Apple
Today is a good day
New PowerBooks are out. Must wet pants with joy. They all look good, but I’m leaning slightly toward a 15” model with an 80GB disk and 1GB of RAM; not sure I’m ready for a 17” boat anchor.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was definitely not a good day. For some time now, I’ve been installing Panther betas on my iBook with the Archive & Install option, which preserves almost all of my applications and customizations while completely replacing the OS. I’ve always backed up my home directory first, but haven’t bothered with an extra full backup. Cuts the total upgrade time down to about an hour, most of which is spent watching the disks spin.
On another day, I’d consider including a comparison to my last Windows upgrade horror story. Unfortunately, things went terribly wrong this time. Twelve hours later, my iBook is almost back to normal.
iTMS weekly reports
No, I didn’t buy another big batch of music from the iTunes Music Store yet, although I probably will soon, to stock up the iPod for my next road trip to Las Vegas. I have been keeping an eye on the store, though, and after corresponding with Brian Tiemann, I decided to investigate an oddity we’d both noticed: the week-by-week “Just Added” report ain’t no such thing.
I love this kind of bug...
People often wonder what sysadmins do for a living. It’s a mostly-invisible profession, where you’re only noticed when things aren’t working. Mostly we solve problems, but often we first have to figure out what the problem really is.
I don’t want to know how long it took someone to get from “my password doesn’t work” to this:
If you used Open Firmware Password utility to create a password that contains the capital letter "U", your password will not be recognized during the startup process (when you try to access Startup Manager, for example).
Note that it applies to Mac models going back several years, but wasn’t posted on the support site until this week. No doubt there’s a small pile of bug reports that have been sitting around for all this time, with their status field set to “WTF?”.
More from the iTunes Music Store
The only thing that keeps me from spending even more money than I already have at iTMS is the limited selection. Broad but not deep, that is. Some recent artists that I like aren’t listed at all, while some old favorites have just a fraction of their catalog online. And then there are the ones who were never on a major label, or who have renounced their sinful past (warning: the Flash in this site ground my browser into the dust).
Anyway, here’s what I’ve bought recently.
Online music done right
Just for amusement, a list of the albums and songs I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store since it went online.
Complete albums:
- A Wonderful World, Tony Bennett & k.d. lang
- Jazz Cello, Ray Brown
- The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, Ray Charles
- In Blue, The Corrs
- Count Basie's Finest Hour, Count Basie
- Getz for Lovers, Stan Getz
- Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, Stan Getz
- Best of Al Jarreau, Al Jarreau
- B.B. King: Anthology, B.B. King
- Late at Night with Dean Martin, Dean Martin
- The Best of the Moody Blues, The Moody Blues
- Confirmation: The Best of the Verve Years, Charlie Parker
- Blues Etude, Oscar Peterson
- Tracks, Oscar Peterson
- We Get Requests, Oscar Peterson Trio
- With Respect to Nat, Oscar Peterson Trio
- Oscar Peterson: Stéphane Grappelli Quartet, Vol. 1, Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli
- Liz Phair, Liz Phair
- The Dynamic Duo, Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery
- Great American Marches I, John Philip Sousa
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Trevor Jones & The London Symphony Orchestra
Individual Songs:
- You've Made Me so Very Happy, Blood, Sweat & Tears
- Do You Wanna Hold Me?, Bow Wow Wow
- Takin' It to the Streets, The Doobie Brothers
- What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers
- Radar Love, Golden Earring
- The Day Basketball Was Saved, Jackson 5
- I Think It's Love, Jermaine Jackson
- Laura, Billy Joel
- Beth, Kiss
- Detroit Rock City, Kiss
- King of the Night Time World, Kiss
- Shout It Out Loud, Kiss
- Head to Toe, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam
- Insanity, Liz Phair
- Don't Stand so Close to Me, The Police
- Every Morning, Sugar Ray
- Macho Man, Village People
Sometimes it's not the network
My job was Unix support for Corporate Services, which basically referred to everything in the company that wasn’t related to developing, selling, or training customers how to use our products. In practice, though, it usually just meant MIS, because HR and Legal were composed entirely of Mac people, who had their own support team.
The oddest exception started one day when an HR manager asked me to help him set up a beta-test of a Lotus Notes-based applicant tracking system. The application was being developed on OS/2 servers and PC clients, but we wanted to test it with a SunOS server and Mac clients, since that’s what we had.
Why I'm not a Switcher
I own two Windows machines that I rarely turn on any more. Even at work, the only thing I use Windows for is handling expense reports and accepting meeting invitations. I own two Macintoshes and an iPod (well, two, but only ’til I find a home for the old 10GB model), and I’ll almost certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 later this year.
I spend most of my time using Macs these days, but I insist that I am not a Switcher. Why not? Because the Switch ads aren’t about technology; they’re about validation. For years, Mac users have been the whipping-boy of the mainstream computing world, and they’ve responded with a “cold, dead hands” attitude and a cultlike devotion to all things Apple. The Switch ads play up to that.
