billpalmer.net

Thanks to everyone who has written in to express concern that I made it through the hurricane OK. Everything's fine here, even South Florida didn't get it that bad, but apparently the same thing can not now be said for New Orleans. Half the city is currently living inside the SuperDome, let's just all hope the thing holds up. A category 5 hurricane is some powerful stuff.

I'm tired of this hurricane stuff

It's funny how quickly your plans for the weekend can go downhill. Just throw a hurricane into the mix, basically.

I had this nice big weekend trip planned to South Florida that included a doctor appointment, a Green Day concert, and a Miami Dolphins game. And in all honesty, with the way my back has stiffened up over the past week, I think I was looking forward to the doctor appointment the most out of the three. Don't worry, I'll live. But I'm too young for this. I'm also too young for the grey hair, but that's another story. The real story here, of course, is that my intended destination just happens to be scheduled for a date with a hurricane this weekend.

And I to think that if I'd followed my original plan, I'd be driving into the heart of it right at this moment. Good thing I checked the news before I hit the road, as South Florida is now well into full shutdown mode. The doctor appointment has already been cancelled, I can't get any word one way or another about the concert, and the football game is still officially very tentatively scheduled to go on as planned. And although I was really looking forward to all of it, I'm mostly over it at this point. I just saw Green Day earlier this year, and the Dolphins game is merely a preseason game. So if I have to cut bait and stay home this weekend, well it would certainly be preferable to heading down there and getting trapped right in the middle of yet another hurricane.

And that's what's bothering me more than the weekend washing me out. I'm not ready for another hurricane season. Last year was enough for a lifetime. But I'm from Florida, I should be used to it, right? In a word, no. In the first twenty-six years of my life, all in South Florida, I had been through precisely one hurricane (Andrew '92). And then I move to inland Central Florida, which hadn't had a hurricane in something like five decades, and I promptly get whacked by three hurricanes in two months.

Because we're so far inland here, there's no evacuating, there's no fearing for your life. There's just locking yourself inside and waiting for it to pass while your life is completely shut down, and then waiting for things to slowly creep back to normalcy after it's gone. It's nine days in a row without electricity, it's traveling all around the landscape to find working internet access so you can keep your going concerns going, it's having every traffic signal in your town ripped off the power lines and seeing the national guard directing traffic. It's seeing the police driving around in tanks. It's having literallly half the roads in your town blocked by fallen trees. It's having the screens ripped off your porch, and not wanting to bother replacing them because they'll likely just get ripped off by the next storn next month. It's not fun. And it's not normal.

You can deal with something like that if you're pretty sure it's not going to happen again. But here we go again, it would seem. This first storm isn't here at all, hitting South Florida instead, but it's already screwing with my plans, interrupting things and making life difficult.

Here we go again? Let's hope not.

Five days and counting

Lots of folks have been writing in to ask what I think of my new iBook now that I've had a few more days to play with it. Been a bit too busy to sketch it out in detail, so for now I'll sum it up with a fast food slogan: I'm lovin' it.

New iBook First Impressions

Well it wouldn't be an adventure if you didn't start off by electrocuting yourself, so I decided to go ahead and get that out of the way right off the bat with my new iBook. I realized I needed a free endplug on my surge protector in order to fit my new iBook's plug, so I unplugged the plug on the end, which happened to be my laser writer, which I happened to forget to turn off before unplugging, and my fingers just happened to manage to come into contact with the partially-unplugged prongs, and sure enough I was electrocuting myself. It's one thing to get shocked, but having a current running consistently through your body is another thing entirely. I tried to let go, but my right arm didn't feel like cooperating, and I had to grab my right arm with my left arm and pull it off the plug. I fully expected to find myself dead, or on fire, or otherwise on my way to the hospital, or at least have smoke coming off of my forehead or something. But the only side effect was that my right arm was numb for a few minutes, so I suppose I was pretty lucky in that regard.

And fortunately, getting electrocuted was by far the most painful part of getting my new iBook up and running. Everything after that was pretty much a walk in the park. Although I suppose the bar for things going wrong was set pretty high right out of the gate, considering how things started off.

