Too Smart

Not sure what happened there, folks. Went away for a while. Got very, very busy at work, and ended up coming home and working yet still more. It wasn’t a fun absence, I promise you.

Since then, however, something interesting has happened - I’ve begun to write columns for a website that collects information about Macs. It’s called Low End Mac and lives at www.lowendmac.com.

My column is called Macs in the Enterprise, and my first appeared last Wednesday, here.

Needless to say, I’m stoked. I’ve read the website for nearly a decade, since they first went live, and have used it as a resource in rebuilding Macs, and deciding which ones are worth saving and which can head to the recycling center. Never mind that I get paid for writing (not a great deal, but I would have done it for free), I’m just excited to have a seat at the table.

So, expect to see periodic links to new articles as they go live. Even if you’re not technical, I’d love to have you pop over and read them, and let me know what you think.

Given that I don’t have the qualifications, currently, to be a University professor, I guess I’ll just have to look for more interesting work. Anyone want to give me a job? Something fun, but challenging, and hopefully with a reasonable pay rate.

I wonder just what it takes, really, to teach at the University level. I’m not sure just what I’d want to teach…whether it be computers or history is hard to say for sure. But I suspect a Masters’ is the first step.

Okay, one of the companies involved is in Japan, but the other one looks utterly western. Surely one of them ran the name through their public relations people?

Aciphex, a drug from Eisai Inc. and Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a heartburn and acid reflux medicine. On paper, it looks fine. But they keep running ads for this on television, and you pronounce "aciphex" as "ass effects" which immediately makes one think that, rather than an antacid, this is an anti-gas medicine. Am I right?

As a follow-up to my rant about the Macbook Air, let me throw out an example.

My boss’s boss recently decided that she wanted to try out our demo model Thinkpad X41 convertible tablet PC. My boss set her up with the base unit and got her started, using both keyboard and tablet features. She adores this little notebook, and will not give it back, much as our Superintendent did when he tried out the same model. People love how lightweight it is, how portable and how easy to use in meetings. What she does not realize is that my boss did not give her the base station that goes with it. She’s missing an optical drive, additional ports and the like, and she doesn’t even care.

My boss, on the other hand, found that he could not use the tablet features. No computer could be made to read his handwriting. So he got into a small (and I mean small) Fujitsu notebook to use for note taking and presentations - as befits a man on his way to CIO status. When he needs to do some real crunching of numbers, he goes back to his desk and uses a full-power desktop to do so.

So, if you, like me, are a huge Mac fan, then the MBA could fill the same role - either you’re not a power user, and the MBA will do nicely for everything that you need it for (Office suite, browsing, etc), or you are a power user, and you have a 24" iMac or a Mac Pro on your desk for everything else.

When we went into the Apple store last, they finally had their demo models of the Macbook Air out for everyone to play with. The wife was immediately intrigued, until I told her all the things that weren’t included for the 150% pricetag over the Macbooks we both owned. She was immediately sobered and decided that she didn’t want one after all.

And that was a good decision for her. She has no desire to keep, in addition to her laptop, a full-power desktop. And that’s where the Macbook Air finds it’s best niche - the power user that also wants some portability.

Every review is quick to point out what’s missing from the Macbook Air (MBA from here on out):

• It has no optical drive. So you can’t watch DVDs on it, and you can’t rip CDs on it, and you can’t install software that’s on CD or DVD on it, without some help.
  • Apple is in the business of letting people rent and/or buy video content from the iTunes Music Store, so they’re not exactly bummed about the notion. Not to mention, many people are ripping their DVDs into QuickTime to watch them on their iPods as it is, so doing the same for an MBA is not that far out of line. You can, if you feel the need, purchase an external DVD-RW unit for $99 to allow you to do all of these things when you have it plugged in.
  • That said, you can also use Remote Disc to access a CD or DVD drive on another computer on your network, Mac or PC, when the need arises.
• It has no built in Ethernet jack. So you can’t plug it into the network. You absolutely must use WiFi if you intend to be on a network.
  • Very few people in the MBA target audience lack for wireless network access. They have it in their homes, in their places of work, and in nearly every cafe and airport they might visit. The only reason I have ever plugged my own Macbook into the network is that, when I have it at the office, I have yet to successfully get it onto the wireless network - we have one hostile network, I must say.
• Limited disk space. The MBA is designed with a very small (capacity), very small (physical size), very slow hard drive. It’s the same sort of drive that they put in iPods.
  • True again, but 80 GB ought to be enough, if you’re talking about a machine that is used on the road, for presentations and the like, and not your main, workhorse desktop machine.
  • Also, if you’re hip enough to want an MBA, you are also hip enough to have an Airport Extreme or an Apple Time Capsule, the first of which allows you to hook up USB hard drives and printers, and the second which does the same in addition to having a 500GB or 1TB hard drive installed. Space concerns, out the door.
  • I’ve yet to find out if you can do this or not, but I’m curious what would happen if you hooked up a USB DVD-RW to the Airport Extreme or Time Capsule - would you then not even have to worry about the intermediary PC or Mac with Remote Disc?
• The SSD (Solid State Disk) option is overpriced and even smaller.
  • That’s absolutely correct, and in fact, has been shown not to be all that much faster or better than a conventional hard drive. As such, I just recommend that, for now, you stay away from that model.
  • Some have tried to argue that the price is right because they never have to worry about a hard drive head crash - a common problem with dropped laptops. I say, my 160 GB SATA hard drive has smart motion sensing, and any fall that might damage it, should be detected and the heads emergency parked.
  • Others argue that the SSD is quieter, and that their MBA’s are entirely silent. Well, that’s great. My MB is the quietest machine I’ve ever owned. Only when the CPU is under great strain does the fan kick up to a hearable volume.
  • I’m not sold that this will be a viable option for some time to come.

