps the backup in a file, and you then have to go and try to find the files you want, within the wrappers. It also does incremental backups to create new wrappers, which are a pain if you simply want to mirror your files, as I do. When I delete something, there is good reason for it. I don’t want it around. Usually, I’ll have that file available as a backup on my external drive, so even if I delete something important, I can go back and retrieve that file before I clone my drive.

Finally, iDisk has a purpose for me other than e-mail storage.

Transmit

Every day that I use this application I seem to learn something new. Transmit is an FTP client but it can do so much more than just transfer files. One of those other things I discovered today is the ability to connect to my Mobile Me iDisk account.

I was thrilled to see this and knowing how easy Transmit is to use, almost instantly I knew it would work. Setting up Transmit for use with iDisk involves inputing the iDisk server information. This includes the server name, username, password, and protocol.

Your username/password is simply your Mobile Me account information. The server name is the actual address that Apple uses for it’s iDisk service and must be connected via WebDAV and not regular FTP. Also, you must use your Mobile Me username in the remote folder section. This allows you to login to your secure area. Without supplying the remote folder (username), you will not be able to connect to your iDisk account.

Once you create the connection, you really don’t have to do anything else but simply upload your files to your iDisk. But, if you want automation and synchronization, you’ll have to use the last piece of the puzzle, Automator.

Automator

Automator is an application that make scripting easy. It allows you to make little applications simply by dragging and dropping actions. You can do all kinds of neat stuff with Automator, and one is the ability to create a custom Transmit synchronization app for your folders, in my case, my iDisk backup.

I created a workflow and chose to synchronize a set of local folders and remote folders. The synch will be done from local to remote, and I will mirror the local folders to the remote folders. This means that any files residing on the remote location that are not also on the local side will be deleted, making a perfect mirrored copy. I could have chosen to simply update, and this would always upload new files to the remote location, but never delete.

Once the workflow was configured, I saved it as an application. When this new application is run, Transmit will open up, connect to my iDisk, and upload the files. Perfect. But what if I want to schedule the backups to run every night?

iCal

No problem, I simply make an iCal alarm and have this application execute every night. In iCal, I just click to create a new event, but add an alarm, and have it run 0 minutes before the event. So at 2:13 AM every night, the application I created launches, and backs up any files that have changed or have been added since the last backup.

I get all the benefits of Carbonite, without having to spend the extra $55 a year. I’ll check Carbonite in the future to see how they are coming along. Maybe I’ll take them for a spin at version 2!

Remember kids, have at least 3 copies of your data and have one of those copies off-site. Follow this rule, and you will never lose your data, unless you are really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really unlucky.

Related:
The Carbonite Maneuver
Carbonite Online Backup TRIAL Review

So today was the day for the clean install of my Mac OS and my re-test of the Carbonite backup service. And day is a good description, as it took about 8 hours to get everything setup and back to where I left off before I wiped the drive. I do have about 40 programs installed, so that took the bulk of the time in re-downloading them. Luckily, I had all the preferences backed up to my Mobile Me account!

A Good Start

I started off by re-partitioning the disk to one GUID partition. I did have a Boot Camp Windows partition, but I’ll worry about that later. I hardly use it anyway. After that, I proceeded to install the bare minimum, which was 5.9 GB. No extras, no printer drivers, just the OS.

After skipping the verify disc check of the installation DVD, I went right to the installation. It only takes about 30 minutes, if that. In about an hour, I had the OS installed and all the updates to bring me to the current 10.5.6 version. I made sure that I only installed the Apple software and no third party software so I could see how Carbonite behaved with the basic installation. Actually, I did install one piece of software, Wallet, so I could access my passwords and associated data.

Get It, Got It

I went to the Carbonite website, logged in, and re-installed the software. That was a very easy process. I had no trouble. It recognized my account/computer and began to check for updates. Since I didn’t have any files in my home folder, it quickly did it’s thing.

My original problem with Carbonite was that when it was doing nothing, just sitting idle, it would use an incredible amount of CPU resources. So I figured it was one of the many applications I had installed not behaving nicely with Carbonite. To my dismay, Carbonite acted the same way with just the installation of the OS, with no other apps.

I Got It

I did manage to find the problem, and there is nothing I can do on my end, this is definitely a problem on Carbonite’s end. When Carbonite is idle, it is supposed to show an “idle” status message. And I noticed that it sometimes did, and when it did, the CPU usage dropped to levels expected of an idle application. However, this idle message would be sporadic, and most of the time, even though I was idle, Carbonite had the status message “Backup in progress,” even though no backup was being made. In essence, Carbonite was idle, but it was using CPU resources as it were backing up or looking for files to backup.

This was very strange, as I did get the “Idle” message a few times in the beginning, but then quickly that message would not reappear, and it just said it had a backup in progress. As long as the status read “Backup in progress,” and no files were being copied, my CPU resources soared. Since I only had the Mac OS installed, plus Wallet, I don’t see how this could be a problem on my end. The image below shows my CPU in use when Carbonite showed “Backup in progress” as it’s status message.

I will be emailing Carbonite, who have been very helpful to this point, and explain what I did and that there is no way that any software on my machine is interfering with Carbonite. I still will use the service, but I’ll have to pause it when not in use, otherwise the CPU melts the aluminum and the fans sound like jet engines. Well maybe the aluminum doesn’t melt, but it’s pretty hot just the same.

The latest episode, Margaritaville, pokes fun at the economy, specifically the state of Wall Street and banking, and the spending habits of ordinary people. The first five minutes are some of the funniest I’ve ever seen in South Park. I probably watched it 10 times and laughed as hard the last time as the first.

Click on the button below and go watch it, you’ll be glad you did.

So I bought half a blueberry pie, ReddiWip, and some Organic Cow whole milk from Stop & Shop tonight. I haven’t had blueberry pie in ages, so I thought it would be a nice treat. Granted, it’s not the best pie in the world, but at least it was once made from natural ingredients, and sold near the bakery, which is good enough for me.

About ten minutes ago, I decided it might be good to have a piece. So I got out the pie, put some whipped cream on it, and got my milk ready. I was all set up, plastic fork even. I took a nice heaping fork-full, making sure to get some cream on it. I had my milk at the ready so I could down the pie in style. I put it the pie in my mouth, chew a few times, and almost as a quick as an involuntary reflex, the pie is expelled out of my mouth.

Now, I’ve never tasted makeup, but if I did, I’m sure this is what it would have resembled. This was the worst taste in my life. I don’t know if it was the pie or the whipped cream, but this thing hit the trash faster than I could say refund. The taste was so bad, I had to break out some sour cream & onion Pringles, then break out the french onion dip. Yeah, that bad.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had bad experiences with food from Stop & Shop. From now on, I’m going to fight my initial impulse of throwing the food away and I’m going to return it to the store. Now I wish I went with the chocolate-chip cookies:(

What I’m listening to right now: Spaceball Ricochet by T.Rex

As you may know, standard velcro consists of two sides– one side has hooks, which when come into contact with the loop side, forms a tight fastening. After repeated opening and closings, the loop side fabric can become stretched, fatigued, and otherwise a bit worse for wear.

Snipping off just enough of the frayed fibers gave me a much better fit. Now, when I press both ends together, and give it a little extra wiggle, the velcro makes for a much better fit. Now, I can actually hear that “ripping” sound when I open my flap.

So if you’re velcro is getting long in the tooth, give this a try. Only remove a small amount of loop fiber at a time, then test. Remember, you have to keep some fiber so the hooks can find their target.

Image Credit: Scott Cambell design for Velcro Indie Dance Party @ Spanish Moon

My backup strategy has ranged from making cloned copies of my drive, to using Apple’s Time Machine software and their Time Capsule hardware, to backing up files on DVDs. All are good, but just as in real estate, it’s all about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

Often, the problem is that all of our backups are stored in the same location. This exposes the data to the possibility of fire or theft. Even with the best backup strategy, data stored in the same location offers as much insurance as not having any backups– and that’s pretty nill.

If you have a fire-proof safe, that’s better, if you can store copies of your data offsite, that’s better still, but if could effortlessly and securely backup your data online, well that is the holy grail. Thankfully, there are many options for the latter storage option.

Remote solutions that I’ve tried are backing up to my web server (FTP), Carbonite, Mobile Me, and Amazon’s S3 service. And now… a few words on each. Later in the article, look for the special feature “Carbonite Support Chat.”

Web Server

Since a lot of people have web sites today, chances are they have storage available with a web host. Actually, this form of backup is pretty cheap, as you can often get like 50 gigs of storage space for only a few bucks per month, often with unlimited transfer or a number so high it’s essentially unlimited. The downside is that the interface is usually a bland FTP application (unless you are a Mac user and have Transmit). Usually you are restricted to just manually dragging and dropping data from the local and remote locations. Not the most intuitive backup solution, but at least it is a solution.

One caveat is that if the web host goes down and you never hear from them again, you lose all your data. Also, this isn’t a secure method, since anyone on “their” side can access your data unless you encrypt it, which kinda kills the concept of “easy backup.” If it’s all you got, it’s all you need.

Mobile Me

This seemed like a great way for me to backup my files, as I’m already a Mobile Me customer and I have all the necessary software to make this happen. The problem is that Apple limits you to 20 GB of storage and you have to pay for additional storage. For an additional 40 GB, it’s $49.00/year on top of the $99/year you are paying for the Mobile Me service. For me, this is too cost prohibitive, especially if I want to backup all of my data, music, and movies. (for $50.00, Carbonite gives you unlimited storage)

The Backup app that Apple offers is lacking, and simply backs up the files in increments and in bundles, so you have to jump through hoops to get to the actual files. I have around 19 GB of free space, but I don’t use it as I’m not happy with the way Apple has implemented file backup. I don’t want to save everything, I just want to sync my drive. I need to look for alternatives which allow backup clients to access my iDisk space, in a consistent and intuitive manner.

Amazon S3

I’ve heard about S3 for a while and recently tried it. You pay no monthly fees except $0.15/GB of storage per month, as well as transfer fees. Sounds good, but I tried uploading, and some Mac files, like my iPhoto Library, had issues. To S3, it just looked as one big folder and didn’t even copy all the files. There are some Mac front-ends but they charge you an additional fee for using their software/service. I only tried it for about 15 minutes and it didn’t meet my needs. It’s good for straight storage of files, and it’s a step up from storage with your web host.

Carbonite

Of all the solutions I’ve mentioned so far, this seemed like the best for me. It can backup files in the background, will check for new file versions, will save a backup copy of your files for 30 days even after you delete them on your computer, and runs from within the System Preferences. Restoring files is a snap and you can always see exactly what you have backed up. It’s still in version 1.0, but this looks very promising.

Carbonite has no storage limits, except it doesn’t by default backup video files. You have to manually set the location of the video files. If you have video strewn about your computer, this may be a turn-off. But if you keep them in your Movies folder (like you should), it shouldn’t be a problem. For me, however, I have videos within my web site file backups, so those aren’t backed up by Carbonite as I have them stored across the site. But I have those backed up on my computer, with the web host, and on an external drive. Plus, those are not the most important video files I have.

There is one HUGE downside I’ve discovered, and after searching the web, I’m not alone. Carbonite, when not doing anything and in it’s idle state, uses a heavy load of CPU cycles. For me, this is between 70% and 80%. CPU cycles peak at around 94%. My fans blaze and my MacBook Pro glows like a ceramic heater. If I’m running any other apps that use any amount of the CPU, my computer slows. If I’m running Photoshop, it’s like death.

My trial is over in a few days, and this may be a deal-breaker for me. I’ve contacted tech support via the in-app support area, but not have heard back. I did a chat today with a rep and he told me to submit another request. He was moderately helpful, but did suggest I just turn it off when not using the backup. This defeats the purpose of having an automatic, autonomous, real-time backup solution with no muss or fuss. I am very diligent when it comes to backing up, so I may have to live with this while it’s being worked out.

Carbonite Support Chat

10:49:58 AM EDT System
Ken has joined this session!

10:49:58 AM EDT System
Connected with Ken

10:50:03 AM EDT System
Hello and thank you for using Customer Support Live Chat! How may I assist you today?

10:51:20 AM EDT Bryan
I am using the Mac trial version of Carbonite. So far it works great. The only problem I am having is that when it’s in “wait and see mode” looking for files to backup, it’s uses like 80-90% of my CPU processes. In looking at Activity Monitor, when doing nothing, it is a CPU hog. I often have to pause it as my MacBook Pro really heats up and the fans come on very strong. Is this a known problem?

