Category: Rant

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.
Continue reading “Why Apple is going to go out of business”

After all the worrying I did about the meeting that I posted about in Ominous…, it turns out that the meeting was called to address some whinging about the company bonus.
Continue reading “Well, that was an hour I’ll never have again…”

Thanks to my experience at GeoVision, I get more than a little bit scared when a secretary comes around to personally hand out meeting notices to a “Group Discussion”, and checks your name off on a list when she gives you your invitation. Especially when you work for a shrinking company in a lousy economy.
Continue reading “Ominous…”

I was walking through a shopping mall with my new Great Big Sea CD in my
hand and an old Great Big Sea CD playing on my iPod. As it changed from
one song to another, the song didn’t start. I pulled it out of my pocket
and looked, and the display seemed frozen – it wouldn’t react to any of
the buttons. So I did a full reset, and got the icon showing a folder
with an exclamation point. So I did another full reset – and this time I
got an icon showing a disk and a magnifying glass, and then a while later
I got the “sad ipod” icon.

While messing around to see if I could fix it, I noticed some strange
noises while it was booting. And afterwards I was trying to take it take
it out of the Marware case it lives in and something is rattling around
inside it.

This is so strange – you’d expect rattly noises if I’d dropped it and it
immediately stopped working, but I’d been listening to it.

Oh, and just to make sure this day is perfect, the Apple web site where you order a repair tells me that I’m giving an invalid serial number, so I can’t even have the privilege of paying $260 to fix it.