Author: Owen

Back in Business

This Monday morning, I started up my laptop to check the weather report like usual. Although it booted, it quickly crashed. I tried again, and it froze again. I tried memtest86, and that froze too. And so began My Time Without Half My Brain. Something in my thinkpad’s motherboard fried so I had to send it in to IBM to get repaired. Although they assured me the average turnaround is 5-7 days, I knew from experience that, with shipping time, this would be more like two weeks.

This really sucked because after 6 straight weeks of finishing shows and this week being my last, 20th show of the year, I was planning to take much-needed next week off and do some hacking on the OLPC version of PenguinTV. Without my laptop it would be next to impossible to find another linux machine and get it to the point where I’d feed productive on it.

On Tuesday, I got the ez-ship box from DHL and shipped off the poor little laptop Taking care, of course, to remove my not-officially-supported-harddrive with not-officially-supported-OS and insert my original-low-capacity harddrive for them to reimage. DHL: you rock for calling ahead and confirming my address which IBM had wrong.

With my minidock naked and empty, I salvaged some tomboy notes and bookmarks from my backup drive and uploaded them to a VMWare Fusion instance on the mac on my desk By the way, VMWare Fusion is totally awesome and I recommend it highly. I had a fully-functional Ubuntu desktop in the time it takes to download the pre-made image. You can even drag and drop files from the host OS to the guest OS desktop!. This gave me a workable solution for checking email and such, but I still felt slow and stupid without my various array of calendars, bookmarks, and email archives.

Today, I was presented with a package from DHL. My laptop is completely fixed and working again. This is the fastest turnaround time I’ve ever experienced for a laptop repair, and after popping back in my own harddrive everything is just as I left it. And because I got a three-year warranty, it was free.

Now, my hacking plans for next week are back on, and even better I also got an email that I’ve been accepted into the Nokia n810 developer program, so I’m soon going to have two separate mobile platforms for which to develop PenguinTV.

IBM / lenovo / whoever it was: you rock. I’m sorry I ever thought about getting my next laptop from HP.

iphone analogies

Mark Pilgrim has written a now-dugg post on the iphone, and how people should learn to stop buying products from Apple in the hopes that they will get a clue and truly open them up.

Although the blog post is nice, I prefer the simplicity of his delicious comment:
“Doctor, it hurts when I buy Apple products.”

The punchline, for those that don’t recognize the joke: “Then don’t do that.”

Or take the digg comments when Steve Jobs took X+200$ from people for an iphone, then gave them 100$ back so they can spend it at the Apple store. Commenters were falling over themselves praising Apple for doing the right thing, even though customers have still spent X+200$ at Apple, and the only thing Apple loses is the equivalent of a few months iphone subscription revenue. My response: “Thank you sir may I have another!”

Similarly, I often describe buying a Mac as a deal with the devil. You get the best-available computing experience money can buy, but you’ll have to put up with Steven P. Jobs’ odd whims — some of which cost money18-month 129$ charges for OS upgrades, plus money for simple utilities that should be free, others of which just make you mad“Why do I have to buy the expensive laptop to get it in black?”, some of which screw you over“you mean this device that worked with my ipod two days ago doesn’t work now because it doesn’t have a chip from apple?”.

But I think the most apt analogy for Apple and its users is the abusive relationship. Apple will slap you around and beat you up, but it’ll always come back with a bouquet of flowers and promise that this time things’ll be different.

Update:

Now apparently Apple is saying “I’ll buy you a bouquet of flowers, and you can choose the flowers, but only if I think they go with the drapes.”

Wolf Blitzer’s journalistic integrity

In the recent much-linked interview with Michael Moore, Moore mentions that he can’t imagine what pharmaceutical company will be sponsoring the next commercial. Blitzer responds:

In fairness we’ve got a lot of commercials for Sicko that we’ve been running on CNN as well, so, uh, we have commercials. This is a business, obviously.

That struck me as an odd argument. I was expecting something more along the lines of “at CNN we have strict separation between our ad sales division and our news division, so the commercials we run have no impact on the stories we cover.” But he didn’t say anything like that. Is Blitzer tacitly acknowledging that CNN changes its news based on who the sponsors are?

Avid Symphony Nitris – hope you like progress bars

It’s one thing putting up with Avid because of their kludgy made-it-up-as-they-went interface. I’ll grant that video editors are not particularly technical people, so the cost of modernizing the UI wouldn’t be worth the retraining costs.

But if we pay 90,000$ for the best Avid editing station, which includes 4,000$ for a quad-core Xeon workstation, it should bloody well use more than one processor at once when rendering effects:

If your code is so old and krufty that you can’t support multiple processors for something as simple as effects or video encoding, it’s time for a rewrite.

a window on another world

“Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.”

The New York Times, 6/18/07.

The great thing about the Times is, even when their articles are hopelessly behind the curve (you mean you can reserve a table OVER THE INTERNET???!!), there are sometimes little nuggets of gold on the inside. The best of these come in the form of revelations about how “the other 1%” ((My dad coined used this phrase while we were biking this weekend in Weston, MA. I like it.)) live. In this case, we learn about a man who is so rich, his restaurants help make sure his wife doesn’t find out about his regular infidelities. I’m lucky if the person at the Qdoba realizes I’ve been ordering the same thing once a week for two years!

I haven’t had this much fun learning about rich people since the Escapes article in which one fellow has a summer house in Phoenix that he keeps permanently air-conditioned so it would be cool if he decides to visit.