So I fire up my new iBook (thankfully, not literally) and after looking at some cool new splash screens, I'm asked if I want to let the iBook automatically pick up my user account, apps, etc. from another Mac. It's been so long since I've bought a new Mac that I had actually forgotten that this nifty feature existed. I would certainly recommend it to most people, but I was tempted to instead build my new beast piece by piece, moving over things only as I wanted them, installing my apps from scratch, and so on. But I figured I'd give the automatic thingy a try, at least until it pointed out that I didn't have the drive space to let it do its thing. It struck me as odd at first, with both machines having the same 40 GB hard drive, but then I recalled that the new iBook comes with a whole lot more stuff bundled on it. So although I could have easily moved some data out of my home folder and then sat back while the automatic thingy did its thing, I took it as an excuse to go ahead and do the whole thing manually.

Again, I wouldn't recommend this to people who people who don't know what they're doing, but if you know where everything hides, it's not too difficult to go and grab your mail folder, your Safari prefs folder, and so on, until you've got your new machine eerily resembling your old one. It's what the automatic thingy does anyway. But I did borrow one trick from the automatic thingy by booting up my old PowerBook as a FireWire hard drive, as moving thirty gigs of crap isn't all that fun over ethernet, and thinking in wireless terms isn't reality-based when one of the machines is old enough to be running on 802.11b.

So anyway I get everything in place and, oh man, is this fun. The stats say this machine should be roughly twice as fast as my PowerBook, but as I suspected, in certain processor-intensive situations it seems ten times as fast. I can't wait to go and play with Dashboard and the other stuff that my new machine is fast enough for, the stuff I had to leave on the shelf on my old rig because things were slow enough already. And although I'm still getting used to it, I'm loving the small footprint. Finally, a laptop that can actually fit on my lap, something that can be positioned on one knee, or just about anywhere else. Twenty-four hours into it, and I'm not missing those three extra inches at all. And while the PowerBook always felt sufficiently sturdy, this thing feels like a tank.

There are certainly still adjustments to be made. I don't consider the keyboard to be better or worse than my old one, but because the machine is more compact, the keys are at slightly different angles to each other, which takes just a bit of getting used to. Typing in the pitched black will be a little tricky until then. Once I get used to it, I'll be fine. I do wish this machine had a backlit keyboard, but I couldn't have gotten that with a twelve inch PowerBook anyway. And it's nice to finally have my ports on the side of my laptop, where they belong, instead of hiding on the back. A year and a half of using a PowerBook, and I never did get used to that. Two-finger scrolling is deceptively easy to get used to (I didn't even realize I was using it). I hope I never have to find out how well the brace for impact hard drive feature works.

Lastly, I will very much miss the card slot that my old PowerBook sported. Not that I ever once actually put a card in it or anything. But during pauses in my writing, when I was searching for the right word or whatever, I really liked playing with the card slot's release lever.

List of things I need to add to my new iBook to complete the experience, not necessarily in this particular order:

- An extra gig of RAM. This thing is a speed demon already, but with a gig of RAM barely a hundred bucks, there's no reason not to grab it while prices are low. I'll want it eventually.

- A bag or pouch. If I carry around my new 12 inch laptop in the same old 15 inch bag, then there wasn't too much point in buying it. Thanks to everyone who has sent in bag/pouch suggestions so far. I'll likely have to head out to the stores to try some of them out in person.

- An AirPort Express. The next time I head out on a hotel-based trip, I want to do so in style. Also, my current wireless router is 802.11b, which doesn't impact internet speed, but doesn't exactly make for fun file transfer speed. Now that I've finally got an 802.11g machine, I might as well embrace the standard.

- A new surge protector. Really, electrocuting myself once was enough. You pay eight dollars for a surge protector, you get what you deserve. Time for a real one, before I zap myself again and turn the rest of my hair grey.

Past due

Not to belabor the point, but here it is Friday, and Amazon is still quite sure that my new iBook will be delivered by yesterday. UPS begs to differ and believes that my iBook arrived in Orlando at about 1:00 this morning, meaning that it goes on the truck any minute now and makes it to me at the whim of the driver.

Maybe Amazon simply meant that it would travel through a town near me by yesterday. Ah well.

And yeah I'm aware that no one could possibly care about any of this but me, but you know what? Too bad.