10:52:26 AM EDT Bryan
Also, when you open the Carbonite Preferences, when it’s not backing up anything, it always says “Backup In Progress,” and shows the blue progress bar, which is a bit misleading as nothing is being backed up at the time.

10:52:58 AM EDT Ken
Please let me review your account.

10:53:30 AM EDT Bryan
CarboniteDaemon is using 80-90% of CPU

10:54:03 AM EDT Ken
I apologize for the inconvenience.

10:54:58 AM EDT Ken
If it is using high CPU. You can just disable Carbonite when you are using your computer. Enable Carbonite when not in use.

10:55:37 AM EDT Bryan
I know you can do that, but that gets annoying after a while, and kind of defeats the purpose of having your files backed up instantly.

10:56:06 AM EDT Bryan
I can see if it’s using the CPU while backing up, but when it’s just idle, that’s when I’m getting high CPU usage. CPU cycles are actually lower when it is doing soemthing.

10:57:43 AM EDT Bryan
As it is, MacBook Pro users can’t keep this program running without pausing it due to heat issues. That seems to be a problem with Carbonite, in that it is using a disproportionate amount of CPU resources vs other applications.

10:58:38 AM EDT Bryan
I would like to keep this software once my trial is over, but I’m afraid I’m not going to pay for it due to these CPU issues. I want my files constantly backed up but not at the expense of my CPU and usability due to other programs running very slow.

10:59:17 AM EDT Bryan
So if you could file a bug report, or something along that line, and make note of the high CPU usage, if this gets resolved, I would consider looking again at Carbonite.

10:59:17 AM EDT Ken
Please allow me a moment.

10:59:31 AM EDT Bryan
ok

11:04:58 AM EDT Ken
I appreciate your patience.

11:05:06 AM EDT Ken
Please wait and let me confirm.

11:05:07 AM EDT Bryan
it’s no problem

11:06:21 AM EDT Bryan
I just found this on another site “I’ve found the Carbonite daemon to be a resource hog, even when I’m fully backed up and nothing is being uploaded. My fan started to run constantly and my system performance slowed down so I checked Activity Monitor and the Carbonite daemon was varying between 20-70% CPU usage.
Unacceptable.”

11:06:21 AM EDT Ken
To better assist you we need your log files.

11:07:02 AM EDT Bryan
That’s the problem I have… ^^

11:07:03 AM EDT Ken
I am sending you an email.

11:07:13 AM EDT Ken
Please reply to the email.

11:07:19 AM EDT Bryan
Ok

11:08:58 AM EDT Ken
Once we review the log files we will answer you.

11:09:05 AM EDT Bryan
When shall I expect the email

11:09:13 AM EDT Ken
Is there anything else I may assist you with?

11:09:13 AM EDT Bryan
just got it.

11:09:48 AM EDT Bryan
Actually, I did submit a request via the Carbonite Preference window, but I didn’t hear back from anyone

11:09:59 AM EDT Bryan
I’ll do it again though

11:10:13 AM EDT Bryan
Thanks for the help, that will be all.

11:10:48 AM EDT Ken
Welcome Bryan.

11:10:58 AM EDT Ken
Is there anything else I may assist you with?

11:11:04 AM EDT Bryan
that will be all

11:11:20 AM EDT System
The session has ended!

I received a phone call from my mother today asking if it was legal for store owners to impose these minimums for credit/debit cards. I told her I didn’t know the answer to that, but I said I would visit the MasterCard and Visa website to find out.

I first did a Google search and found out that although it’s not illegal to impose minimums per se, it is indeed against the merchant agreement of both Visa and MasterCard. Now I was intrigued. Why do some merchants do it? Do they know it’s breaking their agreement? Do they care? Do they think the public doesn’t know the guidelines? Whatever, it’s wrong.

Master The Moment

A quick view of the FAQ at MasterCard’s site will inform the customer:

Another MasterCard acceptance rule prohibits merchants that accept MasterCard cards from establishing any minimum amount below which the merchant won’t accept payment via MasterCard card.

The full FAQ can be found here.

A check of Visa’s help section devotes a portion to minimums:

Visa merchants are not permitted to establish minimum transaction amounts, even on sale items. They also are not permitted to charge you a fee when you want to use your Visa card.

If you run into a problem like this with a merchant, please notify the financial institution that issued you your Visa card. These institutions have access to the appropriate Visa rules and regulations and can help you document and file your complaint. You’ll find their address and/or telephone number on your Visa statement. Their telephone number may also appear on the back of the card itself.

The full help section can be found here.

You Just Got Served

So what can we consumers do? Well, I for one will be challenging merchants who try to impose a minimum on myself, and I will use a handy little document that I created to enforce my position. This is a simple PDF file I created that reprints MasterCard and Visa’s guidelines.

I encourage everyone to download the document, print it, and serve any merchant with it. Want to militant on the issue? Hand these outside (on public property) the merchant’s establishment to customers.

In The News

The MSNBC website had a Q&A on this topic, titled: Surprise: Stores can’t set credit card minimum. Included below is the text from that page.

There are many convenience stores that charge small fees for using a debit or credit card when customers do not spend a certain dollar amount. For example, one store said they would charge me $0.75 if I used my Visa debit card to buy a soda, because I did not spend enough. I told the store clerk that she cannot impose a minimum purchase requirement when I used my Visa card and she simply laughed at me. Or was I wrong?
Keiko C.

You are correct. Merchants accepting Visa or MasterCard credit or debit cards are not allowed to set a minimum amount for using the card; that is a violation of the merchant agreement.
“People want to use their cards for smaller ticket transactions,” MasterCard’s Barbara Coleman tells me, and the credit card companies want to make sure they can.

Even so, as you found out, some stores try to impose a limit. What can you do? In your case, you can report the merchant to the financial institution that issued your Visa card.

You raised another interesting question. Can a merchant charge you a service fee for using a credit card or debit card? There is no federal regulation that prohibits this. The law that prohibited a surcharge on credit card purchases expired back in 1984. Both Visa and MasterCard allow a merchant to offer a discount to customers who pay by cash or check, but in most cases they say, a merchant cannot charge more for putting it on plastic — that would be a violation of the merchant agreement. I’ve asked the credit card companies for specific information about when an exception to this surcharge rule is permitted and I hope to write more about that in a future column.

Read the full text @ MSNBC

Project Expose

Now I’m going to be on the lookout for merchants who try to impose minimums. I will certainly write back here if I encounter any, and I will certainly submit my form to them.

Stay tuned, this could get interesting!

Once I got my premium amount, I proceeded to sign up online. Everything is done online, including signing the forms. The only form that they must mail to me is the contract. Unlike my current provider, you can edit/update your policy online and don’t have to waste time speaking with an agent. It all looks pretty efficient, except one thing.

Everything was going great until it was time to sign the forms. Progressive’s website was telling me I didn’t have JavaScript enabled on my browser (Safari 4.0 BETA), didn’t have Adobe Acrobat installed on my system (I do), and that my browser needed to be updated to, get this, Internet Explorer!!! Of all browsers…

No matter what browser I used, including FireFox 3.0, I could not get the forms. Luckily, I have Windows installed on my Mac, so I was able to boot into Windows, sign the forms, then get out as fast as I could. This prompted me to write a little note to the support team. I include that note here for completeness sake.

Aside from this minor annoyance, so far, so good.

I am an Apple Mac user and no matter what current web browser I used (FireFox, Safari, Camino) I got a message stating my browser needed to be updated.. to Internet Explorer no less.

Your site said I had no JavaScript, no Acrobat, etc. installed. Luckily, I have Windows installed on my Mac (because Macs are good like that), so I was able to sign my electronic documents. Had I not been able to boot into Windows, you would have had to mail the forms to to me for my signature.

I understand Windows is the dominant operating system, but Mac users should be able to use your site, especially since Mac + modern web browsers are 1000x more secure than any Windows machine.

In the future, I would like to see better Mac compatibility with your online services.

Thank you,

Bryan
New Customer

I used to buy that line, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” And maybe in a sane and moral society, that line works. But we are dealing with anything but sane and moral. We are living in the downward spiral of something that was once great.

I don’t have time to write anything substantive on this issue, I just wanted to make a point. Hopefully, I’ll be able to devote more time to this topic and expose these gun-rights morons for the illogical and misinformed people they are.

In The Beginning

The theatre doors opened up about 7:35 PM EST, and we promptly took our seats. The Wang Theatre is a very nice building, spacious with great views of the stage throughout the theatre seating. We were sitting in the orchestra (center) section, row W; a direct and center line of site with the stage. There were two large video screens on either side of the stage for additional viewing.

The atmosphere was great and the theatre filled up to (it looked like) capacity. After the president and CEO of the Citi Performing Arts Center came out and gave a brief speech, the producer of the show came out and spoke a little about Ann Coulter and Bill Maher. Once his speech and a few canned jokes were finished, the show began.

Enter Stage Right Wing

Ann Coulter was the first to be introduced. She walked onto the stage and took her place behind the podium. She was just as tall as she looks on TV, and just as skinny. They say television adds ten pounds to you. Well, the stage took back those ten, and I think, took another five as well. As someone uttered in the seats next to me, “she needs to eat.” I wanted to buy her a #1 with a Coke and a fillet sandwich at McDonalds.

Coulter spoke for about 20 minutes. The speech was prepared, but it looked as if her notes were more an outline, as she had good eye contact with the audience and presented herself well. Her speech tended to stray to many topics, as if she was trying to pack as much into her allotted time as possible. It was classic Ann Coulter. She went after Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, liberals, the media, non-conservatives, etc. Although she’s not a comedian per se, like many of her television appearances, she mixes up fiction with humor;) Well, some fact, but mostly her conservative bent shines through. Some of her jokes, only she got, but audience reaction was good, and overall she did a great job.

Boo Birds

Twice, Coulter’s speech was stopped by hecklers, to which she responded, “ushers, ushers.” The crowd laughed and she continued. I was surprised at how equal the crowd was in their political affiliations. Before the show, the producer asked how many people thought Barack Obama was doing a good job, and how many people thought that he wasn’t. The applause for each was about equal, and I thought at one point the non-Obama people cheered louder. For Boston, in a blue state, that seemed strange. I definitely thought she would get more audience abuse than Bill Maher. Coulter finished her speech to applause and she walked off the stage.

Enter Stage Left Wing

When Bill Maher was introduced, the audience reaction was a bit more invigorated and louder than for Coulter. When Maher got to the podium and started speaking, it appeared as if he’d “had a couple” before the show. He was speaking slower than normal and his eyes looked a little heavy. The woman next to me said “he looks tired.” He did.

As the minutes moved on, he got his pep back, and by mid-speech, he was his regular self. Maher’s speech was more direct and to the point. He focused on 12 reasons why he doesn’t like Republicans. Like Coulter, he stayed on topics he has spoken about throughout the years, including greed, Sarah Palin, George W Bush, science, religion, republicans, Rush Limbaugh, etc.

The Wrath Of Bill

Maher got about to point number four, when some in the audience turned a bit unruly. At first Maher called out the ushers, just as Coulter did. Then again, he instructed the ushers and asked if they were all “75 years old,” as it was taking so long for them to actually find people who were unruly. He then joked that if John McCain would have won the Presidency, because of his age, this slowness would be indicative of McCain’s administration. Actually, the ushers were kind of old, especially for the type of crowd that Bill Maher and Ann Coulter generate. I’m sure they’ll hire some additional security for the next Speaker Series event.

During these brief interludes of delay, Maher was cracking jokes and making the best of the situation. Just as he got back to his speech, another person to the back and right of us started yelling. At this point, Maher had enough. He shouted back, and I’m paraphrasing here, “People paid good money to be here tonight and you’re ruining it for them, so sit down and shut the f@ck up.” The crowd lit up with applause. The heckler continued, and Maher hit back, “If you actually did something with your life, maybe you’d be up hear and people would be paying to hear you speak.” It was classic Bill Maher and a great moment for him on stage. He took control of that room.

Every time Maher got angry and made this guy look silly, the crowed erupted in applause. This altercation went on for about five minutes, and Maher was letting this guy have it with choice obscenities and the evil eye. Once the episode was over, Maher continued his speech, and asked “What, am I on point five?”

Because of all the interruptions, it seemed he was on stage far longer than Coulter. If he appeared tired at the start of his speech, he surely was live and awake now. Once he finished his speech, Coulter came out along with the moderator, and they all sat down on the chairs at center stage.

