Category Archives: Geekery

Geekery

BREAKING: Possible iSlate Release Date Confirmed?

Posted on by

I’ve been helping my super awesome cousin Carrie with some drama she has had with her laptop.  It has been having adventures and I’ve been trying to help and she has also been in contact with Apple to try and fix it.  While she was speaking with a rep over the phone, she got some interesting info:

Carrie:   Just talked to a lady at apple! She told me the tablets are launching the first week of February!

Eli:   Yay for your laptop! And did she really?

C:   Yeah. My laptop died again, it needs new ram. That lady just made me so excited. I’m bouncing.

E:   Lol. I’m really hoping that it will be good stuff

C:   She said it definitely is.
There hasn’t been that much excitement there in years. She’s been working there for 15 years or something like that.

As with all rumors and speculation surrounding Apple product releases, this could be any number of things.  It could be one of the infamous fabricated leaks which Cupertino loves to put out there, maybe they are using their customer support to spread stuff at random?  It could be some mis-information to throw us all off track, or a service representative who is just playing around.  But I think (and hope in my heart of hearts) that this is actually just the pure enthusiasm and honesty of one Apple fan in the know sharing it with other Apple fans.

I guess we will all see next Wednesday.

Additional iSlate Commentary…

Posted on by

Oh Penny Arcade, how I love thee. The most recent comic is an excellent depiction of Apple fanboyism and the Apple media coverage regarding the as yet unannounced, and quite possibly non-existent iSlate/iPad/iTablet. It does indeed cause people to froth at the mouth with desperate gadget lust. The fantsy renderings and supposition surrounding the fabled device is technoporn at it’s finest.

In the Beginning

Posted on by

I think I was early to the scene as far as reading and hunting for blogs went.  I started back in around 2002-ish and was addicted.  I remember my mom rolling her eyes at me whenever I would start to talk about my “Internet people”.  I guess to her it seemed like being a blogger meant living your life in a fishbowl. I saw it as something else.  In just the same way my siblings and I were told as kids to shut the blinds at night “Because we don’t live in a fishbowl!” bloggers have that same ability. They get to choose when they open the blinds and what they are going to show you inside.

The ability to be reading the thoughts and experiences and day-to-day narratives from regular people out there in the world with such diversity and a dash of bravery for sharing basically melted my brain.  I was hooked.  It was a liberating moment to find ridiculously creative people out there with wit and humor to boot!  And though these voices I kept coming across were older than I was, I felt connected.  I felt like I had found a tiny niche of my own in a world which was hurtling through so much conflict and confusion.

I remember my first recipe site which I was totally just tickled pink with.   Bitchen Kitchen just made my day with its playful colors and retro-influenced design.   It would still look quite snappy if it had survived past late 2005/early 2006.   I going through some crap at the time so I lost track of it and when I remembered it just this last year, it was dead and gone.  Apparently a victim of one of the less awesome parts of the web: the vanishing.  Domains can expire, interest and resources can wane, time moves on and things vanish.

mp3.com.  I found some of my first indie music there, which I loved, by The Secret Band.  The album was called “Special Little Devil” and I downloaded the four tracks that I liked the best with the hope of buying the CD eventually.  mp3.com was purchased by CNET and the catalog was dumped unceremoniously and I couldn’t locate any of their work again.  The Velvet Teen emerged from that group and I contacted a band member for details on where I could get a copy of their earlier work but he said he wasn’t sure they still had it.  My favorite song of theirs, Rivena, has a great sound to it and somehow over the years it was corrupted in the shuffle between computers and is now truncated awkwardly.

I also remember, quite fondly, Beth from Crazy Us and her stories about her sons Kyle and Eli.  I’m dying because I had printed out a short story she posted once regarding a conversation she had with her kids over breakfast which I may have lost in my last move.  The whole thing was just ridiculously amazing, but my two favorite lines which I think I have down to memory verbatim go: “I am a bunny rabbit!  A poisonous bunny rabbit.  I will poisonous you! Hisss!” and “We play animal friends simply every day!”  It was at that point that the concept of having children, which had been totally icky, gross and foreign to me suddenly popped into focus as something I may be interested in doing.  That was a landmark moment for me.

Crazy Us has popped in and out of existence since then.  It wasn’t a daily read for me but I checked it frequently enough to kindof put together that Beth had difficulty dealing with some of the feedback and criticism she would get from visitors to her site.  This particular issue has actually been always there in my mine.  There are the dooce’s of this world who have gone so far as to monetize negativity, but that takes a LOT of energy and a lot of patience and a lot of self-confidence. Then there are really awesome people like Beth who get worn down by it and I don’t blame her one tiny little bit.  I’ve always wondered how I would fare in the same situation.

