billpalmer.net

Happy Halloween and all that jazz

Just for kicks, I've interviewed myself in my latest column on iPod Garage. It's what you do when you can't think of a good premise for your weekly column. Oh well, I'll just blame it on Halloween.

Talked to my dad in South Florida again, still no electricity. Water finallly, albeit not hot water, making it possible to take cold showers at home instead of at the workplace. His generator is not strong enough to power the hot water heater, but just enough to power the television long enough to watch the Miami Dolphins game, which is hilarious. Also a bit ironic, considering that he watched the game on TV and I didn't. Yeah, that's what I get for living two hundred miles from the team, but so be it. Gonna have to do something about it before next year one way or the other, though, because I'm not going through another year of having to decide whether to drive twenty miles to a sports bar or tune into the radio every time the team goes on the road. Gotta look into that whole DirecTV package, although I know it's going to cost me plenty. I keep hoping they'll make the NFL Total Access package available on cable, but I guess that would make too much sense for everyone involved.

Back on topic, or as close to a topic as I'm apparently going to get today, I talked to a friend in South Florida who only lost power for an hour and saw only minimal effects. What I find so bizarre is that none of it even seems to crack the national news landscape. Sure, there are other more scandalous things going on right now on a national level than there were during Katrina, but just because no one's trapped on their roof this time doesn't mean it's not a story. Schools are on their second week of being closed, because only a third of them have power and it's not realistic to expect the parents to get the kids there anyway. School Board headquarters is in tatters, some would say that it's a come-uppance for wastefully building a headquarters made entirely of glass, but I'm not going to go there. They've got bigger issues than me picking on them.

Oh, you wanted something on topic? Anyone who writes an article stating that DRM-hacking software "frees" iTunes music from the iPod should just be arrested and placed in jail. For stupidity. And for just not getting it. Which are the same thing, I suppose. Sorry, I've got nothing at the moment, which all of you have undoubtedly figured out by now without me having to tell you so. I'll try again once it's a weekday.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to ask if I made it through the hurricane alright. The whole thing actually ended up happening quite south of me, but to give you an idea of just how large the storm was, I'm about two hundred miles north of where the eye of the storm hit, and I still saw (some) effects of the storm here. Nothing on the level of a hurricane, but strong enough wind to make it not safe to go outside for an entire day. But it's completely done with by now. At least here anyway.

Unfortunately that's not the case down south. No electricity, no water, and apparently limited phone service appear to be ruling the day, as I just this evening managed to make contact with my dad for a brief and gargled conversation in which I believe he said they're all showering at his place of work. I've got friends whose cell phones are either dead or simply not ringing, with the kind of "all circuits are busy" error message that you usually only receive when you're walking out of a packed football stadium.

But I'm not all that worried. This isn't another New Orleans. Although the two storms themselves were somewhat analogous, it was the flooding that did in New Orleans, and that's not happening this time, at least not to that extent. Being at sea level or below sea level is all the difference in the world. The levee breaks in New Orleans immediately pushed eight feet of water into the city, while South Florida is apparently not seeing more than two or three feet of water at its worst, essentially accumulated rain water. No levees to break, no lakes to come flooding into town. Still, a big mess. Limited access to the most basic of supplies. In most cases though, lives not ruined -- just lives on pause for awhile.

I've been interviewed on the latest episode of the MyMac.com Podcast in a twenty-minute segment during which we (mostly) discuss the Macintosh. It was a privilege because it just so happens to be one of the few Podcasts that I actually subscribe to. MyMac is unique in that it's been publishing for ten years, which on the internet is more than an eternity; it's almost the whole internet. When MyMac first began publishing, Mike Spindler was the CEO of Apple. The fact that most of you had either forgotten or never heard of that name merely serves to emphasize my point about longevity. If you're not reading MyMac, you should be, and I'm not just saying that because they interviewed me.