The final leg begins

According to UPS, my new iBook just left Jacksonville and is currently en route to the Orlando distribution center. These are exciting times, whether you believe it or not.

Amazon, for its part, still believes that my iBook is going to be delivered today.

I shoulda just paid for overnight shipping.

Waiting for the new iBook to show up

My new iBook is currrently in Jacksonville, a good two hundred miles from here, and despite the fact that it's 10:00 at night, Amazon somehow still seems to think that it's going to be delivered today. Yeah. I guess it's the price you pay for going after the best price instead of merely walking into an Apple Store and walking out with one. But since I'm not in any hurry, I'll just remind myself that I saved a good $160 by going through Amazon. It's just funny, though, how you can spend the better part of a year carefully planning a purchase, and then once you pull the trigger, you go nuts because you have to wait another three days for it to show up.

During my wait, I've realized that this is the first time since 1999 that I've bought a new Mac. That seems absurd, considering that in that time, I've ordered and set up more than three hundred of them for the school district, and assisted countless others in buying one of their own. It's not that I haven't thrown thousands of dollars into Apple's coffers in the mean time,on purchases ranging from software to iPods. Considering I've been a Mac user the whole time, it just seems odd how long it's been. I guess it's just one of those odd quirks.

I bought my aging PowerBook early last year, but it was quite the used product at the time. This time it's an iBook, but despite the seeming downward shift in the product matrix, it's very much an upgrade. Oddly enough, the last new Mac I bought back in '99 was also a twelve inch iBook, although the iBook of yesteryear, with its clamshell styling, MacOS 8.6 operating system, 300 Mhz processor, and 32 MB of RAM, doesn't faintly resemble today's iBook in terms of looks or user experience. The funny thing is, those were all fairly impressive stats at the time. Today the original iBook almost belongs in a museum. But then, come to think of it, despite being too underpowered for serious use, my old clamshell still sits on the far corner of my desk and runs Panther quite nicely. Living proof, I guess, that Macs age well.

I'm still not entirely sure I'm going to love every aspect of my new iBook, even though I've logged quite a few hours on an iBook of the same form factor, having grudgingly moved from a clamshell to a snow white G3 iBook later in my school system career to take advantage of the 1024 screen resolution which made school website design feasible. I say grudgingly because it's no secret that I liked the clamshell iBook's smooth, curved wrist wrests a whole lot better than that of the sharp lines introduced on either the white iBook or the G4 PowerBook. But because going back to a 300 Mhz laptop isn't exactly a feasible option, I've learned to my PowerBook's odd wrist angles, and I imagine I'll learn to love the same about my new iBook as well -- especially considering how much faster my new rig will be than my current one.

Finally, I think I'm really going to love having a little twelve inch bugger again. A fifteen inch screen has its advantages, but it's not as important to my workflow as it used to be, and it's a lot of extra machine to carry around if you're not going to take advantage of it. Having a laptop I can balance on one knee during use, and throw into a backpack during travel, is likely going to come in extremely handy over the next six months, during which I have more travel scheduled (both by plane and by car) than in probably the past five years combined.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of it all is that, in order to match the iPod, most new Macs are white in color these days. The iBook will be the first white-colored Mac I've ever owned, and yet now I have a black-and-red iPod to go with it. Hey, might as well mix it up.

Frankly, I can't wait to take my new toy for a spin. I think I'll take the money I saved by waiting for it to show up, and invest that money into an AirPort Express, which will likely come in equally handy during my upcoming travel. That, and I need a new laptop bag. I mean, there's not much point in owning a twelve inch laptop if you're going to continue carrying it around in a fifteen inch bag. If anyone wants to recommend a great bag for an iBook, feel free to holler at me. And if anyone is interested in buying an aging G4 Titanium PowerBook with a variety of issues, holler at me as well. I'm not entirely sure whether I'm going to sell it or keep it as a backup, but if someone out there can put it to good use, then I might consider parting with it. After all, I've still got my original iBook sitting around just in case. And no, it's not for sale.