Q&A With Ann & Bill

The last hour or so of the show took place with Ann and Bill answering questions posed by the moderator. Maher was much more animated in this setting, as they were able to be more relaxed sitting in nice, comfy chairs. The most animated he got was then they got around to talking about science, religion, and the bible.

The moderator spoke about Bill’s movie, Religulous, and asked him to speak about creationism. Coulter referred to it as Intelligent Design, to which Maher couldn’t help but break out in a laugh. Maher recounted how that at the Creationist Museum he visited for his movie, they had dinosaurs with saddles on them, perpetrating the fraud that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

Some of Coulter’s assertions during the Q&A were that the majority of scientists concluded that evolution is a falsehood and that adult stem cells offer more medical hope than embryonic stem cells. She also stated that liberals are more a detriment to science than conservatives. Maher looked puzzled, but he let it go.

The low-light of the night was that moderator. He had a weird way about him. He had no control of either guest or the crowd, and twice Bill Maher had to ask him “Do you know me? Have you ever watched my show?,” to which the moderator said “no.” The moderator asked stupid questions of Maher, such as “How do you feel about legalizing Marijuana?” Duh…

To Serve Man

Having seen these two speak on television for years now, it was quite different to see them on stage in-person. On TV, they are not real. They are just talking heads with no connection to the real world. But in-person, they are flesh and blood, they are human. They have feelings, convictions, and act just like the rest of us. I used to say I hate Ann Coulter. I can’t say I hate her anymore. I don’t agree with her mostly, but I don’t hate her. She is passionate about what she believes in, and that has to be respected. As much as I was in direct opposition to most of her comments throughout the night, she did make valid points, and those jerks who interrupted her should have been thrown out without question.

Being a huge Bill Maher fan, I was very pleased with his performance. If anything, I even agree with him more and have a much better connection with his rational for his beliefs and opinions. Tuesday night, on display was the ultimate freedom that we all bask in– freedom of speech. It was a flawless example of the principles of the founders of this country. Two diametrically opposed individuals, on stage together, engaging in vibrant debate. Agree or disagree with either of them, we all benefit from open discussion about the political landscape in this country.

I’ll end this article with some words of wisdom from a guy two seats to my right. As one jerk was getting escorted out by security, shouting stupidity, this guy sitting next to me had a couple words for that jerk. The guy sitting next to me succintly and eloquently summed up the feelings of the crowd– f@ck you (two times)! Well said.

Related Articles:

Bill Maher, Ann Coulter face off at Wang
Bunch of Wang nuts

Seats are still available. Hurry up and order online now!

Bill Maher and Ann Coulter
Humorous Perspectives, Serious Issues

MSG Entertainment and the Citi Performing Arts Center are proud to announce “Speaker Series: The Minds That Move The World,” a timely and important series of events that will provide attendees with a unique framework for understanding America’s current political landscape and place in world politics, through the insights of some of the most prominent political figures of our time.

In light of the new political environment that faces our nation, the “Speaker Series: The Minds That Move The World” will undoubtedly generate heated discussion as the best political minds of our day examine the most talked about topics surrounding current events.

What was happening on August 8, 2002? Well, Martha Stewart was in deep with her stock scandal, and Saddam says he was “ready for the US.” Hmmm… was he really? Yeah, for a Can O’ Whoop Ass!

Below are a couple other screen shots. I found these rummaging through my old web folders. I may be relaunching my lunch box site, Lunch Box Pad, with a new design later this year.

Click on each image below to see the full size.

I was up in no time. To make changing to NetShare a seamless proposition, I created a new network location on my Mac so I don’t have to fiddle with TCP/IP and Proxy settings. I tested it and NetShare still works great. I now have internet access anywhere I have cell phone coverage. I’m using the slower Edge network, but any speed is a good speed when you otherwise have no internet connection.

I purchased my copy of NetShare on August 1, 2008. Here is my original article about NetShare and Apple’s actions regarding this app, published August 3, 2008.

NETSHARE, BANNED FROM THE APPSTORE

Looks like Apple has decided they will not be allowing any tethering applications in the AppStore. As such, NetShare will not be available in the iTunes AppStore. We are seeing a lot of similar reports from various developers who’s applications were abruptly removed and banned from the AppStore without any violations of the terms of service. This is all unfortunate news for the iPhone platform end-users.

Nullriver Software – 09.13.08

So I thought it might be interesting to post one here. If you had, say, an extra hour or so, you could get familiar with all the legal mumbo-jumbo that is the Software License Agreement (SLA).

This SLA is for the Apple operating system (Leopard). Enjoy!

APPLE INC.
SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MAC OS X
Single Use and Family Pack License for use on Apple-labeled Systems

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THE LICENSE, YOU MAY RETURN THE APPLE SOFTWARE TO THE PLACE WHERE YOU OBTAINED IT FOR A REFUND. IF THE APPLE SOFTWARE WAS ACCESSED ELECTRONICALLY, CLICK “DISAGREE/DECLINE”. FOR APPLE SOFTWARE INCLUDED WITH YOUR PURCHASE OF HARDWARE, YOU MUST RETURN THE ENTIRE HARDWARE/SOFTWARE PACKAGE IN ORDER TO OBTAIN A REFUND.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This software may be used to reproduce, modify, publish and distribute materials. It is licensed to you only for reproduction, modification, publication and distribution of non-copyrighted materials, materials in which you own the copyright, or materials you are authorized or legally permitted to reproduce, modify, publish or distribute. If you are uncertain about your right to copy, modify, publish or distribute any material, you should contact your legal advisor.

1. General. The software (including Boot ROM code), documentation and any fonts accompanying this License whether preinstalled on Apple-labeled hardware, on disk, in read only memory, on any other media or in any other form (collectively the “Apple Software”) are licensed, not sold, to you by Apple Inc. (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License, and Apple reserves all rights not expressly granted to you. The rights granted herein are limited to Apple’s and its licensors’ intellectual property rights in the Apple Software as licensed hereunder and do not include any other patents or intellectual property rights. You own the media on which the Apple Software is recorded but Apple and/or Apple’s licensor(s) retain ownership of the Apple Software itself. The terms of this License will govern any software upgrades provided by Apple that replace and/or supplement the original Apple Software product, unless such upgrade is accompanied by a separate license in which case the terms of that license will govern.

Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner. Such content may be protected by copyright or other intellectual property laws and treaties, and may be subject to terms of use of the third party providing such content. This License does not grant you any rights to use such content nor does it guarantee that such content will continue to be available to you.

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.
A. Single Use. This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so. This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time.

B. Family Pack. If you have purchased a Mac OS X Family Pack, this License allows you to install and use one (1) copy of the Apple Software on up to a maximum of five (5) Apple-labeled computers at a time as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that same household. By “household” we mean a person or persons who share the same housing unit such as a home, apartment, mobile home or condominium, but shall also extend to student members who are primary residents of that household but residing at a separate on-campus location. The Family Pack License does not extend to business or commercial users

C. You may make one copy of the Apple Software (excluding the Boot ROM code and other Apple firmware that is embedded or otherwise contained in Apple-labeled hardware) in machine-readable form for backup purposes only; provided that the backup copy must include all copyright or other proprietary notices contained on the original. Apple Boot ROM code and firmware is provided only for use on Apple-labeled hardware and you may not copy, modify or redistribute the Apple Boot ROM code or firmware, or any portions thereof

D. Certain components of the Apple Software, and third party open source programs included with the Apple Software, have been or may be made available by Apple on its Open Source web site (http://www.opensource.apple.com/) (collectively the “Open-Sourced Components”). You may modify or replace only these Open-Sourced Components; provided that: (i) the resultant modified Apple Software is used, in place of the unmodified Apple Software, on a single Apple-labeled computer; and (ii) you otherwise comply with the terms of this License and any applicable licensing terms governing use of the Open-Sourced Components. Apple is not obligated to provide any updates, maintenance, warranty, technical or other support, or services for the resultant modified Apple Software.

You expressly acknowledge that if failure or damage to Apple hardware results from modification of the Open-Sourced Components of the Apple Software, such failure or damage is excluded from the terms of the Apple hardware warranty.

E. Apple has provided, as part of the Apple Software package, access to certain third party software as a convenience. To the extent that the Apple Software contains third party software, Apple has no express or implied obligation to provide any technical or other support for such software. Please contact the appropriate software vendor or manufacturer directly for technical support and customer service related to its software and products.

F. Except as and only to the extent permitted by applicable licensing terms governing use of the Open-Sourced Components, or by applicable law, you may not copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof. THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

G. If you use Setup/Migration Assistant to transfer software from one Apple-labeled computer to another Apple-labeled computer, please remember that continued use of the original copy of the software may be prohibited once a copy has been transferred to another computer, unless you already have a licensed copy of such software on both computers. You should check the relevant software license agreements for applicable terms and conditions.

3. Transfer. You may not rent, lease, lend, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software. Subject to the restrictions set forth below, you may, however, make a one-time permanent transfer of all of your license rights to the Apple Software (in its original form as provided by Apple) to another party, provided that: (a) the transfer must include all of the Apple Software, including all its component parts (excluding Apple Boot ROM code and firmware), original media, printed materials and this License; (b) you do not retain any copies of the Apple Software, full or partial, including copies stored on a computer or other storage device; and (c) the party receiving the Apple Software reads and agrees to accept the terms and conditions of this License. You may not rent, lease, lend, redistribute, sublicense or transfer any Apple Software that has been modified or replaced under Section 2D above. All components of the Apple Software are provided as part of a bundle and may not be separated from the bundle and distributed as standalone applications. Apple Software provided with a particular Apple-labeled hardware product may not run on other models of Apple-labeled hardware.

Updates: If an Apple Software update completely replaces (full install) a previously licensed version of the Apple Software, you may not use both versions of the Apple Software at the same time nor may you transfer them separately.

NFR (Not for Resale) and Evaluation Copies: Notwithstanding other sections of this License, Apple Software labeled or otherwise provided to you on a promotional or not-for-resale basis may only be used for demonstration, testing and evaluation purposes and may not be resold or transferred.

Apple System Restore Copies: Restore CDs or DVDs that may accompany an Apple hardware bundle, or are otherwise provided by Apple in connection with an Apple hardware bundle, contain a copy of the Apple Software that is to be used for diagnostic and restorative purposes only. These CDs and DVDs may be resold or transferred only as part of the Apple hardware bundle.

Academic Copies: If the Apple Software package has an academic label or if you acquired the Apple Software at an academic discount, you must be an Eligible Educational End User to use the Apple Software. “Eligible Educational End Users” means students, faculty, stafi and administration attending and/or working at an educational institutional facility (i.e., college campus, public or private K-12 schools).

4. Consent to Use of Data. You agree that Apple and its subsidiaries may collect and use technical and related information, including but not limited to technical information about your computer, system and application software, and peripherals, that is gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, product support and other services to you (if any) related to the Apple Software, and to verify compliance with the terms of this License. Apple may use this information, as long as it is in a form that does not personally identify you, to improve our products or to provide services or technologies to you.

5. Termination. This License is efiective until terminated. Your rights under this License will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if you fail to comply with any term(s) of this License. Upon the termination of this License, you shall cease all use of the Apple Software and destroy all copies, full or partial, of the Apple Software.

6. Limited Warranty on Media. Apple warrants the media on which the Apple Software is recorded and delivered by Apple to be free from defects in materials and workmanship under normal use for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of original retail purchase. Your exclusive remedy under this Section shall be, at Apple’s option, a refund of the purchase price of the product containing the Apple Software or replacement of the Apple Software which is returned to Apple or an Apple authorized representative with a copy of the receipt. THIS LIMITED WARRANTY AND ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES ON THE MEDIA INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, AND OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE LIMITED IN DURATION TO NINETY (90) DAYS FROM THE DATE OF ORIGINAL RETAIL PURCHASE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW LIMITATIONS ON HOW LONG AN IMPLIED WARRANTY LASTS, SO THE ABOVE LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. THE LIMITED WARRANTY SET FORTH HEREIN IS THE ONLY WARRANTY MADE TO YOU AND IS PROVIDED IN LIEU OF ANY OTHER WARRANTIES (IF ANY) CREATED BY ANY DOCUMENTATION, PACKAGING OR OTHERWISE. THIS LIMITED WARRANTY GIVES YOU SPECIFIC LEGAL RIGHTS, AND YOU MAY ALSO HAVE OTHER RIGHTS WHICH VARY BY JURISDICTION.

