Well that’s strange. Why were so many people interested in visiting my sleepy little site on Christmas Day?

Oh, so there you go. New XBOXs!

Before I get into my thoughts on the computer itself, let me type at you for a minute about the Apple Store experience.

I do not like it.

I need order, not chaos. I need to know where to find my product, and where to pay for it. Instead, engaging someone to ask questions of or, more importantly, to give money to, is something closer to checking in at a busy foreign airport.

Backing up a little bit, I’d decided last week that I needed a new laptop. Work provides one, but it’s mostly inadequate. The virus checker runs almost non-stop, which kills performance. When the virus checker isn’t chugging, Outlook is doing God-knows-what; I can open Task Manager and watch it writing, writing, writing. The battery lasts about an hour, probably because of the virus checking and Outlook activity. It’s heavy and bulky and I’m not crazy about the keyboard and Outlook freezes every day or so when trying to do things like, you know, receive email, and… and… and… it’s enough already. Windows is still mostly unsatisfying, though Windows 7 is their best OS yet and I don’t mind it that much. But it’s still not the computing experience I expect. I’m still fighting my PC.

So I’d decided I was buying myself a Mac laptop, but hadn’t decided between a 13″ MacBook Pro and a 15″ MacBook Pro. I needed to go to the store and poke and prod them. Since I’d done a fair amount of research online before hitting the store, I didn’t need to spend a lot of time comparing specs, but felt I needed to lay on hands to see what felt right. And after all the touch tests, the Air became the clear winner for what I needed. The weight different between a 13″ Air (2.96lbs) and a 13″ Pro (4.5lbs) is surprising. You wouldn’t think 1.5 lbs would make a big difference, but it does. I picked the Air up and it just felt right. The intention was to buy a laptop for email, communications (Lync, Skype), web browsing, development, and documents. No heavy gaming or video editing, no 200GB media library. When I took all that into consideration, the choice was simple.

Now I’m in the Apple Store and I’ve decided which laptop I want. I’m ready to give someone money. But I can’t find someone to take my money. There’s a 1:8 ratio of Blue Shirts to customers, everyone occupied. The storefront greeter person says they have a new system, called iQueue (and why not?). He walks me over to the nearest laptop and hits a button on the iPad next to it, which is supposed to place me in a queue for a blue shirt. But it posts an error. Try again, error. Aha! After the 7th time, it says I’m in a queue. I’m instructed to wait by my designated iPad and wait for a blue shirt. For grins I start the Timer app on my phone to see how long it takes. Then I proceed to spend the next 10 minutes and 37 seconds standing like a tool waiting for someone to come by, all while (unsuccessfully) trying to flag down someone else that can help me before that. Remember, this is me basically trying my best to hand someone $1383.

There’s a psychology and/or industrial design lesson in here somewhere. So yes, I’m not a fan of the Apple Retail experience.

The problem is, it doesn’t much matter in the end. If I’d said screw it after 8 minutes of waiting, I still would’ve gone home and bought it from the online store, where the margins are even meatier. Apple wins either way.

But now I have the laptop, and the memories of how I acquired it are starting to fade. It’s a beautiful product. The screen is the right size for me. The exterior feels solid despite the light weight. The keyboard is a pleasure. The solid state drive is zippy and the 128GB capacity shouldn’t be a problem since most of my stuff is stored “in the cloud” or on our home NAS. I’ve been sitting on the couch typing for 100 minutes now and it just occurred to me to check the battery life. Oh, still 65% left. I rebooted once yesterday when upgrading to OSX 7.2 and some other updates, and not because of a crash. Outlook for Mac 2011 is on here and isn’t the complete disaster that Entourage was. Skype, Chrome, and Dropbox all work fine. The touchpad is by far the best pointing device I’ve used on any laptop so far, even including ThinkPad’s eraser-nub stick. I’d love to complain about something, but I can’t yet. Perhaps since I came into this relationship with such low standards I can’t see the flaws under the surface and I’ll have a monster blog post in a few weeks railing on all the problems I’m having.

