daveb: apple

what was lost is found · Oct 31, 08:39 am

i arrived in new york on sunday night, excited, harried, without any luggage.

our first flight of the day was delayed for almost an hour, so i was nervous about making our connection. we flew from edmonton to minneapolis in great time, so we were only half an hour late. when we got off the plane and looked at the screens to find out where to dash, so we could make our connection. we found out our flight from minneapolis to new york was cancelled.

we waited at the ticketing desk for a while trying to get another flight. our options were to spend the night in minneapolis, and fly out the next day (and miss our first day of training) – or take one guaranteed ticket, and one standby.

we took the risk and ended up on the plane. i sat next to rod – who told me about his sons, showed me pictures from his digital camera, described each of his brothers in detail, and talked up the horse he had when he was a kid. rod was also mad for sudoku, and seems to have a drug-addict fidgit when he couldn’t find one on the plane. i really felt for him – sudoku-less…

when we got off the plane we discovered that – of course – our luggage didn’t make the last minute hop to our plane.

we stopped in at the luggage reclaimation center – likely the most forlorn place in the world. everyone is angry, confused, and not-too-fresh-smelling.

the very kind people in the booth had no idea where our luggage was. they assured us that it should have arrived with us on our flight. the fact that our luggage was not on the flight made me suspect of their assurances.

we ended up at the hotel with nothing other than our laptops. and the free toothbrushes we got from the hotel desk.

the first day of training was a little rough, we were not as fresh as we could be – personal care was not high – as we had nothing but toothbrushes to groom ourselves with in the morning. i actually thought through how i might wrangle my hair with a toothbrush, but couldn’t make it go.

we went out the first night and purchased a few essentials, t-shirts etc. when we got back to the hotel there was still nothing.

at midnight – in desperation – i made a final check, and our bags had not only arrived, but a bellhop carried them up to our room – to my great delight, and likely the approval of my fellow trainees. i had clean underwear for the morning! and personal hygene products.

today has been a much better day.

on with the reddot.

Categories: apple / personal | comments?

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this is where i am. · Oct 30, 06:24 am

this is home for the next week.

i’m training – just about a block from ‘trinity church’ at the bottom of that illustration.

out the front window – lady liberty. out the back window – freedom square. on the way to work – great sounds and sights.

Categories: apple / | comments? [1]

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macintosh bother · Jun 29, 02:50 pm

Sad Mac

after my most recent software update (10.4.7) my macbook pro has taken a turn for the worse. now it will not load most of my apps.

quickbooks (my invoicing app) will load, but i can’t print invoices.

none of my macromedia applications will load.

none of my adobe products will load.

looks like i’m doing a full restore this evening.

oh bother.

UPDATE: after reinstalling adobe / macromedia apps several times and SIX permission repairs i’m able to run software again.

Categories: apple / web | comments?

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marklar comes true · Jun 6, 07:35 pm

steve jobs announced today that all apple computers will use the intel chip by 2006.

for the past 5 years every copy of OS X has compiled to run on both powerpc and intel chips. Jobs says developing apps to run on Intel Macs is easy…there’s a checkbox in the developer tools that “makes a cross-platform single binary”. Demo of Mathematica running on an Intel Mac from a guy from Wolfram…it only took them two days to port it to Intel.

here’s the press release

kottke.org’s reporting of the same event

some screenshots of the apple homepage over the past few years

macrumours predicts this shift in august 2002

Categories: apple / |

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Tiger - for better or worse? · May 10, 09:23 am

definately better.

i installed tiger a few days ago, and so far i love it. it’s $129 to ‘upgrade’ but i’ve never bought an upgrade i enjoyed more.

a few favorites:

the search. best implementation i’ve ever experienced. fast, powerful – gives me all the information i’m looking for. took a while to index on first install, but i do have 100,000 items on my computer for it to look through and categorize. if i type “paul bellows” it brings up my brother’s contact info, any emails sent to him, any word docs that include his name, and the URL to his website.
dictionary – fully integrated dictionary based on The New Oxford American Dictionary (great if you speak English). if you ctrl+click on anything with dictionary enabled (Mail, Safari, TextEdit) you can look up a word in the dictionary. if you select a word and hold down ctrl+apple+D you get a contextual dictionary menu popping up. if you keep ctrl+apple pressed you can move your mouse around to other words for a definition.
widgets – they seem alright at first, i don’t think i’d use any of the prebuilt ones, but custom widgets! that’s where the money is. as soon as ebay creates one to track and monitor your sales, and FedEx creates one to monitor your packages they’ll become a whole lot more productive.
mail – i read and send a lot of email during my day. right now i’m using outlook 2003 for the peecee at work, and mail at home. the integration and feel of this app far surpasses outlook 2003, and the speed is quite considerably better.

a few bugs:

i think tiger eats my battery. paul mentioned i said “it makes my battery slower” which i’m not sure i quite understand. but i know my battery management is not as good as it was.
external displays – whenever i plug in an external display my Bluetooth Mouse Connection Wizard pops up. a quick thing to close, but uh … weird.
hungry. an upgrade install of tiger ate my friend gregg’s imac. he had to send his data to his lifeboat/ipod until he could get hardware rectified. but i’m hoping that’s not common.

see all 200 new features

Categories: apple / code | comments?

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