7. Disclaimer of Warranties. YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT USE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU. EXCEPT FOR THE LIMITED WARRANTY ON MEDIA SET FORTH ABOVE AND TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND ANY SERVICES PERFORMED OR PROVIDED BY THE APPLE SOFTWARE (“SERVICES”) ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, AND APPLE AND APPLE’S LICENSORS ( COLLECTIVELY REFERRED TO AS “APPLE” FOR THE PURPOSES OF SECTIONS 7 and 8 ) HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND ANY SERVICES, EITHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND/OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OF ACCURACY, OF QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS. APPLE DOES NOT WARRANT AGAINST INTERFERENCE WITH YOUR ENJOYMENT OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE, THAT THE FUNCTIONS CONTAINED IN, OR SERVICES PERFORMED OR PROVIDED BY, THE APPLE SOFTWARE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, THAT THE OPERATION OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES WILL BE COMPATIBLE WITH THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, OR THAT DEFECTS IN THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES WILL BE CORRECTED. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN INFORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN BY APPLE OR AN APPLE AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE SHALL CREATE A WARRANTY. SHOULD THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE ENTIRE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR LIMITATIONS ON APPLICABLE STATUTORY RIGHTS OF A CONSUMER, SO THE ABOVE EXCLUSION AND LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

The Apple Software automatically references, displays, links to, and provides web services related to, sites and information located worldwide throughout the Internet. Because Apple has no control over such sites and information, Apple makes no guarantees as to such sites and information, including but not limited to: (a) the accuracy, availability, sequence, completeness, currency, content, validity or quality of any such sites and information, or (b) whether an Apple search completed through the Apple Software may locate unintended or objectionable content. Because some of the content on the Internet consists of material that is adult-oriented or otherwise objectionable to some people or viewers under the age of 18, the results of any search or entering of a particular URL using the Apple Software may automatically and unintentionally generate links or references to objectionable material. By using the Apple Software, you acknowledge that Apple makes no representations or warranties with regard to any sites or information displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software, or any web services performed by the Apple Software in relation to such sites or information. Apple, its oficers, afiliates and subsidiaries shall not, directly or indirectly, be liable, in any way, to you or any other person for the content you receive using the Apple Software or for any inaccuracies, errors in or omissions from the content. Financial information displayed by the Apple Software is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon as investment advice. Before executing any securities transaction based upon information obtained through the Apple Software, you should consult with a financial professional. Neither Apple nor any of its content providers guarantees the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of stock information appearing within the Apple Software. The Apple Software may be used to conduct automated translations. As automated translations are performed by software tools and do not involve any human intervention or verification, it is not advisable to rely upon such translations where absolute accuracy is required. Backup functions performed by the Apple Software are only carried out at certain times and are subject to hardware limitations such as drive storage capacity.

Apple and its licensors reserve the right to change, suspend, remove, or disable access to any Services at any time without notice. In no event will Apple be liable for the removal of or disabling of access to any such Services. Apple may also impose limits on the use of or access to certain Services, in any case and without notice or liability.

8. Limitation of Liability. TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL APPLE BE LIABLE FOR PERSONAL INJURY, OR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF DATA, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE APPLE SOFTWARE, HOWEVER CAUSED, REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY (CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE) AND EVEN IF APPLE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR PERSONAL INJURY, OR OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. In no event shall Apple’s total liability to you for all damages (other than as may be required by applicable law in cases involving personal injury) exceed the amount of fifty dollars ($50.00). The foregoing limitations will apply even if the above stated remedy fails of its essential purpose.

9. Digital Certificates.
General. The Apple Software contains functionality that allows it to accept digital certificates either issued from Apple or from third parties. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT TO RELY ON A CERTIFICATE WHETHER ISSUED BY APPLE OR A THIRD PARTY. YOUR USE OF DIGITAL CERTIFICATES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. APPLE MAKES NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, SECURITY, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO DIGITAL CERTIFICATES. You agree that (a) you will not falsify or misuse any certificate; (b) you will use Digital Certificates for legal purposes only and in accordance with any applicable Certificate Policy, Certificate Practice Statement or other Certificate Authority business practice disclosures; (c) you are solely responsible for preventing any unauthorized user from making use of your Digital Certificates; and (d) you will revoke any certificate that you have reason to believe has been compromised.

Use of Digital Certificates in iChat. The Apple Software allows you to encrypt your iChat communications. This feature uses digital certificates to verify that the iChat is coming from the iChat screen name that appears in the iChat window and to encrypt and decrypt the chat. It does not verify the identity of the person using that screen name. Apple does not guarantee that there will be no hacking or intrusions into the chat. YOUR USE OF THIS FEATURE IN CONNECTION WITH ICHAT IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. APPLE MAKES NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, SECURITY, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO THE USE OF DIGITAL CERTIFICATES AND/OR ENCRYPTION IN ICHAT. By using the Apple Software, you agree that (a) you will take no action that interferes with the normal operation of digital certificates or encryption used in an iChat session or otherwise falsify the digital certificate used to validate a screen name; (b) you will use the encrypted iChat function solely for legal purposes; (c) you are solely responsible for preventing any unauthorized user from having access to any certificate or private key stored on your computer; and (d) you will revoke any certificate that you have reason to believe is compromised. Apple’s Certificate Policy and Certificate Practice Statements may be found at: http://www.apple.com/certificateauthority.

10. Export Control. You may not use or otherwise export or reexport the Apple Product except as authorized by United States law and the laws of the jurisdiction in which the Apple Product was obtained. In particular, but without limitation, the Apple Product may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S. embargoed countries or (b) to anyone on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals or the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Person’s List or Entity List. By using the Apple Product, you represent and warrant that you are not located in any such country or on any such list.

11. Government End Users. The Apple Software and related documentation are “Commercial Items”, as that term is defined at 48 C.F.R. §2.101, consisting of “Commercial Computer Software” and “Commercial Computer Software Documentation”, as such terms are used in 48 C.F.R. §12.212 or 48 C.F.R. §227.7202, as applicable. Consistent with 48 C.F.R. §12.212 or 48 C.F.R. §227.7202-1 through 227.7202-4, as applicable, the Commercial Computer Software and Commercial Computer Software Documentation are being licensed to U.S. Government end users (a) only as Commercial Items and (b) with only those rights as are granted to all other end users pursuant to the terms and conditions herein. Unpublished-rights reserved under the copyright laws of the United States.

12. Controlling Law and Severability. This License will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California, as applied to agreements entered into and to be performed entirely within California between California residents. This License shall not be governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, the application of which is expressly excluded. If for any reason a court of competent jurisdiction finds any provision, or portion thereof, to be unenforceable, the remainder of this License shall continue in full force and efiect.

13. Complete Agreement; Governing Language. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the use of the Apple Software licensed hereunder and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous understandings regarding such subject matter. No amendment to or modification of this License will be binding unless in writing and signed by Apple. Any translation of this License is done for local requirements and in the event of a dispute between the English and any non-English versions, the English version of this License shall govern.

14. Third Party Acknowledgements.
A. Portions of the Apple Software utilize or include third party software and other copyrighted material. Acknowledgements, licensing terms and disclaimers for such material are contained in the “online” electronic documentation for the Apple Software, and your use of such material is governed by their respective terms.

B. Certain software libraries and other third party software included with the Apple Software are free software and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Library/Lesser General Public License (LGPL), as the case may be. You may obtain a complete machine-readable copy of the source code for such free software under the terms of the GPL or LGPL, as the case may be, without charge except for the cost of media, shipping, and handling, upon written request to Apple. The GPL/LGPL software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. A copy of the GPL and LGPL is included with the Apple Software.

C. The Apple Software includes certain software licensed under the IBM Public License Version 1.0 (IPL) or the Common Public License Version 1.0 (CPL). A copy of the source code for the IPL and CPL licensed software may be found in Apple’s Open Source repository. See Apple’s Open Source web site (http:// www.opensource.apple.com/) for information on how to obtain the source code. THE IPL AND CPL SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NEITHER APPLE, IBM NOR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR TO THE IPL AND CPL SOFTWARE SHALL HAVE ANY LIABILITY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, LOST PROFITS), HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE IPL AND CPL SOFTWARE OR THE EXERCISE OF ANY RIGHTS GRANTED HEREUNDER, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

D. MPEG-2 Notice. To the extent that the Apple Software contains MPEG-2 functionality, the following provision applies: ANY USE OF THIS PRODUCT OTHER THAN CONSUMER PERSONAL USE IN ANY MANNER THAT COMPLIES WITH THE MPEG-2 STANDARD FOR ENCODING VIDEO INFORMATION FOR PACKAGED MEDIA IS EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED WITHOUT A LICENSE UNDER APPLICABLE PATENTS IN THE MPEG-2 PATENT PORTFOLIO, WHICH LICENSE IS AVAILABLE FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C, 250 STEELE STREET, SUITE 300, DENVER, COLORADO 80206.

E. Use of MPEG-4. This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 Systems Patent Portfolio License for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 Systems Standard, except that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.

This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 Visual Standard (“MPEG-4 Video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use.

Additional information including that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http: // www.mpegla.com. For answers to frequently asked questions regarding use fees under the MPEG LA Visual Patent Portfolio License see www.apple.com/mpeg4 or www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/faq.html.

F. H.264/AVC Notice. To the extent that the Apple Software contains AVC encoding and/or decoding functionality, commercial use of H.264/AVC requires additional licensing and the following provision applies: THE AVC FUNCTIONALITY IN THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED HEREIN ONLY FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR AVC VIDEO THAT WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. INFORMATION REGARDING OTHER USES AND LICENSES MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM.

G. AMR Notice. The Adaptive Multi-Rate (“AMR”) encoding and decoding functionality in this product is not licensed to perform cellular voice calls, or for use in any telephony products built on the QuickTime architecture for the Windows platform. The AMR encoding and decoding functionality in this product is also not licensed for use in a cellular communications infrastructure including: base stations, base station controllers/radio network controllers, switching centers, and gateways to and from the public switched network.

H. FAA Notice. Aircraft Situation Display and National Airspace System Status Information data (collectively “Flight Data”) displayed through the Apple Software is generated by the Federal Aviation Administration. You agree not to redistribute Flight Data without the prior written consent of the FAA. The FAA and Apple disclaim all warranties, expressed or implied (including the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose), regarding the use and accuracy of the Flight Data. You agree that the FAA and Apple shall not be liable, either collectively or individually, for any loss, damage, claim, liability, expense, or penalty, or for any indirect, special, secondary, incidental, or consequential damages deriving from the use of the Flight Data. The Apple Software is not sponsored or endorsed by the FAA. The FAA is not responsible for technical or system problems, and you should not contact the FAA regarding such problems or regarding operational trafic fiow issues.

I. Use of Adobe Color Profiles. You may use the Adobe Color Profile software included with the Apple Software pursuant to this License, but Adobe is under no obligation to provide any support for the Color Profiles hereunder, including upgrades or future versions of the Profiles or other items. In addition to the provisions of Sections 7 and 8 above, IN NO EVENT WILL ADOBE BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES, CLAIMS OR COSTS WHATSOEVER. The Adobe Color Profile software distributed with the Apple Software is also available for download from Adobe at www.adobe.com.

EA0390 Rev.
8-14-07

Either Rupert Murdoch has got one GIANT set of balls or he has complete morons working for him at the New York Post– the paper owned by News Corp, a company for which Rupert is a major shareholder– and the paper that published the aforementioned comic. The execs at Fox News Channel must even be sitting back and scratching their heads, wondering how this one got out.

One…Two…How Stupid Can I Be?

Let’s see if I can give the Post the benefit of the doubt here. There have a bunch of right-wing nuts running around there since Murdoch took over. They also have a core political philosophy that I don’t agree with. But, I can understand this comic in one way, a way that may not be an overt racist attack on the President. The Post, and many republicans hate this stimulus bill. They don’t like anything about it. In that sense, they must think that even a chimp’ could write this bill.

Evolution Of A Different Sort

The only problem, chimps, monkeys, gorillas, and any other primate you want to include can be mistaken as a racist interpretation, especially when it comes to degrading a President who also happens to be black. If this was Bush, you could easily understand and laugh. Since this is not Bush, you can understand the uproar.

Now, just because Obama happens to be black doesn’t mean he is off limits when it comes to satirization. He is fair game. However, you must understand the delicate nature of racism, especially as it pertains to white-on-black racism. Yes, there is also black-on-white racism. The problem, this country has had more than it’s share of white-on-black racism and neither is acceptable.