It's Moving Day here in the barnyard

It's Moving Day here in the barnyard, and while that doesn't imply a new residence, it does represent a few new dance moves. And if you can figure out what that sentence means, then you probably understand my tortured brain more than I do. But in any case, Move #1 was to go ahead and order my new iBook. I figured I'd wait a week or so to see if Amazon went ahead and attached a hundred dollar rebate to the new iBook like it has with the last several iBook models, and sure enough they did just that yesterday, so it was time to pull the trigger. For a thousand bucks, with no sales tax, minus a hundred bucks coming back to me, the new iBook is an absolute steal for $900. Now I get to find out if I was right when I concluded that based on my evolving usage, I no longer wanted to lug around a fifteen inch laptop, and would be pleased with a twelve instead. If it turns out I was wrong, then I'll use the new iBook until next year and then trade up for an Intel-based PowerBook when it rolls out.

Move #2, although not Apple-related but important to me nonetheless, was to go ahead and order contact lenses for the first time in what I believe is three or four years. I got my first pair of glasses when I was twelve, to give you an idea of how long I've needed them, and I moved to contacts by the age of fourteen, to give you an idea how just much I disliked wearing glasses. But about three years ago I decided contacts were more trouble than they were worth, and settled for going back to wearing glasses. No more of that. No more settling. It means I'm going to have to get used to wearing contacts all over again just as if it were the first time, which come to think of it wasn't all that easy to do the first time around.

Move #3, not Apple-related either, is that after having been on prescription allergy medication for a little more than half my life, and then having incorrectly concluded that I could probably do without it because I had moved to a less-polluted climate, I've made an appointment to go and get back on it.

So that's it. I'm no longer willing to settle for using a too-slow computer ten hours a day, I'm no longer willing to have a giant metal frame sitting on my face every waking moment, and I'm no longer willing to tolerate my allergies. Like I said, it's Moving Day. And it ain't over yet.

Does Apple really need another Switch Campaign?

I know, it's been awhile, but let me see what I can rattle off for you before I head out for the weekend...

According to Think Secret, Apple has spent the past year working on a new iPod-themed "Switch" campaign, only to pull the plug on the whole thing at the last minute. It should be pointed out, as always, that the rumor sites are usually wrong, especially now that Apple has taken decisive action to finally silence the moles within the company. And it should also be pointed out that even since that time, far too many of Think Secret's supposed rumors have painted Apple as a band of buffoons, rather convenient considering that Apple has a lawsuit and an injunction pending against Think Secret. But with all that having been said, I have a feeling that this one is true.

And it begs the question: does the Mac really need another Switch campaign?

A cynic would say no. A cynic would say that the first Switch campaign was a failure three years ago, and that Apple's success in getting people to switch to the Mac over the past year or two has more to do with the fact that they launched a music player and that Windows was overrun by viruses. But those cynics miss the whole point of the original campaign, and that's that by blatantly getting in people's faces and telling them to Switch to the Mac, it posed the question in the minds of a Windows-using public that didn't even know the Mac still existed. Here comes Apple three years ago, not only announcing that the Mac still exists, but having the gall to suggest that people should switch to it. Sure, a lot of Windows users probably laughed at those commercials, but it planted the question in their head. And later on, after they fell in love with their Apple iPod, or after their Windows computer fell victim to one too many virus/malware attacks, the idea to switch to the Mac came naturally.

So you can look at the fact that the Mac is now growing three times as fast as the PC, and you can label the Switch campaign a near-complete, if late-blossoming success. But Apple hasn't done much to advertise the Macintosh since, a fact that has chafed at many an activist Mac user, myself included. Hearing the initial rumors of the new Switch campaign brought hope that this might finally change, and hearing of its apparent cancellation initially made me cringe. But the thing is that at this point, any such campaign needs to no longer simply pose the question; that ship has already sailed. Any discussion of new Macintosh advertising has to take into account that the Mac is now winning. No longer a sinking ship in need of being kept afloat, the Mac user base is a tide rising three times as fast as the rest of the ocean, and simply needs to be propelled into a tidal wave. The message is now not "you should switch to a Mac," but instead "everyone else is doing it, so why aren't you?".

