I was wondering why I still haven’t got the return box for my iPod. Since I’m what you might call “experienced” when it comes to returning iPods, I know how long these boxes usually take, and 6 days is too long. So I called AppleCare.
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Somebody posted on Slashdot asking what was your worst development job experience. Well, I have so many that I decided that it was probably best if I did it as a series.
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Last night one of the few semi-non-political jokes stemmed from how Clinton lied about sex, and how that led to a frank discussion in bedrooms across the country about what wasn’t or was adultery. “My wife told me in no uncertain terms that oral sex *is* adultery. Which I guess is why we haven’t had any since we got married.”
Went to see Al Franken last night. Sure, if you’d read his “Lies and the Lying Liars” book and seen his interview on the Daily Show the other day, there wouldn’t have been all that much new material, but man it felt good. It’s good to allow yourself to think, if even for an evening, that there are a few thousand people in your own city who are as mad about the Bush administration as you are, and (being citizens and voters) are in a better situation than you to do something about it. Hey, all I can do is give money to candidates and organizations like moveon.org and the ACLU, and give moral support to guys like Al Franken, and so that is exactly what I do.
Tomorrow I’m going to set up AudioHijack on the G4 to capture his new radio show to disk. If and when I have a working iPod, I can load the previous days show and listen to it at work.
Ok, it’s time for one of my world-famous quick quizes.
Suppose you are in the business of selling computers with Linux and other free operating systems on them, and you just posted an announcement to comp.os.linux.announce about your latest deal. Somebody emails you to tell you that you spelt the URL wrong in the announcement, and not only that on the very front page of your site you’ve used the word “suit” several times when referring to OpenOffice.org when you really meant “suite”. Do you:
If you chose the latter, then there might be a (very short) future for you in retail sales.
To quote in full the response I got: “I don’t mind your criticizing that way. It shows you are only just THOSE kind person!”
I think “I am only just THOSE kind person” will become my new catchphrase.
So much for Rants and Revelations: And some ever better news about the iPod. Last night, with the iPod down to only 3 out of 4 bars showing on the battery charge meter, I tried several times and found I had about a 1 in 5 chance of actually turning it back on after an auto-shutoff. And sometimes when I did the menu+play hard reset, it would take forever to come back up again.
Strangely enough, it seems to work great while it’s plugged in. Since 90% of the time I do have it plugged in at work, I’d be tempted to just forget it and say this is as good as it’s going to get, except I had over a year of an iPod that worked right, so this one is too damn annoying.
Boston.com / News / Politics / Money / Bush-Cheney ‘04 gear reads ‘Made in Burma’
How can one item so perfectly encapsulate Bush-Cheney’s attitude towards American workers, sanctions, and human rights?
“Rumsfeld was saying, we need to bomb Iraq, and we were all saying no, no, al Queda is in Afganistan, we need to bomb Afganistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afganistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq”
- Richard Clark on the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
I’m sure you’re all absolutely fascinated by this, but it appears that the problem is definitely fixed, and, more importantly, I’ve probably got a fresh battery in the new iPod. After nearly 9.5 hours of use (10 hours minus the time it was off for lunch time), I turned it off for 20 minutes, then turned it back on again and it came alive! Woo hoo!
And hopefull that will be the last iPod update I’ll have to post for a while.
In our second last installment, I discovered that my new iPod has a problem that if you play it on battery for 3-4 hours and then pause it long enough for it to turn itself off, it wouldn’t come back on without a full hard reset/reboot. Which is a drag because you lose your place in the playlist you were listening to.
That problem might actually be fixed!
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Remember how in Rants and Revelations: My iPod is dead… I mentioned how I had to call Apple Care because their stupid web site wouldn’t accept my serial number? Well, either because I actually talked to somebody or because Apple are a bunch of theiving low-lives, I got an invoice today for $49 for a one day Apple Care.
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There are a lot of things to like about Apple. They make the coolest, sexiest hardware on the planet, especially their laptops and iPods. They did Unix right in a way that 100,000 Linux geeks never managed to do. They put together a suite of applications that make some of the stuff that people want to do with computers dead easy - while purposely making them limited and unpowerful enough to keep the door open for third party products that do the same things only better. When their hardware works, it works perfectly.
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Ok, my cell phone sucks. And it got worse when I ill-advisedly bought a fancy painted cover for it, which involved taking the guts out of the existing cover and putting them in the new one.
So getting little drop-outs during calls is nothing new. Unfortunately during the call I got a few seconds ago, from a cell phone in Maryland, it happened just when the caller said who it was. The voice was a little familiar, and when he asked if I’ve been flying recently I guessed he’s probably from the Piper mailing list. But since he’d called to ask about his problems with Windows 98, I couldn’t really help. I don’t know that much about Windows, and I’d sort of like to keep it that way.
I love night flying. I hate winter flying. Last night, I did both at once.
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I got my iPod back from Apple service. And it has a different serial number, which means they replaced it rather than fixing it. (Too bad they didn’t replace it with a 3rd Generation iPod.) I’m almost sure than this means I have a fresh zero-time battery - unless they’re hauling them out of returns to save money.