I just can’t believe any newspaper would depict an African American as a monkey. I just can’t. Now, I wouldn’t even think twice if I saw a comic of this nature on the web. You expect that, given the heightened freedom of speech that the web offers. But you don’t expect a popular newspaper such as the New York Post to depict Obama as a monkey.

Opportunity Knocks

Of course the usual suspects are taking advantage of this foul-up. I see the Rev. Al Sharpton sticking his head out from the rock he lives under. I’ve never actually seen this guy in a church, only sticking his nose in racial matters, usually making them worse or blowing them out of proportion. I’m sure Obama is getting a good laugh. As if he didn’t already know his political enemies…

Update 02.24.09

In a statement published in the New York Post today, Murdoch said he wanted to “personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He said the Post will work to be more sensitive.

This is a bullshit apology. If he felt he did anything wrong, this is what he would have said, “I would like to personally apologize for the offensive and quite insulting nature of this cartoon.” That would have been an apology. What he gave, read between the lines, means “We didn’t do anything wrong. The similarity between a monkey and Obama is a coincidence. We are not offended, so how can any of you be? It’s my paper, I will publish what I want.”

I don’t know why, but I’ve been extremely critical of Apple as of late. I still love their products, but they are doing things that seem to tick me off more now than ever. The issue now? Mobile Me e-mail disk quotas.

Mobile Me is a great service, I highly recommend it. I use it more for the syncing aspects, but it has many great features. One not so great feature is the disk quota settings for the e-mail service.

The Thing Of It Is

Presently, you can choose anywhere from 30 MB of disk space to devote to e-mail, or as much as 17 GB, and even more. The problem is, it starts at 30 MB then jumps to 1 GB. Now, I think I’d have e-mail that could break the 30 MB mark, as attachments can add up. But I know that I would never fill up the 1 GB allotment– and I have the family plan with 5 accounts. So what gives?

Follow The Gigabytes

It seems to me that Apple knows that people aren’t going to use the 30 MB option, as this is easily used up by receiving several pictures or file attachments in your e-mail account. They know people will have to jump up to the 1 GB option. The problem is, when you set it for 1 GB, you lose that extra disk space that could otherwise be used constructively, such as you backing up your iPhoto library. So if you average 200 MB of mail storage, you give up 800 GB of disk space. This is a way for apple to save almost a gigabyte of disk space for the average customer.

I think this is pretty sneaky.

Is it just me, or does it seem like 1984 is a bit closer than what Apple led us to believe? I have to go back and check my Chinese calendar, but I think 1984 was the “Year of the Tyrannical Apple,” if I’m not mistaken.

I love all things Apple. I’ve purchased no fewer than seven Macs since 2005, a few iPods and an iPhone. I really like Apple. But the control freaks may end up running this company into the ground. I can understand that Steve Jobs likes to dictate how the public interacts with his products. I’m sure he is very proud of the Mac and wants us to get exactly out of the hardware/software what he thinks we need to get out of it. But at some point Apple must let our hands go, and come to terms with the fact that we are all grown up, and know what we want and what we don’t want.

But What Would You Do Daddy?

I’m disturbed by the the entire process by which Apple picks and chooses which applications are allowed to be run on the iPhone. Well, on iPhones that haven’t been jail-broken, that is. That is a story for another article. Back to South Park.

Anyway, basically Apple can reject an application for any number of reasons. One they like to use is that an application duplicates or offers the same type of services that Apple’s own products offer. Apple has a lot of latitude here. But they seem to pick and choose. For instance, a small company who has a great idea, but may cost Apple money with it’s software, may have Apple stamp a rejection notice on their foreheads. But Google, who is in bed with Apple, can use undocumented APIs and do things that no other app developer could ever get away with. Sound fair? Didn’t think so.

Deliver Us From Evil

The official South Park application was set to be released on the iPhone. It would allow people to “theme” their phone with South Park content. You would be able to watch streaming versions of the cartoons, which are already available for FREE from South Park Studios. This may have been a bone of contention with Apple. Apple is already losing money on South Park episodes due to their FREE access from the South Park Studios website. Now, they would lose more money from consumers watching episodes on their iPhones.

So, rather than tell the truth, and say “we don’t want to lose any more money folks,” Apple has decided the South Park content would be too offensive to iPhone users. They would have to draw the line. Um Kay?

Offensive? What about the R-rated movies? What about the music Apple sells with that little “explicit” logo? What about the audio books with vulgar words? What about the offensive nature of the bible to some people? Apple has no problems with that, since it makes money from those offenses. But if Cartman should say a four letter word… that’s the last straw.

Tell Me Lies About South Park

I’m sure there isn’t one person who really believes Apple. I’m also sure that Apple, like in past cases, will reverse course and allow the South Park app after much outcry. Apple, this is not the way to run a business. You must let the marketplace decide the worth of an application. Isn’t that the American way?

I was so upset, I sent Apple feedback on this issue. I would encourage everyone to do the same. You can send it here. Let them know how you really feel!

Here is the original message I sent to Apple regarding this matter:

I love Apple, but I am getting sick and tired of Apple telling me what I can and can’t do with hardware, software, etc. Apple needs to stick to designing great products, and let us consumers worry about how we are going to use them. Rejecting the South Park app because it may be offensive to some people is a totally ludicrous decision. Of course it’s offensive to people! Just as the R-rated movies you sell are offensive to people, and just as some audio books you sell are offensive.

The consumers should decide what is offensive to them, and not purchase that content. If the FCC says South Park is not offensive enough to be banned from television, Apple has no right deciding that the FCC is wrong. Are we children here? Are the guys running Apple monks?

If Apple continues to try and exert this insane amount of control over it’s products, many people, I for one, will start looking for alternatives. I can think of many reasons why Apple would reject the South Park app, and one would be that the app would allow FREE episodes from South Park Studios to be streamed. Apple would lose money on this. The bottom line is money. I’m not fooled by the “offensive” moniker. Apple loses money on this app. Period.

This leads me to another point, the App Store needs to be overseen by an independent body. Apple has too much of a vested interest in the apps that appear. Apple cannot objectively decide what is in and what is out when it’s looking after it’s bottom line and not the interest of the consumer, who would ultimately benefit from the application.

I’m getting really tired of Apple putting its nose in my business. Just like these “non user-serviceable batteries” in the new MacBook Pros. Are you kidding me? iFixIt removed the battery in seconds! When third-party versions start selling, it’s these that I will buy if Apple does not want to sell me one directly. I don’t need Apple holding my hand and replacing my battery for me. If you alienate all your fans, who are you going to have left?

I’ve purchased probably 7 macs since 2005, and had another 5 people go out and buy macs. If you lose me, the kind of person loyal to Apple, you lose the company. You’ll be back to the desperation of the early 90s.

Give us back the control we need and deserve, or there will surely be trouble for Apple.

And one more thing… I’m not just a customer, I’m also a shareholder.

To continue using Photoshop, I have to reinstall the entire suite? What? At least they were polite and said sorry. For the record, I’m using CS2, so it’s not the latest and greatest, but it still works worked.

Just kidding. It still works.

This started out like any other transaction, but it ended with the strangest compliment I ever received. As the cashier handed my credit card back, she said, “you’ve got a cool card.” I do? It’s really cool?

So I guess some cards are just more cool than others. I just happen to have a cool card. Actually, the card is pretty cool looking. It’s matte black with a glossy “JUNIPER” title. That stupid hologram bird that they put on the front of cards, Juniper relegated that thing to the back. I’m a minimalist at heart, so this card perfectly suits my taste.

BTW… I did not steal this credit card. It’s a complete Photoshop creation. It came out pretty good.

I had it up long enough to boot from my external drive and saw that the HDD is corrupted. I wasn’t able to repair the drive, even after booting from my external. I tried Drive Genius 2, but even that couldn’t see the drive. I wish I had Disk Warrior to try it out, but I don’t own that anymore. It was time to get to work.

So, What To Do?

I knew at the very least I had to replace the hard drive. But the other strange sounds concerned me. I thought maybe the fans stopped working or there was a problem with the SuperDrive. So I decided now is the time to fix it. I either get it working or I throw it out the window (literally).

I went to RadioShack, asked for a set of Torx drivers. The guy said he probably didn’t have them, and he was right. He said go to Wal*Mart or Sears. He said he’d try Sears and mentioned at Wal*Mart, “you get what you pay for.” I agree. So I tried Sears.

I only saw a Torx T10 in the cheapest set, so I asked an employee. He pointed me out to a $24.99 set of Torx tools. It had a T8, which was what I needed, but it was just more money than I should have had to pay for one driver. So I looked and looked, and there, I saw a cheap set for $9.99. Grabbed it. I also grabbed another mini screwdriver set, which turns out I didn’t even need except for to help unstick the tape around the LCD panel.

Getting Down To Business

I was now ready. Had all my tools and all the enthusiasm in the world I was gonna fix this thing. First I removed the RAM and set that aside. There are about 6 screws on the bottom of the unit. The next step was to gently pry the front bezel off. This is tricky as the plastic is taped to LCD panel edges. Also, the iSight camera is attached, so flip the bezel over and rest it against a pillow or something that is tall enough for it to stay upright. There is one connector I could remove, but the other wires were bundled and taped, so I left them alone. After you carefully remove the tape/foil, being sure not to destroy it so you can put it back the way you found it, you can find 4 screws to unseat the LCD panel. Once these screws are removed, and more tape is removed from the LCD panel, you can pull the panel up.

Open Sesame

Some models I’ve seen on the web are laid out differently. I have an Intel 20″ Core 2 Duo machine, and my LCD was attached to the computer on both sides. There are 5 sets of wires connected from the LCD panel to the iMac. You DO NOT want to just pull the panel up. Thankfully, the wires are simple connectors which can be removed. Be sure to note which ones go where. I didn’t make note of anything, as the wires were “in the right spot” for the connectors, so I didn’t move the wires around any.

You can choose to keep the LCD panel attached and just move it to the side, or like you, you can remove it totally and put it on the side. I would suggest unplugging it fully and set it aside as not to harm it. It’s easy for it to tip over and get scratched.

Damn, You Got Guts

Once the LCD panel is off, you now have access to the entire “guts” of the machine. My HDD was located on the left side. To get to it, I had to remove a soft of brace on the left side and disconnect two sets of cables. Then it was a matter of sliding the drive out leftward, up, and at an angle, as two locking pins keep the drive in place on the right side. The drive is also connected to a heat sensor, just remove this connection. The sensor is attached with some adhesive. I used some new adhesive to attach it to the new drive.

Once the drive was out, I swapped it with a drive from an external hard drive, that luckily I cloned just a few days before. I didn’t know this at the time. A few screws later, I had the new drive in. Now I had to put this unit back together.

Rerun

Basically, I just reversed the process. Just remember to use all the screws you took out of the unit! I had no problems with any connectors. The only thing I encountered was the main LCD connector came loose and the screen didn’t go on. There was a piece of tape on it, holding it in place, but I removed that. I used a piece of electrical tape to keep it in place. Now it won’t come loose from general use or if you have to move the machine.

I put it back together, but didn’t fully put the bezel and LCD back on, I just put them in there place and closed it as best I could. I plugged the unit in and now it was time for the moment of truth… it worked. I was delighted! I don’t have a wired keyboard or mouse, so there was nothing I could do to test it. But the machine did not shut off in over 30 minutes. It never would have lasted that long in it’s previous state. I was happy.

So I’m going to Staples today to get a cheap keyboard/mouse and I’m gonna do some testing to make sure all is well. I have a good feeling that it’s fixed. I’m also gonna clean out the internals with some compressed air. I was shocked at home much dust was coming out the back vent when I was slapping the back of the computer in anger.

I’ll post back the final results.

Update: 04.19.09 8:58 PM. I eventually sold the LCD panel on eBay, along with the SuperDrive and RAM. Here’s a response from the buyer: “Thank you. Your screen found a second life in my imac. replacement was not too difficult.” I’m glad it found a good home.

Update: 02.15.09 1:08 PM. The iMac is DEAD. It died around noon today. I was doing some video encoding and the kernel panic popped up. I restarted, and it made some strange sounds. That was the only part that was bothering. It made strange sounds upon startup. Well, looks like I’ll be breaking this down and selling it instead. The LCD panel is still good, the hard drive, RAM, and a couple other pieces I probably can sell.