So I saw Audioslave in concert last night at the Hard Rock Live (you can read my review here), and it turned out to be a rather unique evening beyond just the show itself (which was fantastic). Hard Rock Live is essentially a glorified nightclub with a stage, all tucked behind the actual Hard Rock Cafe restaurant, on Universal Studios property. They've done a rather clever thing in which, in order to get to the theme park entrances, you have to walk through what they call Citywalk, which is a collection of theme restaurants, shops, a movie theater, and of course the Hard Rock with its built-in concert venue. And while it works quite conveniently as a tourist trap, it also serves as a portion of Universal Studios that works well for the locals. I had an annual pass to both Universal parks when I first moved here, but after awhile you can only take the same eight rides over and over again, and I didn't renew. But Universal still gets into my pocket now and then I make it a night out at Citywalk (Disney has its own similar creation called "Downtown Disney" complete with a House of Blues).

I arrived for the concert earlier than I should have, so I took a seat at the bar in the Hard Rock Cafe and had dinner while I watched some of the baseball playoffs, and then finally headed into the venue for the show. Afterwards, as I was heading out with the intention of heading home, I glanced at the movie theater and saw that "Serenity" was starting in about five minutes as a midnight showing. I've had enough people tell me that I needed to see this movie, so I thought why not and walked up to the ticket window. The guy's machine wasn't working so he was sending people inside to Guest Relations to buy their tickets. But I get in there and it turns out that none of the machines are working. And in of the best displays of public relations savvy I've seen in awhile, the manager comes over and says "just let them in" without hesitation.

If he'd sent us away, or made us stand there and wait while they fixed the machines are caused us to miss the opening of the movie, I'd have left with a bad taste in my mouth. Instead, this guy turns it into a win, because as we all know, all the money is made from the concession stands anyway. The funny part was that none of us knew which theater we were supposed to go to, because that information is on the ticket itself, and of course we didn't have any. So the poor ticket taker is flipping through a printout telling each of us where to head to. I was the only person he said "sixteen" to, but it didn't quite dawn on me until I walked into the theater that I was literally the only person there. Talk about creepy. You can't help but get the feeling that all time has stopped except for you and the showing of this movie. You laugh at a joke, and your laugh is the only one you hear, echoing off every wall.

When the movie ends I walk out and the upstairs cleaning crew is staring at me incredulously, either because they didn't know anyone was in there, or because they'd never seen just one walk out of a theater before. It was a unique experience, I'll give it that. Only trouble was that the concert left me just a bit hard of hearing, making some of the movie dialogue a bit challenging. But oh well, I didn't pay for it anyway. And getting both a concert and a movie in on the same outing was nice, as the local (two-screen) theater here in town is in a rut at the moment, and Citywalk (or Downtown Disney) is a long drive just for a movie.

Busy concert pace I'm on here, with Our Lady Peace earlier this month, Audioslave this past evening, Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age early next week, Lifehouse late next week, and U2 two weeks after that. You gotta love it.

Where exactly in the living room does the Mac belong?

After a few days of allowing the latest Mac-related announcements to sink in, here's where I'm at:

- So much for the notion that Apple was going to sit on its hands with Mac hardware until the PowerPC is gone. I mean, the new iMac might not be a completely redesigned computer, but it's a completely redesigned definition of a computer. And it's clear now that Apple's grand scheme goes way beyond just the iPod. The iPod may be the portable peripheral for all things media, but the Mac now seems destined to become the stationary peripheral for all things media. Both the Mac and the iPod are just a peripheral for your content now, and it's going to beome increasingly incongruous for someone to own one and not the other, and a whole lot of those millions of Windows-using iPod users are going to be figuring that out rather quickly now. This ought to be fun to watch.

- Am I the only one who scratches his head every time Steve Jobs refers to something "OH-tomatically" happening? Is this some kind of obscure regional dialect that only exists on the street he lives on? I wonder if the people who work directly under Steve ever hesitate to use the word in front of him, for fear of pronouncing it differently than he does. Seriously, has anyone ever heard anyone pronounce the word "automatically" the way Steve does?