I guess the moral to this story is that the internet is very much a living, breathing thing in its own way.  It evolves and grows and things are lost in the shuffle.  It’s a double edged sword.  The amazing ease with which content can be shared and people can connect with one another also lends itself to the rather quick loss of that same information if not actively maintained.  I think that is why I love physically published media.  It doesn’t go anywhere for the most part.  It’s a lot harder to delete and repurpose the constituent parts of a book or photo album or a handful of letters than it is to delete a website or flickr profile or email to free up space.  That being said, I love the power of the internet as it enables me to share what I can, unless you know of a publisher who is just dying to deal with me and publish my crap incrementally!

A Matter of Speed

Posted on by

This is a long geek post.  Just a warning up front for those of you who are busy or just not that into the geekiness!

I’m reaching a point where I’m no longer able to look the other way when it comes to my primary computer’s performance.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook, in spite of the fact that it no longer functions without being plugged in and the fact that a small part of the wrist rest has chipped off.  I have one of the first generation black MacBooks with a Core Duo processor.  Not Core 2 Duo, the other one.  After three years it seems that even my routine 12-18 month computer colonics, where I just wipe everything clean and start from scratch, aren’t cutting it.

I think this situation has a lot to do with my iPhone 3GS as it so happens.  It’s fast.  Very fast.  It switches and flips between functions amazingly well.  I can go for weeks without rebooting it and the only time I generally run into errors are with early builds of independent applications which I download from the App Store.  I seriously adore my iPhone and it has become in many ways my primary computing device.  However, this speed has caused me to become impatient with my laptop.  It just isn’t quite fast enough.  I must also concede that small part of the problem also has to do with my Internet provider, but even after careful consideration, even Qwest’s hideously lacking service doesn’t quite explain what is going on here.

I need something which just works and moves faster.  But that isn’t my only issue.  I’m now faced with a moment where I have to take a long, hard look at the form factor of the machine I’m using.  I’ve long been a one-machine household.  I’ve had my MacBook and that is it.  I like the simplicity of this concept.  My computer is just that, a computer.  It’s not some fixture or installation which is stuck there at all times.  I’m not on my computer all the time, so it’s nice to be able to tuck it in a drawer when not in use.  That appeals to the minimalist in me.  As much as I love technology, I think that it should be easily tucked away and function seamlessly with the act of living.

That being said, I would love to have a larger, more vibrant, and much more accurate display to work with my photos.  It’s painful to me to be stuck with inconsistent output from my printer when printing photos as a result of the limited color gamut and accuracy of what is presented on-screen.  A nice iMac would be delightful, but at the same time, I think I’m the only one to complain that they are now only available in gargantuan and megamonster sizes.

A new MacBook pro would be nice, but the 13-inch screen is too limiting, though I could just get a larger external display.  I would also love a MacBook Air to be able to have an even more slight and effortless mobile computing experience.  I don’t need a ton of features, but it is lacking in the processor department which is my current beef with my computer now and would seal the need for a more powerful primary computer.

I’ve enjoyed the one-machine simplicity and I find that the concept of having multiple machines brings in the need for a NAS solution and thus far I’m hard-pressed to find one which really moves me, especially now that the Time Capsule from Apple seems to be emo and can die in sort of data-backup roulette at 18 months for unlucky winners.  I’ve been using a very simple machine in my living room for backups as well as Netflix duty, but it’s lone tiny Celeron processor doesn’t like to play nice all the time and is prone to gagging and sputtering.  At the same time, I really don’t want to invest much in that machine as I don’t want it to be more than a simple dummy box.  I don’t like the idea of using some set-top product not it not playing nice with any particular online outlet.

If money were not an issue, I would be able to very simply solve this problem, even if the solution weren’t as elegant as I would prefer.  I would have a MacBook Air for general puttering around the house and writing and stuff, a new 21-inch iMac in the office for heavy lifting and photo editing, and a Mac mini server in the living room for backups and streaming media.  But that seems to make it all much more complex and I’m not a fan of that.  It’s hard to balance the minimalist and the ubergeek inside of me.

Not to mention that as much as I would love to save my pennies and get a new Mac, I would love new furniture as well.  Oh and some new clothes.  Or a new lens for my camera.  Or a million other things I would just love to have.  It’s all so complex and muddled.  Anyhow, that is my awful, long, imposing, over-the-top geek dialog on new computers.  I don’t see why they can’t just magically be fast and amazing forever.  Thats not that much to ask for!