Update: 02.15.09 3:27 AM. The iMac has been on for about 10 hours now. I’m editing this article on the iMac. I’m running my cloned external drive, so I can use this as my primary computer for the next several days to test it. No problems at all. Works like a charm.

Update: 02.14.09 5:23 PM. The iMac has been on for hours now with no problems. When installing OS X, I thought it shut down, but I think it went into sleep mode. The computer has been working wonderfully for me. It appears that the hard drive was the only issue. I will keep an eye on it and keep it on for the next few days 24/7. If all goes well, I have an iMac I’m selling. Anyone need a new computer?

Just sitting here listening to iTunes. The song happens to be “The Rover” by Led Zeppelin. I have the remastered studio set. To me, this song sounds like it has a bit of noise on the recording, especially towards the end and beginning. You can hear audible tape hiss.

I can hear Cheap Trick and even ACDC in here.

I used to have a FREE Song Of The Week, but stopped that long ago. But in keeping with that tradition, every time I talk about a song I’ll post it here in MP3, 256 Kbps goodness.

See the Wiki entry for this song.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget, you can get high-res album art for this CD and many other in the Album Art (.mac Gallery). If you have a Mac and iPhoto, you can subscribe to the gallery and get instant updates as they are added!

Download audio file (therover.mp3)

Enter Perian

I found this great QuickTime plugin called Perian– billed as the “the swiss-army knife for QuickTime.” It will let you open flash and other file formats not natively supported by QuickTime. Quickly and with no fuss I was able to start watching the flash movie. I could edit the movie and even save it as a .MOV file. The best part about it is that it’s a FREE plugin. How can you beat that?

If you need to watch or convert some odd file format, check out Perian, it may just do the trick!

Cold Lunch Kid

Anyway, it’s just a bunch of lunch boxes floating around your screen, banging into each other. When they hit one another, they make a distinct metal-on-metal sound (which I recorded by banging two old boxes together).

I thought I had lost this one to history. But nope, here it is. Get your copy today!

Download the Screen Saver here! (Microsoft Windows Only)

A Different Tale

The story of Buddy Holly is a tragic one, but a story shared with many a Rock legend– a rocker who started with nothing, but left with everything– far too soon. But unlike Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, or Morrison, Holly didn’t contribute to his own demise. To the contrary, he was pushing the limits of recording technology and inventing new sounds. Holly was a pioneer during his time, in that he actually could write, sing, arrange, and play his own instruments. Each of these steps usually was performed by a specialist of the music industry. Rarely were artists so involved in their craft as Holly was. In two short years, Buddy Holly invented a sound that has lasted 50 years on.

The Hands Of Time

Buddy Holly has been gone twice as long as he roamed this Earth. Buddy was only 22 on the night of his death. He would be 72 today. What would he have accomplished had he continued recording through the 1960s and beyond? Sadly we will never know. The end of the 1950s, musically, left us in a rut. With Elvis in the Service, and later to Hollywood, and Buddy Holly gone, the industry sank into an abyss of teenage heartthrobs. A pretty face and a modicum of vocal talents required. The lines ran around the block.

Buddy Holly is remembered 50 years later, and will be remembered 50 years from now. Contrary to the song, the music never died. It’s reborn every time a song is played. Music can never die. Music always was, and will always be.

Buddy Holly Bio

He was born Charles Hardin Holley (later amended to “Holly”) on September 7th, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas. He learned to play guitar, piano and fiddle at an early age. After high school, he formed the Western and Bop Band, a country-oriented act that performed regularly on a Lubbock radio station and opened for acts that came through town. After being noticed by a talent scout, Holly was signed to Decca in early 1956, recording demos and singles for the label in Nashville under the name Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes. Back home, Holly opened a show at the Lubbock Youth Center for Elvis Presley, an event that hastened his conversion from country and western to rock and roll.

On February 25th, 1957, Holly and a revised band lineup, now dubbed the Crickets, recorded “That’ll Be the Day” at the Clovis, New Mexico, studio of producer Norman Petty. The effortless, upbeat rocker won them a contract with the Coral and Brunswick labels. Later that year it became a Number One pop hit and even rose to Number Two on the R&B charts. The terms of Holly’s arrangement with his record labels, negotiated by producer/manager Petty, were somewhat unusual. Releases alternated on Coral and Brunswick, with those on the former label credited to Buddy Holly and the latter to the Crickets. Between August 1957 and August 1958, Holly and the Crickets charted seven Top Forty singles.

In October 1958, Holly split both with the Crickets and with Petty, moving to Greenwich Village and marrying Maria Elena Santiago, to whom he proposed on their first date. Because of legal and financial problems engendered by his breakup with Petty, Holly reluctantly agreed to perform on the Winter Dance Party, an ill-advised bus tour of the Midwest in the winter of 1959. Following a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a private plane to the next stop on the tour, Moorhead, Minnesota. Two other performers, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, joined him. Their plane left the Mason City, Iowa, airport at one in the morning and crashed in a cornfield a few minutes later, killing all aboard. Buddy Holly was only 22 years old at the time of the crash – an event immortalized in Don McLean’s “American Pie” as “the day the music died.”

www.rockhall.com

Want to hear what 1957 sounded like? Take a listen to Oh, Boy! (1957) Buddy Holly & The Crickets

Download audio file (OhBoy.mp3)

WordPress is by far the best blogging software you can use. You can either host a blog on their servers, or you can download the software and run it on your own server. I choose to do the latter. By having it on your own server, you can completely customize it and have total control over every aspect of the system, right down to every file and image.

WordPress + Blogo = Good Stuff. Remember that!

If you are expecting to read some of the game’s highlights, or what I thought about the game… sorry. I just wanted to see that beautiful logo on my site.

Better luck next year!!!

Anyway, I posted in the Apple discussion forums and received a reply that Apple had updated their Battery Replacement Program to allow for replacement of defective batteries for up to 2 years from the original computer purchase. I made the cut by about a month!

Yesterday I went to the Providence, Rhode Island Apple Retail Store. Working with Apple has been so easy when it comes to repairs or problems. You simply make an appointment with a Mac Genius, and be there at the specified time. I’ve never had to pay for any repairs or problems I have had with the hardware, although usually I am under warranty. This time however, I had no warranty on my computer. If it wasn’t for the battery program, I’d have had to spend $129.00 on a new battery.

Here is my original post in the Apple discussion forum:

Last week, I noticed that the mouse button on my MacBook Pro (2 years old in March) wasn’t clicking properly. It was as if something was stuck in there, not being able to click down. No click sound. Well tonight, the same thing happened to me. No click, but this time, my left mouse click (i’m using wireless mighty mouse) wouldn’t work. I went to press the button on the MacBook Pro, and it was so tight, wouldn’t press down.

So now I figure I have to unscrew the top off and try to play with it. So I get ready to open it up, and I take the battery out for good measure. Then I noticed some bulging. I remove the battery, and the entire top is bulging out. This was happening pretty much in real-time. I took it out, and removed it far away from me. I have to buy another one. Where should I keep this for the night? I don’t want it to burst into flames or anything.

Also, would Apple replace this for me if I brought it into the store? I don’t have any AppleCare warranty coverage anymore. Good thing this didn’t do some serious damage.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You’ve done enough damage, buddy. We’ve got it from here. And we’re going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten? (OMFG, WTF??? Wow…)

This is the new PETA “fishy” campaign.

Sighs… where to begin. This one makes me want to go out and start a legal fund for Michael Vick—stat. The people at PETA are so out of touch with reality, sanity, and society, this is the last time I’m ever going to devote an entire post to them. This is it.

Fighting cruelty against animals is a noble cause. I’m right there with PETA. That’s about where I get off the bus. There latest “gimmick,” referring to fish as “sea kittens” and hoping the world stops eating fish is so insane I would think it was a joke had it not been PETA who is championing it. I’m really too tired to go into why man can eat what he wishes, as we are on top of the food chain, and all of that. I really just want PETA’s word to speak for itself. I want people to read PETA, in their own words. This entire thing is so crazy that it doesn’t even need any spicing up. It’s just that $#@!*$# insane.

More from PETA…

Given the drastic situation for this country’s sea kittens—who are often the victims of many major threats to their welfare and ways of life—it’s high time that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) stop allowing our little sea kitten friends to be tortured and killed. Who’d want to hurt a sea kitten anyway?!

Sea kittens are just as intelligent (not to mention adorable) as dogs and cats, and they feel pain just as all animals do.

Please take just a few moments to send an e-mail to H. Dale Hall, the director of the FWS, asking him to stop promoting the hunting of sea kittens (otherwise known as “fishing”). The promotion of sea kitten hunting is a glaring contradiction of FWS’ mission to “conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats.”

Sea Kitten Facts… No, I’m NOT joking…

Some sea kittens tend well-kept gardens. They encourage the growth of tasty algae and weed out the types that they don’t like. It is particularly tragic when people eat these sea kittens, as their precious little gardens become wild and overgrown in their absence.

Contrary to popular belief, the technical term for sea kitten offspring is “baby sea kitties,” not “caviar.” Many sea kittens build nests where they can raise their baby sea kitties, and others collect small rocks off the sea floor to make widdle hiding pwaces where they can rest.

Many male sea kittens woo potential partners by singing to them. While this is not particularly easy to do underwater coherently, female sea kittens don’t generally seem to mind.

A University of Edinburgh study found that sea kittens can retain information that they learned up to 11 months earlier, which makes them cuter and smarter than the president of the United States!

Sea kittens talk to each other through squeaks, squeals, and other low-frequency sounds that humans can only hear through special instruments. Most ichthyologists—scientists who specialize in sea kitten biology—agree that this is just about the cutest thing ever.

Like their surface-dwelling cousins, the land kittens, sea kittens enjoy being petted. Their lack of arms makes it difficult for them to pet back, but they often gently rub against each other as a sign of affection.

www.peta.com

For even more, read an e-mail I sent to PETA in 2003.

Amadeus Pro
This app is for audio editing. Simple as well as complex edits can be done. I used to be a fan of Sound Studio, but I found that Amadeus offers a better interface and a better all around app.

AppZapper
A handy utility which helps clean up your Mac after you remove a program. Often, some straggler files persist, such as preference files. AppZapper will search for all associated files and delete them.

ArtText
Great app that lets you create artistic and unique text images. You simply type in the text you want, and you can add all the effects you like. Great app for web designers who want to liven up their pages.

Bento
From the makers of FileMaker. This is a database program that is quite robust for it’s small price tag and it’s relationship to it’s cousin– FileMaker. For most consumers who would like a database product, this is the one.

Billings
If you need to create invoices, statements, or bill your clients using exotic rules, this is the app for you. It has a great timer feature that you can toggle on/off while you are working. Get paid for every minute you work!

Blogo
It’s what I’m writing this post with. Must-have software for bloggers. Create your best work right from your desktop. When you are done, simply press “Post” and Blogo will upload all content to your web server.

CandyBar
This app allows you to customize the OS X environment. You can easily customize your dock and change application icons as well as hard-to-find system icons. Download free icon packages to boot!

Cocktail
Great utility to keep your Mac healthy and free of slowdowns. Cocktail can be set to run on a schedule and perform your system maintenance automatically. Additional features can customize the OS to your liking.

Chronosync
Fabulous syncing application. I used this one for school to keep my USB thumbdrive in sync with my MacBook Pro. Any changes I made on my thumbdrive or MacBook would be perfectly in sync running this app.

coconutBattery
Great utility to keep track of your laptop battery. It lets you know how old your computer and battery are, and how many charge cycles you have gone through. You can also see how much capacity your battery has lost.

Coda
The best coding app I’ve ever used. It’s a no-frills code editor, made for all those “by hand” coders out there. I often use it to debug code that I generate using other applications, such as Freeway Pro.

Freeway Pro
Finally, a WYSIWYG web site design app that actually produces accurate, compatible, and efficient code. I have been making web sites for years and this app can pretty much do it all. This is the shit.

Google Earth
The best mapping software. I can sit and use the satellite view for hours, just flying around the country, visiting famous landmarks. A really cool app that is getting better all the time (it can’t get no worse).

Little Snitch
Great little software firewall. This app will snitch on anything that is trying to phone home and alert you any time you are sending out any data. Once you configure it, you won’t be annoyed by any pop-ups.

MacJournal
At it’s heart this is a simple journalling program. But I use it to catalog all of my PDFs and text files. It has a search feature so I can search through hundreds of documents. I haven’t found anything better to archive my PDFs.