- Odd that Jon Rubinstein would choose now to retire. Maybe I'm assuming too much based on hair color, but Rubinstein isn't exactly Fred Anderson here. Fred looked like he was old enough to want to cash out his chips and head for an island paradise, but Rube doesn't look like he's much past forty. What I particularly don't get is that he was moved from running the Mac hardware division to running the new iPod division merely a year ago. You'd think he'd be feeling reinvigorated right about now, not calling it a day. One theory says he asked to be moved to the iPod division because he'd become bored with the Mac, and even working with the iPod couldn't keep him intrigued with the concept of, you know, working. Maybe kinda tough to do when you're a millionaire. Another theory says he was moved to the iPod division, ahem, involuntarily and the move didn't take. As is always with these things, we'll never know until someone writes a book, and then we still won't know.

- As brilliant as the new iMac is, the cancellation of the eMac is every bit as much bizarre. There's now officially nothing that makes sense about the Mac desktop lineup under $1300. Please don't write in. Even if you believe that the Mac mini is god's gift to desktops, you still have to look at the prices of the lineup ($500, $600, $700, $1300) and shake your head and wonder if these price points weren't drawn up on the back of a napkin while everyone was drunk and playing twister. You can talk all you want about add-ons, built-to-order, and what-not, but the bottom line is that Apple doesn't have a desktop machine whose base price comes within $300 of the thousand dollar mark on either side. There's only one price point for consumer desktops that matters, and it's $999, and Apple seems more intent than ever at missing that mark by as wide a margin as possible. It's not that Mac desktops are overpriced or underpriced, they're just mispriced. Getting rid of the eMac made sense if and only if the new iMac launched at $999, and that didn't happen. Thirteen hundred bucks was a great price for the iMac back in 1998, But this isn't 1998, and for some reason the iMac still costs $1300. If that's what it has to cost because the heat from the G5 requires an ultra-expensive internal design for the machine, then so be it, and it all gets worked out in the Intel wash. But you keep the eMac around in the mean time. What's most bizarre of all is that on the Mac laptop side, Apple gets it perfect by pricing the iBook at -- you guessed it -- $999. Again, please don't write in.

- I've read some opinions that as great as the new iMac is, it's missing one critical element: live television. It seems some folks want to be able to replace their television with an iMac. Sounds good in theory, but I'll tell you, there are far too many times where I'm using both the computer and the television, and I don't mean that I'm alternating back and forth, I mean that I'm actively using them both at the same time. Like right now, for instance, as I watch SportsCenter while I type. Having my computer and my television be the same machine would make situations like that awfully...messy. I know Apple could likely come up with some way to make it work intelligently enough, but there ain't no way I wanna be doing what I'm doing at the current moment on a single screen, with TV in a little window as I type of whatever. So for now, I'm happy with the idea that the new iMac is meant to sit next to the television, not in place of it.

So will I be buying a media center iMac for my living room? In a word, no. I've always believed that the computer belongs in the living room -- but its proper location is on the coffee table. In other words, a laptop. I know, I could have both an iBook and an iMac, and use the iBook as my traditional computer and my iMac as my media center, but I really truly do not like having my data and user space spread out across more than one computer. I want to be able to take my entire user experience, fold it up, and walk out the door with it, and that only happens when your laptop is your only computer. All the tricks and treats and syncs and shares and jury-rigs in the world won't change that fact. If you're a desktop user, you can own a laptop but it'll never offer you your full user experience. And if you're a true laptop user, then it has to be your main machine or you're just fooling yourself with the notion of portability. I look forward to a time when a laptop is no longer behind the curve on the technological advancement chart when it comes to new stuff like media center capability. Build all that Front Row stuff into my iBook, with the ability to (occasionally) redirect all that content up onto the screen of my regular television, and I'm on board.

But regardless of just how the whole "true multimedia" experience ends up playing out, we'll get there soon enough one way or the other. Now, more than ever, I'm convinced of that. And after what we saw this past week, it might all be coming sooner than any of us could have ever expected. Don't let its familar looks fool you, the new iMac is the beginning of a whole new age of Macintosh. Now, if we can just get the darned thing down to $999 so the rest of the world will want to join the party.

Is this normal?

