billpalmer.net

Oh for the love of caffeine, or why I shouldn't be allowed to leave the house without adult supervision

There hasn't been much happening in the Mac universe lately, so for now you'll just have to settle for this little story of mine. Anyone who likes to see me suffer should enjoy this one:

At eight o'clock this evening I did something that I haven't done at eight o'clock in probably six months or more: I went to bed. So worn out I just crashed, you know. But I remembered that I'd forgotten to take by medication, so I get out of bed and head for the kitchen, only to recall that I had completely run out of soda. Now I'm not enough of a caffeine addict that I need an intervention, but I am enough of a caffeine addict that I need it in the morning, if you know what I mean. But I was exhausted enough that I wasn't thinking clearly enough to figure out that I could just drive a hundred yards in the morning to get myself a cold soda from the convenience store, so I mistakenly concluded that I needed to go to the store this evening. And since I needed a few other things as well, I figured I might as well skip the convenience store and head to the grocery store a mile and a half away. And since I was exhausted, I figured I'd take the back roads, which are really empty, so I wouldn't have to deal with anyone else on the road.

So you can probably see where this is headed, right?

I got part way to the store and, like clockwork, my tire went flat. It was after dark and I was in the middle of nowhere, and because I chose to take the back roads, it was pitch black. But that was alright because I keep a flashlight in my car...except that last week, we were having so many power outages around here that I took my flashlight out of the car for use in the house. So no big deal, I was just going to have to jack up the car in the dark...except that no matter how many times I tried, I just couldn't seem to find a stable point on which to do so. Because, you know, it was pitch black. No problem, though, I've got relatives living all over this town, one of whom is an automobile enthusiast and knows more about my car than I do, so I could just drag him over here and he could help me jack it up, right? Except, of course, for the fact that my relatives in town all decided go out of town this evening. Perhaps this was a sign that I should have gone with them.

Out of better options, I locked up the car and walked home. I'd just have to walk back to the car in the morning, and with the added benefit of daylight, change the tire. It was a long enough walk, but that's what iPods are for. I finally got home, only to realize that I still didn't have any soda for the morning...and now, I wasn't going to have a car to go get one in the morning. So I did what any addle-brained caffeine addict would do: I walked to the convenience store and bought some. And then I did what any blogger with writer's block would do: I wrote about it.

Oh well, at least I've got my soda for the morning. With the kind of morning I'm in for, I think I'll more than earn it. Now for some sleep.

How the spam blockers became the real problem

I think we've officially reached the point where spam blockers are now a bigger problem than spam. It used to be that if you sent someone an email and it didn't bounce back to you, then you knew with near certainty that they received it. But these days? Overachieving spam filters are now eating so much legitimate email that not only can you not be sure that someone recieved something you sent them, but people now have a built-in excuse of "sorry, it must have gotten eaten by a spam filter" and you have no way of knowing whether they're telling the truth. We've been reduced to the point where any time you send someone a vital, time-sensitive email, you have to include the words "please write back and let me know that you received it," which is just a lousy way to have to do business.

Far worse are the folks who think they have the right to force me to jump through hoops, click on links, and type in stuff, just to be "allowed" to send them an email. I can't believe anyone thinks they're so important that they get to waste that much of my time on something so unneccesary. Needless to say, such folks won't ever be receiving email from me.


Yeah, spam's a problem. But you know what? Deal with it. If you're going to use a spam filter, take the time to go through and train it properly, or to set the filtering levels appropriately. Setting your spam filter to "hyper-active" and then never keeping an eye on it is a lousy way to make friends.

Your inability to receive from me is officially not my problem.

Waiting on an Apple afternoon

- With an apparently strong chance that Tiger will be announced within the next couple of weeks, I'm suddenly in no immediate hurry to buy my next laptop after all. Why not wait until next month and turn the equivalent of a $129 profit in the process? Yeah, I'm on record as saying that the people who run these rumor sites and actively solicit Apple's trade secrets for publication are scum, but since the info is already out there, might as well put it to good use. But I'm still in favor of seeing the rumor sites get what they deserve.

- In a move I'll likely end up regretting, I've gone ahead and released my current PowerBook from the 1024x768 vise grip that I'd been keeping it locked in, in the name of readying myself for my next machine. Seeing as how that's going to be a little while, I went ahead and bumped it back up to its fullest resolution -- I just couldn't stand to see the pixels go to waste any longer. I'll regret it later, once I actually make the move and have to re-adjust all over again.

- To those of you continually writing in trying to convince me to buy a second monitor for my laptop, you can save your keystrokes by knowing that there are no circumstances under which I would consider doing so. I bounce around with my laptop so much, even around the house, that a second monitor would rarely get used, and would only serve to throw off my entire rhythm by sometimes being available, sometimes not. The whole point of having a laptop, for me at least, is that you can take all of its features with you.

- By all accounts, inventory of the eMac has dropped to the point that the next-generation eMac has to be just around the corner. That's the good news. But with the eMac being so hard to find at the moment, I wonder just how many potential sales Apple has lost recently by not having a legitimate sub-$1000 desktop option on the market. The current lineup, with the least expensive legitimate desktop option clocking in at $1299, is most screwed up Apple's consumer desktop line has been since...well, maybe ever. Come on, Apple, come back to reality on this, before it's too late.