Sure, it's a lousy reason to change computing platforms. But for all the born followers out there, it's precisely what's going to cause them to switch. Heck, it's the reason why most of them are using Windows right now. The born leaders are already making the move to the Mac in full force. Apple now needs to help the followers realize this, so they'll follow suit. None of us know enough about the specific content of the new Switch campaign to know exactly what its message was going to be. But if the backstory that Think Secret provides is true, then this ad campaign was canned not because Apple doesn't want to advertise the Mac, but because the this particular campaign itself was simply falling flat when they tried to shoot it. That means that we should see something, if not this campaign then some other campaign, soon. Knowing Steve Jobs, he already had eighteen different fallback campaigns in place just in case this one didn't work out. For all we know, this might have been one of the fallback campaigns, and we're now instead going to see the real thing. After all, even when the rumor sites get the individual facts right, they tend to do a rather fantastic job of putting them together wrong. So we'll see what happens.

But regardless, keep in mind that as far as bringing Windows users over to the Mac, right now we're in the "Rising Tide" stage; think "Tidal Wave" for the next step.

Mighty Mouse: still very much a one-button mouse, thankfully

It's a tough call. There are almost no Mac users in the real world who have any desire whatsoever for a two-button mouse. Yet at the same time, nearly every geek on the Mac Web not only uses a two-button mouse, makes a point of overcomplicating their Mac experience by right-clicking fifty-two times per second when there are almost literally no circumstances when right-clicking would ever be needed, and worst of all, as we all know, has spent nearly every minute of the past several years of their life demanding that Apple screw up the Mac experience by moving to a two-button mouse standard. Yes, it's the same out of touch insulated geeks who have wasted an equally large portion of their lives demanding a headless iMac, and with whom the Mac platform would be so much better off without. So what should Apple do: listen to the ninety-nine percent who couldn't be happier with Apple's absolutely perfect one-button mouse, or screw things up by listening to the insulated geeks and releasing some awful two-button monstrosity that would negatively impact every single Mac user -- even those smart enough to avoid the geeks' last dubious victory, Mac mini. It's obviously a no-brainer, but for reasons which still haven't become clear, Apple has been having a hard time ignoring the goons this year. So what's it going to be: stick with what works really well, or screw everything up with a two-button mouse?

For about five incredibly disappointing minutes this morning, I was afraid it had turned out to be the latter. Sure enough, Apple has released a mouse with seemingly more buttons on it than the average keyboard, and sure enough, the tiny geek minority wasted no time in cheering what they were quite sure was another victory for their camp at the expense of the other ninety-nine percent of the population. But then I took a look at the Mighty Mouse, and to my surprise and relief, I realized something: the Mighty Mouse appears to still be very much a one-button mouse. And even better, Apple has done so in a way that has apparently managed to trick the geeks into thinking they got what they wanted (degraded user experience for all), and sent them back to their little corner where they'll stay silent until they think of some other asinine thing to begin picketing Apple for ("Apple keyboards should no longer have the letter 'R' on them" is my personal prediction -- hey, it's no stupider than the Mac mini).

So how is it that this mouse, with all its buttons and protrustions, is still a one-button mouse? Well, it would appear that Apple has taken the fundamental flaws shared by every two-button mouse ever made, and found a way to make them non-issues. This is saying a lot, as there's never been a company in history that has been able (or more accurately, willing) to make a multi-button mouse that was actually usable by humans. How horribly have all these companies gone wrong? Let's count the ways. First, there's that absolutely pointless right button. Pointless on the Mac anyway, as right-clicking is something you would never do on a Mac unless you were trying to make a point of making your Mac experience suck. Sure, there are contextual menus to be accessed, but on a Mac there's always a better way of doing things. If you're using contextual menus on a Mac on any kind of regular basis, you're either trying to show off for people (who aren't impressed), or you simply don't know how to use a Mac.

Harsh? Yep. Accurate? You bet.