Oddly, this is only the second Apple computer I’ve ever bought, despite having used Apples for 27 years or so now.

1. Rip one of the Arrested Development DVDs to ISO using DVD Shrink.
2. Use Handbrake to transcode a single episode. Turn the Video rate down to 5 frames per second (since we don’t care about the video but there doesn’t seem to be an option to leave it out altogether). In Audio, select AC3 (ffmpeg) for the Audio Codec.
3. Use VLC Player to drop the video and convert the audio to WAV. In the audio settings, make sure to select WAV as the encapsulation type, and WAV as the codec.
4. Use Audacity to edit the audio (*). Then Export as MP3 Audio.
5. In iTunes, change my Import settings over to AAC. Import the MP3 into iTunes. Right-click on it, then select Convert to AAC.
6. Find the <file name>.m4a file under Documents->Music->iTunes>and so on, and change the extension to .m4r.

There has to be an easier way.

* – Why isn’t there a proper Crop function in Audacity? Keep what I’ve selected, remove everything before and after… including silence.


Name: ______________________________________
Address: ________ Phone: ______ DOB: _______


Or asking for magic numbers:

FASB #: ________
LUPUS ID: ________


Sorry, just grumpy because it’s 2011 and I have to fill out the same forms at every doctor’s office I visit. No, don’t tell me it’s for privacy reasons; if you gave a crap about privacy you would be pushing back on insurance companies to move away from SSN’s as identifiers.

If I were rating it on the App Store, which I haven’t yet, I’d give it between 2 and 3 stars. I do think it has some promising attributes, but:

- It’s very needy. As in, if you don’t log in for a day, everything turns to shit.
- They’re playing the Zynga song note-for-note. You know the one, where you can sort of squeak by in free mode but it’s a LOT BETTER IF YOU JUST BUY SOME CASH OR FAVORS USING REAL MONEY. Basically it let’s you level faster, but that’s useless because…
- There’s no end. So every half day or so for the rest of your life you’ll need to login to push the levers and receive the carrots.

I do kind of wish it was a paid app. If the focus was less on getting you to spend money(*) and more on strategy and socializing, it would have longer playability, and they might even make more money in the process. It’s likely I’ll stop playing tomorrow, but still keep it installed to see what updates they roll out over time. Of course, by then my tower will be a cockroach-invested, burned-out mess, but that’s life in the city.

* – It’s not as in-your-face as other apps, I have to give them credit. But it’s still there.

What should you do instead? Spend $10 to register your own .com domain, and then use Google Apps to host it.

I’m personally wary of doing business with someone that doesn’t have their own domain. All else equal, I’ll generally choose the vendor with a custom domain; to me, it implies they have their act more together than someone who’s running a business using an ISP acccount. And as Dave points out, why do you want a critical communication mode to be subject to the whims of a company like Comcast, AOL, or the Hotmail group?

For me as a home office worker, Skype is an invaluable business tool. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on SkypeIn numbers and lots of long distance to colleagues over in the UK. And despite being the 800 lb gorilla in its category, it falls way short of what a business communication tool should be.

One of my biggest complaints is that it’s unnecessarily difficult to switch between headset and hands-free. I’ve griped about this before. That, coupled with a few other little GUI quirks, reek of their product management people not eating their own dog food. With Skype’s scale, each client quirk that irks one of their developers is probably also pissing off tens or hundreds of thousands of other users. Instead, they’ve busied themselves with removing features.

So the quest continues for a decent business communication service. I have money that I’m willing to spend, if someone can provide the service. Who’s it going to be, because I’m not terribly optimistic for the prospects for “Microsoft Live Skype Lync Client for Windows 64-bit for Enterprises” or whatever the hell it will be mangled into.

AWS is in the middle of a major outage that’s lasted for much, much longer than most sites should tolerate.