- The more I use GarageBand, the more I like it. My advice: carve out some time in your schedule to go and play with it. Create some music. And annoy the heck out of your friends with it.

- Got a website of your own? Want to make some money? Join the LoadPod Affiliate Program.

The 12 inch PowerBook: it doesn't suck but I'm not buying it

My mere mention of the fact that some folks were writing trying to convince me to take a look at the 12 inch PowerBook instead of the 12 inch iBook, naturally caused a flood of emails from both sides of the issue. While a lot of those emails were simply a matter of a user of one machine or the other explaining why their choice was the right one for them, some folks went to far to as to try to make a case that one machine or the other was the better choice for all users.

And you don't see that every day. Not on both sides of the issue, anyway.

The case that some folks made for the iBook being the "correct" 12 inch Apple laptop for all users generally read like this: the 12 inch PowerBook is about fifty percent more expensive and yet doesn't come anywhere near delivering fifty percent more specs. It has 20 percent more Megahertz, but it's still the same processor family, meaning that the two machines are going to feel roughly the same speed throughout their relevant lives, and they're both going to become obsolete at about the same time. While the PowerBook comes with twice the RAM, it does so simply by dropping an extra 256 MB RAM chip in the only empty RAM slot, meaning that if you plan on upgrading past 512 MB, that extra 256 chip it came with is going to be useless to you. The PowerBook has a better video card, but are you a hard-core video gamer? It comes with Bluetooth built-in, but are you going to use it? You can do monitor spanning, but will you ever actually buy a second monitor and use that feature? The PowerBook weighs a few ounces less but has a shorter battery life, which is a lousy trade-off. The only spec with an appreciable difference is that the PowerBook's hard drive has twice the capacity. You can get a SuperDrive, but you have to pay an additional $200 on top of the extra $500 you're already paying. The 12 inch PowerBook just doesn't have $500 worth of extra value built into it.

For what it's worth, I more or less agree with just about everything in the above paragraph, which is why I was leaning toward the 12 inch iBook in the first place.

In most cases, the case that was made of the PowerBook being the "only 12 inch Apple laptop worth buying" read something like this: the iBook is cheap and flimsy, the iBook has a crappy keyboard, I don't like the iBook's aesthetics, I don't like the iBook's white color.

Notice a pattern there? As in, no actual reasons to buy a 12 inch PowerBook, just a lot of badmouthing of the option they didn't choose?

The more I looked at the specs and the more I thought about it, the 12 inch PowerBook looked more and more like the "sucker model" of the group. Sort of like those "value packs" you see some retailers throw together that cost more than what the individual components would cost if you bought them on your own. I've used an iBook enough to know that it does not have a crappy keyboard, it's not flimsy in comparison to the PowerBook, and considering the color of the infinitely popular iPod, attacking the iBook for being "too white" is just weird.

And then of course there's the fringe crowd, insisting that I seriously consider "upgrading" to a G3 Pismo PowerBook, which effectively runs MacOS X at about one-fifth the speed of the machine I'm currently using. I guess I'll just leave that one alone, lest the fanatical Pismo devotees descend their wrath on me.

But back to the reality-based options, I kept kicking around the notion of why someone would actually pay $1500 for a 12 inch PowerBook, when for another $500 you could get yourself a "real" 15 inch PowerBook. And then I figured out the 12 inch PowerBook's intended target market: those folks who want the features that only the PowerBook offers, but for portability reasons, they need those features smashed down into the smallest form factor possible. If that means paying $500 more than an iBook then so be it, because these folks weren't looking at an iBook anyway. They were looking at a 15 inch PowerBook and saying "perfect...but too large."

Of course, I doubt Apple minds much when someone manages to upsell themselves from an iBook to a 12 inch PowerBook for no other reason than the ability to do the math, but that's not Apple's problem. As for me, I actually want the larger screen size and don't mind the larger form factor, so if I were to buy a new PowerBook right now, it would be the 15 inch model, not the 12. But, as I said earlier, the entire PowerBook line is overpriced right now, by virtue of the fact that they sport a G4 processor. Whatever I buy now, I'll be ditching the day the G5 PowerBook appears on the market, and I would never, ever, ever get a decent return by trying to sell a recent G4 PowerBook after the G5's have appeared.

So with all of that decided, why don't I just go and buy something already? Well, not yet. No matter what I do lately, I can't quite manage to nudge "new laptop" to the top of the financial priority list, which is fine because I expect Tiger to appear within the next six weeks at the most, and with the iBook line being about six months old, new revisions may be just around the corner as well. I can wait another two months and in the mean time I'll just keep chugging away on my current rig, as long as it continues to hold up (knock on Titanium).

And yet another laptop option...

Hmm, lots of folks writing in telling me I should be looking at the 12 inch PowerBook instead of the iBook. I'm eight kinds of skeptical, but I'll have to take some time to read everything y'all have written about it and let it all sink in...