My bank is awful. It's also free, so that first part doesn't come as a surprise. I don't want to mention it by name (it rhymes with "Boshington Putual"), but even for a free bank, there are more than a few things that bother me. There are never any tellers working. They've got this bizarre new branch layout where the teller stations are all in a circle, and almost without exception, all stations are unmanned. It's not that there are no employees; there's one person working up front as some kind of WalMart greeter whose sole purpose is to smile at people when the come in, and then when the line gets really long and there are no tellers on the floor, do a lot of apologizing before heading into the back room and asking one of the drive-thru tellers to come over and fill in in place of the tellers who don't exist. And there are always higher-ups who sit at their desks in the corners of the building on the off chance that someone wanders in and needs a loan Right Now, but these folks apparently haven't been shown how to work the teller stations, despite the fact that they're supposedly the higher-ups among the staff. This scenario has held true in every branch of my bank I've been to, regardless of whether it's a busy time of day or not. Five pm on a Friday, and they still have zero tellers on-duty.

Fortunately I rarely have to go inside, which is probably the only reason I've stayed with the bank for as long as I have. But it seems that lately the drive-thru ATM is officially out of order about one out of every four times I try to use it, and when it isn't outright malfunctioning it's either out of receipt paper or out of cash.

But the real kicker is that the bank's website, which once upon a time was rock solid, has become almost as much of a joke as the rest of the overall banking experience. The site goes down for "scheduled maintenance" every single Saturday evening and doesn't come back up until Sunday afternoon at the earliest, sometimes being down all day Sunday. And because this apparently isn't enough time for them to get done whatever they're doing behind the scenes, the site is more and more frequently down randomly during the week. Like everything else about this bank, it gets worse with every passing month.

At some point "free" just gets too costly to be worth it, but I've hesitated to jump ship for fear that I'll end up paying some other bank for service that's just as mind-bogglingly awful. Banks, much like cell phone companies, are one of those industries where nearly everyone hates the company they're dealing with, and only holds off from switching because everyone they know hates the company they're dealing with. And the few folks who actually claim to like the company they're dealing with are either too gullible to know they're getting disserviced or they use the services so rarely that they have yet to get a taste of just how bad it can be.

So I guess my question is this: Is this normal? Are all banks this bad? Of all the unacceptable aspects of my bank, the website being down so often is by far the biggest for me. Just wondering if other banks suck as much as mine does.

Alright, back on topic with the Macintosh

Yeah, so I'm not the typical user. But when I'm surfing the web, I wouldn't even so much as think of clicking on an external link without first taking a peek at where it leads to. It's not that I'm afraid of bad things happening, I just don't like to have my time wasted by being taken to sites I have no interest in. Some Safari users don't even seen to be aware that this is possible, but a quick trip to View -> Show Status Bar will give you the magical little strip of gray across the bottom of the browser that will tell you, with a simple mouse-over, where a link points to.

So here's my question: why don't we have this feature in Mail? In an email, all links are external links, rarely do you have sufficient context to tell you exactly where you're going to be taken, and in this case there is the potential to be taken to places less than safe. Seems it would be easy enough to run the same gray bar (er white, in the case of Mail) across the bottom that tells you where a link is going to take you. It's too much of a pain to copy and paste the link into Safari's browser bar just to see what it is.

On another note, the Safari Status Bar also tells you whether the link is going to open in the same window or pop in a new one. Which is nice, but it's too bad the creators of the HTML spec couldn't have foreseen the advent of tabbed browsing. When I'm halfway through reading a (good) article, the last thing I want to do is abandon the thing before I'm done just so I can go and visit the clever in-text link that the author has planted. But having the link pop open in a new window is so 1999. Sure, holding down the Apple key while clicking the link will force it to open in a new tab (provided you have your Safari prefs set correctly), but that gets old.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dinging Safari for this, as it's certainly not the fault of anyone within Apple. In fact it's no one's fault, really. We're just going to have to wait for HTML 5.0 specification (or whatever it is) to surface, but it had better include a tag for popping a link into a new tab. Of course, with Windows Internet Explorer users still back in 1999, the tag is going to need to default a more traditional behavior for browsers that don't support tabbed browsing. Here's a hint, in case you haven't already figured it out: if you Mac users want your browsing experience on Safari to continue to move forward, encourage all your Windows-using friends to switch to something other than IE.