PDF Shrink
If you create PDF manuals from say Word documents, or create flyers and save them to PDF, this app is very handy. It will compress your PDFs while keeping the quality. I frequently shrink 60MB manuals down to 12MB.

Photoshop
You all know this one. The best image editing application around. It does it all, and probably more than you’ll ever need it to do. My advice, learn to use the Pen Tool. It’s your friend!

SnapzPro X
Screencasting app which can record your desktop and audio stream, allowing you to produce video tutorials and how-to movies. If words can’t describe something, SnapzPro X can show you the way.

SuperDuper!
My favorite backup software. With a click, you can create a perfect clone of your hard disk. What’s even better, with an external FW drive, you can boot into the OS, always having a bootable version of your computer.

Transmit
Usually people throw around the phrase “the best” pretty easily. Usually it’s not warranted. This is the exception. Transmit is the best FTP program, of any platform, ever. Nothing even comes close.

Typeset
This is one of those programs that you think doesn’t really do much, but it’s a life saver. Type any word or phrase, and you can quickly see what it looks like in any font you have installed on your computer.

VMware Fusion
Virtualization software which allows me to run Windows XP right from within my OS X environment. No need to log out of Mac OS and boot into Windows via Boot Camp. Great for most apps, but don’t play games with it.

Wallet
Again, this is “the best” app you can have to store your passwords and sensative information. You can use it for web passwords, software serial numbers, credit cards, or just about anything else. Highly customizable.

YemuZip
Why would I need a zipping utility? Why not just right-click and “Compress?” Well you can, but PC users will see your hidden Mac files. This will let you zip and eliminate those files for PC users. Again, another time saver.

So what is Blogo? Blogo is Mac-only software (sorry Windoze users) which allows you to post to your blog right from your desktop, without all that messy web interface stuff. Writing to your blog should be a fun and easy process. Even though I love WordPress, I don’t particularly care for it’s interface, and having to go log in all the time is a pain. Blogo offers relief.

From Blogo:

Easily publish text, images, videos, slideshows and more. With a simple, intuitive interface and support for WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, and Expression Engine, Blogo is the best way to maintain your blog and spread the word with Twitter, Ping.fm and other supported services.

The first thing you’ll notice when you launch Blogo is the simple, yet effective and intuitive interface. The app doesn’t clutter the screen with unnecessary buttons and toolbars. You see what is essential. If you need more, you can venture to the menu bar and see the complete collection of features.

Blogo gives you all the power of your blog’s web interface, but offers up the “drag and drop” approach. Need to add an image? Drag it to the drop box. Need to add a YouTube video? Just paste the code in your editor. Blogo offers a Rich Text editor as well as an HTML editor for more advanced users. And if you are easily distracted by all those windows open on your desktop, just launch full-screen mode and like magic, no more distractions.

Blogo also plays well with others, in that Blogo will let you post to any of your blogs, no matter how many you have, and across multiple blog platforms. You can post to your WordPress blog, and with a click, post another entry to Blogger. Switching between your blogs is a snap. Also, you can edit previous entries, even ones not published with Blogo.

One of my favorite features is the preview window. If you are like me, you make one change and want to preview it to see exactly how it will render in the browser window. Blogo let’s you choose a refresh time, so while you are typing you can see updates in real-time. You can have it refresh at any interval you like. You don’t even need to save the changes, Blogo automatically updates the preview window with all content on the screen at the time of refresh.

I can’t say enough about how easy Blogo is to use. To list and talk about all the features would take far too much time. If you are a Mac user, I recommend jumping on over to their site and try this great software for 21 days for FREE. When you decide to purchase the full version, it only will set you back $25.00, and you can install it on up to two computers. I paid for my copy before I had even written one post. A little birdy named Mr. Laporte clued me in.

This one gets five stars. No questions asked. Besides Freeway Pro, this is the best piece of software I’ve purchased in quite some time. If I had one feature request, it would be some CSS integration so we could have more control over text color, size, and layout.

WARNING: BE PREPARED TO WRITE MORE.
Recommended to all Mac users!

Update! After playing around with the software, I ran into an issue with the image uploading. I e-mailed the developer and hoped I’d get a response after a day or two. I got my reply exactly 16 minutes after sending it. That’s what I call tech support!.

Turns out that by default when you add an image, it uses the thumbnail settings for the image size. Thumbnails are restricted to the maximum width and height you set within the preferences pane. You have the option of selecting the full size, by choosing the full size tab. However, you only get to choose full size if you have the cropper open up when adding an image, which is another setting in preferences. If you turn off this feature, all images added will use the thumbnail settings. To have your images use the proper dimensions and keep the cropper turned off, you can simply set the default thumbnail dimensions to the maximum size for your layout. For me, 450 pixels wide is the maximum image size I can have for my layout without breaking it. So as long as I set the default for 450 pixels in width, I won’t have any problems. I will have to set the height, but I can keep that around 800 pixels, as I’d never have any image with that height, at least not inline.

It would be nice if you could tell the software to default to full size, and also include an option in the edit panel to choose full size, even after you added the image as a thumbnail. As it is now, if the cropper is turned off, you can’t edit the image to change to full size without removing the image and dropping it again (with the cropper turned on).

Another issue appears after publishing to your blog. You have the option in preferences to open your blog in the web browser after publishing. Even if you enable this setting, once you publish your entry, the icon will bounce in the dock, and a message box will alert you that your post was published and ask you if you want to go to your blog. You can just click OK to dismiss the message, but I would much rather have a less obtrusive way of letting you know the post was published. Maybe simply an alert within the window that didn’t require any user attention or input.

More updates to come…

– CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE “YOUR FACE” ANIMATED FILM –

This is the film that set the style and started the career of Bill Plympton. One of the most profitable short films ever made, it’s still showing all over the world. As a second-rate crooner sings about the beauties of his lover’s face, his own face metamorphosizes into the most surreal shapes and contortions possible. The music was written and sung by Maureen McElheron, then slowed down to sound like a man’s voice because Mr. Plympton was too cheap to hire a male singer. 1988 Academy Award nominee for Best Animation. –www.plymptoons.com

You can find Bill Plympton’s website here: www.plymptoons.com

It wasn’t long before I realized that McCain’s campaign is as thriving as Elvis’ pulse. These findings were later confirmed when every major post-debate poll showed that Obama in fact won the debate.

This was really no surprise to me as McCain has been probably the most boring, no balls, candidate I’ve seen in quite some time. The first thing I thought was that I wanted to watch “Fox & Friends” in the morning so I could see how Fox would spin this, and see if they would actually submit to sanity, and agree that Obama won. Boy, was I wrong.

Steve Doocy started to offer polls in which Obama won the debate. However, he then “clarified” for the viewers the faults of each poll. For instance, the CBS poll, says Doocy, is faulted because of the way they handle undecided voters. He says it’s “confusing.” Maybe for him. I was getting pissed-off at this point.

Doocy then cuts to Frank Luntz, generally republican leaning, who is a pollster and is sitting with about 20 people. Remember, this is Fox News, so I was expecting everyone to go for McCain. Boy, was I wrong. Overwhelmingly, the people said Obama won, and the switchers were switching to Obama like 5 to 1. Luntz said, before handing it back to Doocy, “looks like Obama had a great night,” to paraphrase.

Would Doocy listen to reason? Would he concede Obama won? Surely he had to now, right? Boy, was I wrong. What he next did, is, wow, I’ve never seen it. Overlooking all the major polls from reputable news outlets, Doocy did something so insane that I was a little shocked– he cited a sole poll (or soul-less pole) from Matt Drudge’s (gay republican – who isn’t even liked by the people he intends to support) web site and said that Drudge visitors chose McCain as the winner, something like 60% to 20%.

Then, Brian Kilmeade, I guess ignoring the same polls as Doocy, prefaces the next guest by saying “Did McCain get the knockout punch he needed?” WTF? How do you land a knock out punch sitting flat on your ass?

Then, they get a house republican to go over the reasons why McCain won. I was shocked. I was driven to write this article, even though I don’t really have the time as I have so much work to do. I can’t believe it. I’m going back to bed.

A great idea for customers, a bad idea for AT&T.Apparentlysomeone at AT&T relayed this point, thus this software is off again.

However, the point that has got everyone up in arms is that this software,apparentlydidn’t violate any iTunes Music Store policies, nor iPhone policies, was allowed to be on the store then pulled for no reason. Apple has not made any official statements.

This is bad for consumers because all of us who paid for this application essentially will not receive any future updates, as the software can only beupdatedvia iTunes and the iTunes Store. And if the software isn’t in the store, it’s useless if it breaks. And in it’s current form, the software does work, but I couldn’t get it to work with a WEP password. And even then, it was a bit slow, and would seem to stop working when it wanted. Certainly a good start, but in need of updates. Apple, through it’s actions, has made this impossible.

So I had to write Apple a letter and request a refund. They responded, and I’m at least happy I’m getting my money back. Here is a copy of thecorrespondence:

I purchased NetShare from the App store in good faith, since Apple had approved this software to be sold in the App store, and only allows certified applications from registered developers. Come to find out Apple has been removing this item from the store with no explanation. If this software is removed from the store, I cannot get updates, thus this software isn’t worth anything to me. I request a full refund of this software, $9.99. In the future, Apple should take more care in approving the software it allows to be sold and avoid what happened here. Bryan Los

Here is the response from Apple:

Hello Bryan, I understand that you would like a refund for the application purchase of “NetShare”. Please accept my sincere apologies for any frustration caused. I appreciate your patience. My name is Amanda, and I am more then happy to help. I have reversed the charge for this purchase. Please note that all iTunes Store sales are final, so this is an exception that I cannot promise will be granted again. In three to five business days, a credit of $9.99, should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase. Thank you for choosing the iTunes Store. It has been a pleasure assisting you. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email. Hope you have a great day. Amanda iTunes customer support Please note my hours are Monday to Friday, 1:00 to 9:30pm est Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you. You may receive AppleCare survey email; any feedback you provide would be greatly appreciated.

Funny Update! – So I go to forward the email correspondance I had with Apple to my father, as he had some issues with a few downloads so they gave him some store credits. I inluded this message at the top of the foward to my father:

I had my own bone to pick with Apple about a purchase…. read below and see my original email at bottom Bryan Los “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” — John Lennon

Accidentally, I forwarded this to the Apple rep who handled my original issue. She them mailed me back this:

Hello Bryan, Amanda here again, and I understand that you also had an issue with a song from “John Lennon”. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. I was unable to locate any purchase of “John Lennon”, on your iTunes account. I have issued a song credit to your iTunes Store account. You can use this to buy the individual song of your choice from the iTunes Store. When you next sign in with this account, the song credit will appear by your account name (in the upper-right section of the iTunes Store). The next individual song you buy from the iTunes Store will use this song credit instead of your primary form of payment. Please note that song credits cannot be used for purchasing songs that are listed as “Album Only.” If you don’t see your credit, refresh your account information by signing out and back in to the iTunes Store. You can find both “Sign Out” and “Sign In” within the pull-down “Store” menu. If you don’t see this menu, you should need only download the latest version of iTunes from our website for free: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ Thank you for choosing the iTunes Store. It has been a pleasure assisting you. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email. Hope you have a great day. Amanda iTunes customer support

This is too funny! For some reason, she read my signature, which is a John Lennon song quote, and thought I had trouble downloading a song– so she gave me one song credit. So I ended up getting a free song by mistakenly forwarding the wrong person my email. Nice.

I am taking an online course this semester, and one of the requirements was purchasing an eBook. I have never purchased one, and found that the software I need to use it was Digital Editions, by Adobe. So I downloaded the free software, then bought the book ($14.95), and indeed I was able to read my digital book.

The software didn’t look all that great, it was functional and let me read my book. Lack of zoom features were something I noticed right off the bat and it’s unintuitive scroll bars never let me jump “to here” as do most scroll bars for applications that I use. Anyway, it worked.

Curiosity Killed The Cat

After reading the book for a while, I wondered where this file was actually being stored, and was it a PDF. I knew it would have some DRM attached, but what would the file look like? So I found it in my Documents folder on my Mac. Yes, the file was encrypted. I opened the file, tried saving it with a new name, etc. That didn’t work, still it was encrypted. I used PDFKey Pro, maybe thinking I can unlock it somehow. Nope.

- Encrypted PDF -

I then knew I had one more trick up my sleeve. What if I printed the text from within Digital Editions? The software gives me the option to print, why not just print back to a PDF? I’ve used this before for protected PDFs, and more recently have used PDFKey Pro to remove password protection on another PDF.