Windows, of course, is a different story. The Windows interface is so crippled that you're quite often backed into a corner in which you have no choice but to right-click your way out of it. The problem is that, even on Windows, you click the main (left) button probably ten to one hundred times for every one time you click the right button. So how have mouse designers handled that? Why, they've made the two buttons equally prominent, of course. Considering the tried and true geek philosophy of burying the most important functions the most deeply, I'm surprised some of these mice don't have the right button even larger than the left, with a big red "X" pained on it.. But nonetheless, even with the two buttons equally sized and emhpasized, I've met people who've spent years struggling with finding their way around Windows because they simply could not figure out when they're supposed to click which of the two buttons. If you're so much of an insulated geek that you can't or won't believe that there are people out there all over the world who struggle with this, then you should probably just stop reading now, because you're only going to get more infuriated as we go on. But the bottom line is that, because WIndows sucks so badly that you have no choice but to right-click in some situations, and because mouse designers are such idiots that they make the right button every bit as prominent as the left button, millions of Windows users have struggled unneccessarily over the years -- and Mac users as well, for being stuck with a prominent button that's essentially pointless and almost always takes the user to an overcomplicated way of doing things.

But it doesn't end there. The scroll wheel, which in these days of ever vertically longer web pages has tended to come in more and more handy, has been implemented by mouse designers in a way that it wastes entirely too much space, and serves to divide the mouse's face up into two distinct buttons in a way that might as well read "Here's these two buttons, you should be using them both at one point or another, just don't ask us to tell you when or how often." In other words, they make it even harder for users to figure out that the left button is the "real" button and that the right button is merely an ace in the hole for Windows users and shouldn't even be there for Mac users.

So, in a word, every mouse on the market, except for Apple's one-button mouse, sucks. The right button is implemented in the manner of a cruel joke, and the scroll wheel is implemented so poorly that it cancels out any advantage that the user might gain.

Leave it to Apple, though, to figure out how to implement both of these features (and I use the term loosely) into a mouse in such a way that neither one detracts from the mouse's "real" button. For starters, the scroll wheel is not a wheel at all but instead a little tiny ball which, from what I've read so far today, scrolls just as easily as any full-size scroll wheel, and yet only takes up a fraction of the space (read: no negative impact on the mouse's one and only "real" button). And that right-click button, which shouldn't even be there on a Macintosh mouse? It's implemented in such a way that it might as well not even be there -- most Mac users will never even encounter it. Why? Because both "buttons" are hidden underneath a single cover. When the Mighty Mouse is held in your right hand, your left index finger will instinctively click the "real" button, and you won't even know that there's a right button on the other side unless A) you're a Windows user and you're desperately looking for it because Windows has trapped you yet again, or B) someone tells you it's there.

What a thing of beauty, eh? Windows users who buy the Mighty Mouse can go right on right-clicking their way through the Windows dungeon, the insulated Mac geeks can pointlessly right-click to their heart's content, and the other ninety-nine percent of Mac users will be no worse for wear, most not even aware that the idiotic second button is even there. Perhaps equally as important, recent switchers to the Mac platform who are still trying to unlearn all that Windows has wraught on them, won't be unintentionally screwing themselves by continuing to right-click on a platform in which right-clicking is a good way to waste time. Instead, they'll forget the hidden right button is even there, and they'll instead learn the real way of doing things on a Mac.

Oh, and those two buttons at the bottom of the Mighty Mouse that launch Dashboard, or send an email to a random person, or trigger a pie thrown in your face? Whatever it is that they do, they're inobtrusive enough that they're unlikely to get in the way of any real mousing. Think of them as a bonus, and one that can easily be ignored if the bonus doesn't feel like a bonus to you.

So there you have it. The Mighty Mouse is not a two-button mouse at all. Instead, it's simply the evolution of Apple's perfect one-button mouse, with a non-obtrusive scrolling mechanism, a couple of non-interfering doo-dad buttons down at the bottom, and most importantly, a right-click button that, thankfully, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. This mouse very much appears to be a usability upgrade, without any of the downsides that the geeks have been demanding all these years.

And while the geeks are never happy unless usability has been hampered, it would appear that Apple has managed to fool them into thinking that they got their crappy two-button mouse after all. That ought to be good for keeping the geeks quiet for at least a few months, which for the rest of us might be just as important as the fact that we didn't lose any usability. Just don't tell the geeks that we won and they lost, lest they come back and start demanding the removal of random letters from the keyboard after all.

And finally, there's the question of whether I'll be buying a Mighty Mouse. I very much doubt it. You see, I don't use a mouse. Rather common trait among laptop users, from what I hear.