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Image: Daniel Salo, Wired

This is totally awesome, although I’m sure two dozen kids/grown kids have already poked gored their eyes out with them.

Despite e-mail warnings from my boss to wait for iPhone 2.0/3G to stabilize, and then perhaps buy one through our work i.t. (so I can transfer my blackberry’s phone number, and align through our corporate AT&T cellular plan), I went out today to buy an iPhone 3G to help ease the pain of not having an apple product to buy a month ago after WWDC. It didn’t go well.

This is my story, which was mostly written via email into my blackberry, hence the thumb-esque conan-speak, thumb-spelling and general lack of definite articles. Liberties were taken, but not many. thank you to juan for inspiring me to get back in the game. See you next year!

2:54pm

Sitting outside (not on line; on bench) apple store in clarendon va. Appx 50-60 people in line to buy the iPhone 3G. Looks to be the feel-good hit of the Summer.

Riot about to break out; Apple citizens in line shouting at hired line security thugs re: ‘line not moving in over two hours’. Wish blackberry world edition had camera / video, because I think I could get famous. I think it’s about to be set off, football hooligan-style. People are baking in the sun and not happy. Boiling heat, summer stench. Plus every third person that walks by starts laughing / taking camera phone pictures of people in line, taunting, irritating. this is what happens when an apple store is between a williams sonoma and some boutique clothery. like most apple stores aren’t. i assume this is happening everywhere. a happening.

Family of filthy rednecks (what are they doing in Clarendon; I hope they’re reading this over their dialup connections) just walked by line and loudly proclaimed ‘hick hick why don’t those idiots just buy it from ameeezon dot com hick?’. iPhoneists in line, so angry, shouted epithets at family of inbreeds, which included small children (both in the family, and doing the shouting from the line). The apple user backlash is full steam, bi-directional. This fun / comedy almost makes up for not having an iphone. Although these people on the ready line are my brothers, I am slightly removed… watching the game, not in the line. Too lazy. So lazy. Glad apple makes it hard to buy their products.

I’m supppoed to be at friend Steve’s birthday party in a few hours, but I don’t think I can leave this scene; previously unknown journalistic impulses surfacing. Plus, if the line trickles to zero, I’m in there to win.

surly Line-dwellers just yelled at secuirity ‘get us some cokes or something!!!’. Security: ‘you get back in line! You get back in line!’. I couldn’t make this up. Keep an eye on cnn — I swear there is going to be a riot. Let’s kick it off. I can’t report the truth[1].

3:30pm

Just saw 20-something 9 month pregnant woman on line. Should she be there? Does she have to be there? Is the iphone for the fetus? What if she calves right here? My god, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, we could have a mucus plug, amniotic fluid, and a new life (undoubtedly apple-supporting, as it should be) to deal with in realtime. Maybe that would help her get forward in the line, which is not moving.

This apple store is in a fake ‘fancy towne‘ that is retail below, apartments directly above. People are sitting on balconies, drinking sangria and cold beer, spectating, taunting. That’s the way to do it.

Line is _not_ moving. Has not moved in the 46 minutes I’ve been sitting here. Sun was behind a cloud for a few minutes, but now bacl with a vengence. They’re burning, burning! Ow! - a goddamn bird bit me on the ankle! What the fuck? The woman next to me is throwing bread to the birds, and also watching the Apple iPhone people. My ankle is not bread, budgie, although it may be pastey and doughy! I should stamp you down like a pigeon, yet I am merciful.

3:50pm

Amusement: person walks up to iGoons claiming to want to purchase a mac book pro (ie something apple isn’t losing money on today, like the iPhone). igoon points legitimate man to end of the line. “But I’m not buying an iphone!’. Pointed to end of the line. Then, other line security guy seems to understand ramification and runs inside, presumable to get orders from manager / Jon Ives and Steve Jobs personally. If those guys don’t have the 60’s style red Batphone set up today, I don’t know when they do. Which means: they never do.

Ok… There are now two lines, coming from opposite directions, one short, one long. Maybe there is a batphone! Maybe short one is for non-iphone purchases (goons maybe snapped out of it). Maybe I should buy a macbook too so I can get in the short line…seems reasonable. Don’t need a macbook. still seems reasonable. Tiring of this scene.

4:00pm

Got sick of that scene, now walking back to my car, evaluating plan B. Need to be at steve’s in about two hours. Two girls walking through garage, overhear them: “I can’t believe those idiots are standing in line to give Apple their $300, then AT&T their $130 a month.” I want to tell these wenches to shut their watering holes, because we’re talking about the iPhone. Show respect. But it would do no good. They don’t understand. A Plan is formulating. I could still have justice today.

4:30pm

Now driving in concentric circles (ever-widening) around northern virginia hitting “legitimate” at&t retail stores (since the resellers don’t have them), hoping to score, licking my lips, ready to win.

First one I hit was in fairfax at the corner of 29 and 50. There was iphone 3g material and banners in the windows. It was packed, and there was a guy at the door with a clipboard of names and a pen. I figured these were good omens, but the feeling didn’t last.

‘Hello dere!’ Handing me pen. ‘Are you here for non-iphone-related-blah-blah-woof-woof-promotion-for-some-crappy-non-iphone?’. This was bad, but I’m not an asshole. ‘Hi! No! I’m here for an iphone. Do you have any?’ Confused look. ‘No, we don’t have those..’

Yes, of course. After all, why would you? Its not like you work for one of the only two retail outlets selling them, and its not like its the biggest retail event of the year. My bad for asking. I hand him his pen back without stabbing him in the eye with it.