Powerful Development Fakery

So I preceded to print, then save as a PDF. The book was almost 300 pages, so at first, I tried opening the file quickly, and got an error message. I figured that it isn’t possible to do this. So I gave up. I tried again today however, and after trying to open the file and getting the error, I closed Digital Editions. Like magic, the PDF on my desktop now showed the eBook. But, I only had 35 pages. I quickly surmized that this was because the book had almost 250 pages, and I was trying to open it before it had a chance to fully print the PDF.

This was so. I again tested it, waiting a minute or so for it to fully print the PDF. And what do you know, the PDF was there, with all 235 pages. Ready to be read. Now there was one problem with the new PDF– the text was not searchable, i.e., each page was just an “image” of the actual book. However, these images were of high quality enough to read, and if you needed this book, this would probably do very well. After all, you can’t search a paperback either.

- Decrypted PDF -

Because I need searching, I’ll keep using my DRM version. I guess if I was really curious, I could convert the images using OCR and see how much of the text I could get out, then making it a searchable document. But I don’t have the time or the will.

Don’t you just love DRM? If I was able to get a copy of the book without even trying, just imagine what someone with some high-techgadgetryand software could do to theencryption?

I’ve had other thoughts over the years, like how did Noah keep the natural instincts of wild predatory animals in check? All it would take was one hungry lion and a pissed off polar bear to kill off half our species. Also, if the flood killed all that wasn’t saved by Noah, there would have to have been a 100% birth success rate for generations to keep a species from extinction. And.. what about the humans? How did the humans survive the flood? Was there a second Ark that history has forgotten, the “Love Ark?”

I’m sure faith has a good explanation for all of this, but the logic and reason seem to escape me.

I was hoping for a full replacement of the current Apple remote, but there is no option to replace the buttons found on the Apple remote, specifically the menu, play, and directional buttons (volume up/down, rewind/forward). So as it is now, I have to use my “real” remote if I want to move around in the menu system of the Apple TV, such as changing preferences or searching. I was really hoping to be able to search YouTube much easier on my Apple TV. Hopefully the next version will bring all my wants to the app.

Here are some screen shots of the application in action:

A Glue For Any Situation

So for the next 6 hours, it pained me to look at it. I kept on touching it, feeling how it was popped out. It was bothering me. The only thing that made me feel better was that I was using my boss’ MacBook, which is cracked in a few places. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about my MacBook Pro.

There’s always Gorilla Glue around where I work, so I asked if I could take some home. When I got home, I got my Mac ready by popping out the metal strip a bit further, and with a switchblade, I picked up some glue and slid it inside the breach. I quickly cleaned up the excess, and to keep pressure on it, I place it on the floor in front of a wall, and put a screwdriver against it and the wall. This held it in place.

Mac Nap

When I woke up a few hours later, I checked it, and it held perfectly. The only problem was that some glue had seeped out and I could feel it. So carefully I got out a razor blade (yes, carefully) and proceeding to scrape the excess off. That got most of it off. Then I traced the edge with the razor, and that got the rest of it off. Then I gently took some steel wool (yes, gently), and removed the excess without ruining the surrounding surface.

I’m running my finger over it now and really can’t feel it. If looking closely I can see a slight area where the work was done, but nothing from more than a few inches away. I’m happy with it. Now I can sleep.

I recently purchased VMWare Fusion for Mac. This virtualization software allows me to run Windows XP right from within Mac OS, without having to boot into Windows. I used to use BootCamp, which required me to logoff Mac OS then boot into Windows. It was time consuming and I hated it.

Fusion allows me the best of both worlds, well at least one best world. I only use Windows for school. Not to get off-track and into a review of Fusion, I just want to mention “Unity,” which allows me to run Windows “windows” right on my Mac desktop. Cool stuff.

Now for the reason of the article. Windows Update.

I had a problem with Windows Update. Using XP in Fusion, I couldn’t get any updates. I would constantly get error messages. It was really annoying, as some of the updates were required and involved security patches. I figured that since I only use Windows for school, and only use Visual Studio, I didn’t really care about updates. But, I don’t want viruses, even if it’s only a virtual OS.

So I found a post by another individual who had the same problem and it turns out that is a known issue, not just with Fusion, but with Windows XP in general. So if you ever have problems getting updates from Windows Update, continue to this link for help.

Let’s see if I can get this straight. Release the long-awaited iPhones 2.0 software, new iTunes software, launch the MobileMe service, and have a bunch of new (and old) iPhone customers signing up for service… all on the same day… all at the same time.

To put it nicely, it was a nightmare.

Welcome To The (NOT) Working Week

I woke up at 5:00 am, feeling refreshed. I usually don’t get up until 7:00 am, so this was early. Maybe it was because I was anticipating the long awaited iPhone 2.0 firmware and the MobileMe launch. I already updated my iTunes and MobileMe software, so all I was waiting for was iPhone 2.0. From about 7:00 am until 8:00 am, I was in the Apple Discussion forums, talking with all the anxious users. It was almost like a sporting event. I had the TV on in the background and they were broadcasting live from the Apple store in New York City. I was getting more excited by the minute. ETA for 2.0 was 8:00 am. It was one minute to go.

The time has come! I clicked the button to upgrade my firmware. A message popped up stating that I already had the latest software. OK… click it again. Same thing. Me, along with hundreds of thousands of people were sitting there clicking that button, getting the same response. I knew it probably wouldn’t come on right at 8:00 am. But still, when the time comes and you can’t get the software, it’s like a slow death.

Newtons Law

After about 15 minutes I was able to start my download. It went smoothly. iTunes backed up my phone, installed the new firmware, then copied all my data back onto it. Then it got crazy. Really crazy. For some reason, connecting the iPhone to iTunes caused no sync, and no recognition of the phone, other than listing it in the source list. I couldn’t see the summary, could browse through the tabs, it just said “Connecting to iTunes Store.” Why? So for about 90 minutes I had to sit through this, trying everything to get it to work. Back in the Apple forums, everyone was having the same problem. We were all going through this together.

At this time, I had my phone, but I couldn’t sync the new apps that I got from the iTunes Store. So really, I had a phone, but couldn’t do the one thing I wanted to– use my iPhone as a remote for my Apple TV. For some reason, it just wouldn’t sync with my iTunes library. I was considering erasing the iPhone (which would take another hour) and start over, but luckily I read a post in the Apple forum from a guy who just right-click the iPhone in the source list and chose “sync.” How simple. It worked. I was able to get my apps installed, but the phone still wouldn’t sync. At this point, I was just happy to use my remote.

About an hour later, the iPhone finally synced automatically with iTunes, and everything worked fine. But wait, it wasn’t over.

Don’t Forget About Me!

Remember MobileMe? It launched today. Well, almost. As of 4:34 pm EST, there are still problems. For some people who didn’t get the updates earlier in the week, they can’t even use the new service. The system is slow and there are error messages abound. I was lucky to download all the software beforehand, so I can get things working relatively close to correctly, but there are still issues. MobileMe web services are slooooooooow. Reading mail, choosing folders, doing any clicking takes forever. The old .mac service was spry. This new service can put you to sleep. Hopefully this is just first day blues. If it’s this slow in a week, I would think something must be up.

Launch days are rocky rides. You take the good with the bad. I’m just glad I wasn’t in an Apple store activating a phone. I read numerous reports of Apple sending people home to complete the activation. Why on Earth AT&T made people do in-store activations is beyond me.

For all intents, I have a new iPhone today, and I love it!

After watching the WWDC keynote, and hearing Steve Jobs boast about about the new iPhone (and its lower cost), I was surely going to buy one. However, after doing some research, I came to a rather different conclusion.

Boy, Is This Great?

First, the real reason I wanted the 3G iPhone was because of all this great GPS “stuff” they were adding. I even went out and sold my Magellen GPS unit (which I loved) to get ready for the iPhone. I figured that Apple would include some fancy turn-by-turn GPS software built-in, since they have been working with Google and Google Maps. What I learned later was that the best they could do was offer some blue dot that follows your general location as you move. This was hardly what I expected, and my plans for upgrading were forever dashed.

Then I found out what I would really be paying for the phone. Did $199.99 sound too good? Yup, it sure did. I would later find out that the 3G phone would cost more over the course of the new 2 year contract than my current phone. Some of the “benefits” of a new 3G phone would be a $10.00 bump in monthly cost for data plan, and $5.00 a month more for 200 text messages, which I get now for free. Basically, I’d be paying $74.99 for what I have now, the base package, and that’s not including taxes.

So what is so special about the new phone that I would be willing to pay hundreds more just to own it? I’ll be damned if I know! The best part about the new phone, for me, is the iPhone 2.0 firmware– and I get that free with my current iPhone. After that, the new iPhone is all hype. 3G isn’t even available in many markets, so some are just wasting their money.

I’m just happy I can use my iPhone as a remote control for my Apple TV and iTunes. 3G service? I think I’ll pass. I’m not rich enough to talk on it.

This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues.
– Apple

For some time now, I kept on getting my passwords wrong. I couldn’t understand why. Then at times, I would have to type the first letter of a word twice. Seems there was an issue with Leopard that prevented the first keystroke from being accepted if your computer had been sitting around doing nothing for a while.

It’s nice to know that this annoying problem will be a thing of the past.

I was never too much of a movie fan, not even in the old VHS days. However, there is something about going out and renting a movie you haven’t seen in years and being able to watch it again. I was never into new releases as much as I enjoyed finding a movie I’ve seen before, a movie that is good enough to watch 10 times over.

Netflix, and then Blockbuster, provided me with these options.

The Price Is Right.. Bitch

The price seemed to be right. For under $20.00/month you could have unlimited rentals with up to three movies out at once. It was a good deal, but I found myself stepping over my returned mailers on the floor of my room. I would end up not returning them, maybe in the hopes they would return themselves? Still, it was nice to know that when you did finally get around to dropping them in a mailbox, you could have movies coming the next day. If you played your cards right, you could literally almost never be without a movie to watch.

Blockbuster’s in-store rentals are a joke. You can go in there, rent a couple movies, and drop ten bucks before you know it. It’s almost better to buy a used copy of the movie, at least you’d have it forever. The only way to go with Blockbuster is the online rental with the in-store component. Now, even at $34.95/month for three movies, it’s still better to use this form of unlimited in-store returns that actually walk into Blockbuster and rent a movie for five bucks.

Something Blue… Something New…

Now, if new releases are your thing, you might wanna try redbox, if one is available near your location. redbox uses automated vendors so customers can easily rent movies and then return them. Movies can be returned or rented at any redbox vendor locations, usually found in malls, supermarkets and McDonalds. For $1.00 per night, plus a $10.00 authorization hold on your credit/debit cart, you can watch all the new releases you like. And they only charge $1.00 per night if you keep the movie after the first night. Their cutoff time is 9:00 pm, which gives you enough time during the day to return the movie without the additional fee of $1.00.

Renting a movie, or returning a movie for that matter, couldn’t be easier. The screen displays all the movies, either by release date or title, as well as the light box on the outside of the machine. You scroll through the selections, adding movies to your order. Once you are done, you select check-out, provide an e-mail (return customers don’t need to enter the email again), and swipe your credit or debit card. The movies then dispenses from the machine and you are good to go.

For anyone who hasn’t tried redbox, I would highly recommend it. You can visit their website for locations throughout the country.

www.redbox.com

Pros: Easily rent movies online and pick them up at any location of your choosing, or rent them right from the redbox vendor. Once you are ready to return your movie, simply drop it off at any redbox location. It’s that simple. You will receive an email notice when you rent or return a movie. redbox venders feating an elegant user interface that is both easy to use and streamlined.

Cons: Although redbox feature new releases every week, if you are looking for older movies, you won’t find them here. For those who want to see a movie as soon as it hits the DVD shelves, redbox is for you.

Rating: 5/5 stars

www.blockbuster.com

Pros: Like Netflix before it, Blockbuster continued to make online DVD rentals easy. With the muscle of their brick-and-mortar stores behind them, they are able to offer the best of both worlds; online and in-store rentals. This provides Blockbuster a leg up over Netflix, who only allow returns via mail. Easy queue system ensures that you always have movies coming.

Cons: They limit in-store returns to five per month for their standard three movie package with unlimited online returns. They added a new plan which charges double that amount for more than five monthly in-store returns. Effectively, this doubled many people’s monthly bill.

Rating: 2/5 stars