Alright, that's enough for being on-topic for today, I just wanted to get a feel for what that being on-topic like, as it's been awhile.

Crud, have I let it go that long again? It looks like I have. You know, it's not that I've got writers block per se, it's just that I've got writers block when it comes to the Macintosh universe, and admittedly, I have for awhile, as long-time readers have probably been able to surmise just by visiting. The only way out of writer's block is to just start typing, so here's what's been cooking, relevant or not:

Funny thing about being self-employed. During the past few months I've had a seemingly inordinate number of people (family, friends) suggest that I replace my aging car. It's not in bad shape at all, it's just that it's about six years old and the conventional wisdom is that a car only has a certain number of miles left in it at that point, and you want to ditch the car before you reach that limit. But the thing is that I don't drive. Sure, the store or the bank, or out somewhere on a weekend. But that daily commute, large or small, that invariably exists in every driver's life? Not in mine. It's the daily commute that kills a car, and lacking that, my car ought to last just about forever. I could buy a new car just so it would look nice sitting in the driveway day after day, but that seems a bit excessive.

In fact, one of the many things that has enamored me to the idea of living in a place like New York City (in the summertime, at least) is that you don't need a car at all. It's not that I don't enjoy driving. It's the traffic jams and the slow drivers who cause them. If you're going to get behind the wheel of a vehicle that is capable of going sixty or more miles per hour and you're going to get pinned in by idiots who force you to go no faster than walking speed, then you might as well walk, eh? And of course, you've got to love the fact that no matter how busy the subway is, having more passengers on board doesn't cause the trains to go slower.

Anyway, I'd really have to think about it more before packing up and heading to the city or anywhere else for that matter. But again, what's different for me is that I can more or less do what I do from just about anywhere. Most folks, when they think of relocating, the single biggest factor is their job. It's either forcing them to move when they don't want to, keeping them from moving when they do want to, or playing into the decision one way or the other. That's not an issue for me. What is kind of nice, though, is that with nothing to do around here (the amusement parks don't count after the hundredth time), there's nothing to get distracted by. But on the other hand, all work and no play is no way to play the game either.

I recall a conversation a had with a friend a few years back about how the internet could conceivably cause a diffusion of city dwellers into more rural locales under the theory that, with the internet, employees could theoretically work from anywhere instead of living in the city just to show up every day for the cubicle routine. I haven't seen any data as to whether this might actually be happening, and it's a bit early in the life of the internet for such a pattern to emerge yet anyway. But for me at least, the rise of the internet is pushing me in the other direection. Sure, I can do what I do from the middle of nowhere. But half of what I do is a media entity, and the other half is tied into the media from the other side, and the idea of running it all from the media capital of the world is quite enticing, almost irresistible.

But then there's that cold weather thing. It may not even make sense to someone who lives up north, but when you grow up in Florida, you're very much instilled with the idea that life is meant to be fully enjoyed twelve months out of the year, not four. In other words, if it's so cold outside that you have to put on a heavy coat just to avoid being physically injured by the lack of heat, then something is deeply wrong. Could I make the transition to a region in which you spend half of each year having every day of your life severely impacted by what I consider uninhabitable weather? Maybe. But the question is, do I want to? Seems like friends I've grown up with here in Florida who move up north, end up moving back. And none of them hate the cold as much as I do.

Seems like the ideal way to do it would be to spend half the year up there and the other half down here, which would be a bit surreal, but at this point there isn't much about my life that isn't surreal. On the other hand, when I worked at a condo when I was young, I got to see first-hand what people go through when they own residences that are empty for half the year. And short of owning residences in both places, there would always be the uncertainty of "I've got six months to figure out where I'm going to live the next time" hanging over my head.

I don't know, though. Living in the media capital of the world, I believe, would be beneficial to both of my business ventures. As with all things, I just have to figure out if it's worth it. In any case, at the moment we're heading into the colder part of the year, so I guess I've got some time to think about it.