In the long run, you’re never going to convince some people that this is a good idea. These are the same people who pooh-pooh the iMac as being impossible to upgrade, the Mac Mini as being too underpowered and difficult to upgrade, and the Mac Pro as being too expensive. They’re also probably the same folks that thought Apple was crazy when the iMac came out, and it had no floppy drive. Sacrilege!

The MBA has a place. In fact, if you’re not a power user, and you share a house with one, you could probably get away with using it as your sole computer, so long as they were willing to share network resources with you at need. I couldn’t get away with it as my primary computer - no firewire = no camcorder connection - but I do admit that, were I merely an executive, I would want one with all my heart.

I don’t normally show stress - just not my way. In fact, I hide stress so well, I don’t notice it in myself unless something overt happens to bring it to the surface.

After a couple stressful days at the office, I think my body decided to do something about all the stress I had coiled up inside of me. I went to be last night at 10:30, and only then because I felt like I’d be no good to anyone if I didn’t get some sleep. Then I proceeded to lie awake most of the night. I think I got about two hours, between 3:30 and 5:30 or so.

This morning I levered myself out of bed with an effort, forewent any morning exercising, and dragged off to work.

I didn’t even make it a half-day.

Between falling asleep at my desk, generally unable to focus on anything, and a thumping headache, I decided to call it a day. After some lunch and a short nap, now I’m awake, barely, but still not in great shape. Maybe I need a new outlet for my stress or something…

When I first started using a modern Mac (the eMac in the basement, now our server), I left most of the configuration very "stock" and didn’t tinker overmuch with the appearance. A little wallpaper and I was on my way.

When I got the Macbook, I went from a 17" standard screen on the eMac to a 13.3" widescreen on the Macbook. [side note: widescreens, while great for media, are making the computer display industry a mint - do the math…for any given size (measured on the diagonal, like a TV), a widescreen 16:9 screen is smaller in square footage than an old-skool 4:3 monitor] Because of the loss of screen real estate, I had to figure something out to make better use of it.

First, I made the dock very, very tiny. Hard to see, though, even if you knew what each icon was meant to be, and it still used a portion of the screen up that I could have been happier to use with my applications.

Then I tried making the dock auto-hide. Also a built-in feature, but not one I liked very much, It worked alright, but I liked having the list of applications that were running right there and visible.

So finally I tried moving the dock to the right-hand side of the screen. I had high hopes for this, because that was the default location for the dock back in the NeXTStep operating system, on which OS X is based. While the current OS X dock handles things differently, and centered the dock top to bottom, it did something I’d not really considered - it used up some of my surplus width, while leaving me the entire height of the screen to use for applications.

It was one of the best decisions I’ve made with regards to setup of my system. I include this screen shot for your edification.

Yesterday gets no entry. Yesterday was a total disaster.

I was dealing with three crises at the same time by 9:30 in the morning. The upgrade I’ve had planned for weeks went awry, forcing two calls to the support team, and eventually leading to the entire server refusing to come back up from a reboot. My co-workers managed to unplug the power to the switch that manages our entire DMZ, taking down our online job application and posting software, our external email services and our VPN, and I had the food service people railing at me because they couldn’t get into the time-clock software (related to the VPN being down, but I didn’t know it).

I worked a nine hour day, then went home and took the wife to pick up her car at the dealership, grabbed some dinner, and worked three more hours. Today started at 7:00, and I invested another three hours on the phone with IBM support getting that server back to where it was before everything blew up.

The afternoon is a blur.

And I’ve got work yet to do tonight.