Now in chantilly va at a mega strip-mall. Did you know that best buy (this one, anyway) now sells apple computers and musical instruments? Huh. No iPhones. Hungry like the wolf.

Have learned that if you send a text to googl (no e), with a search string, it sms’s you back with data. Thanks, Mike. 2% safer than googling on blackberry while driving on route 66…

5:30pm

Hit AT&T stores all over hell and gone (Chantilly, Centreville, Fairfax, etc etc etc), no joy. Consider going to Apple Store at Fair Oaks mall, but am now 30 minutes away from steve’s, and need to be there in 30 or so. Fair Oaks is probably a mess anyway. That place is a shit-hole.

Get email from my boss, who is begging me to hold off / buy a unit through our i.t. when we’re ready. He’s a good man. He’s trying to do the right thing. unfortunately his message has a legitimacy issue due to the fact he already owns a first gen iphone. But he’s still full of ideas:

omg. how about if you buy an ipod touch to hold you over? 97.946% of all iphone time is consumed by things that don’t involve a phone (these stats are conservative). the app store, omg, is the sigle-most dangerous thing to have at your fingertips. btw, mobileme/push functions are just now starting to work occasionally. IPOD TOUCH!!

response:

My issue with the touch is the distinct lack of phone.

I don’t have disposable income for hold-overs. I need the real thing. Kelley (ed. my wife) has cleared me for iphone purchase.

But thanks for trying to help.

after which i’m mocked for my married-ish behavior.

6:00pm

Arrive at Steve’s. He has downloaded iPhone 2.0 for his first gen, and shows me Super Monkey Ball (irritating), Pandora (awesome XM-radio killer), and an app that makes lightsaber sounds when you whip your phone around (like a lightsaber). I almost leave immediately (five minutes after arrival) to go back to clarendon and get online. But unfortunately Boss Tom has called me again and firmly asked me to promise not to get an iPhone until I can get it through i.t. / switch my cell number over. I cave. I feel so worthless.

Another apple nerd at Steve’s party, “Dan”, tells me that he and his wife were are Fair Oaks Mall (the Shit-Hole) earlier in the day to check out the Apple Store scene / potentially breathe on an iphone 3g. He indicated that line was over 200 Apple iDiots long (how quickly I turn to eat my own when failure is complete and I’m awaft in an gaseos ocean of my own shame), and ran from the store itself into the center part of the mall, where disney-style rope line-controllers had been set up. Awesome. Damn them all.

Bitter Afterword — stop reading now

Thank you, Apple, for making it impossible to buy your product. In this case, it wound being for the better. Still, I hate you for it, since I could, at this moment, be using an iPhone I paid $300-out-of-pocket for, as opposed to the hypothetical one I’ll be getting (maybe for less, who knows what I can negotiate) in the future. Too tired to be filled with rage. Beer will help ease the pain.

But I want to make sure, not that anyone at apple (or anyone at all) is actually reading this, that I make something clear. This experience, no matter how negative, is not going to keep me from buying an iphone. It’s not like there’s another option I’m interested in. It was easy to hold off on the gen one due the price, lack of Exchange integration, and the certainty of apple gen-1-technology-itis. I’m not going to be childish and go buy a zune or some other piece of shit just because apple decided the iphone had to be activated in-store, then didn’t remotely have the infrastructure ready to handle it. I’m going to get an iphone, just like I’m going to keep buying macs, because I am a nerd and I like the way apple products make me feel about myself. I’ve owned a current mac since my dad bought me a mac 512k when i was a young punk playing Deja Vu and Falcon. Clearly there’s no illusion re: what I’m writing this on. say my name, bleyotch.

I’m just going to bitch about it, as I have here, and leave off with an open question to whoever at apple, in some parallel universe, reads this: does it make you feel good to irritate your loyal customers, or even your first time ones? I’m also a shareholder (2002 was a good year to buy apple stock), so if there is some secret sauce in the formula that directly/positively impacts shareholder value, I’d love to hear about it.

If I wanted to wait in lines, I’d go back to russia… which I’ve never been to. Get it?

[1] While this somewhat orbits the truth, it’s not quote so. But still somewhat. I want to avoid slander-lawsuits. Oh no:

“No. We would never do that.”

feel the burn

No, I have not started slaughtering the Jedi, but my current undertaking is nearly as ominous and potentially as difficult (at least for me).

For the first time in about five years, I am actively archiving home data from my “tier 1″ storage (sadly = ATA and SATA disk) straight to archival media (DVD+R single layer, at this point).[0]

This decision and subsequent action is driven by a combination of factors:

1. Recent loss of a hard drive acting as disk-based backup for my iTunes library (”Audio Core”)
2. A lockdown on year-end funds from my CIO
3. 1+2 = current loss of backup for said iTunes library, which is a code-orange operational alert, necessitating the need for reclamation of disk real-estate for that purpose
4. The firm realization that I have way too much video data[1] on tier-1 storage that I only occasionally watch, but am not willing to permanently part with or invest the time to re-rip as necessary
5. The begrudging realization that although I would generally recommend none of my customers (nor my worst enemy) use optical media (at least of a non-magneto-optical nature) as backup for any number of reasons [2], it might fit the bill[3] for this particular mission
6. ATA disk is just so f(!@#)ng unreliable when you don’t have RAID protecting it. That may not be a particularly politic assertion given my job (which sometimes involves designing solutions featuring always RAID-protected ATA and SATA disk), but it’s so, so true.

So here I find myself with Toast open, dragging my handbrake-ripped copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation - the Complete Seventh Season to burn, baby, burn when the question pops up (sort of like that old VH-1 show, Pop Up Video[4]: how am I going to index this stuff when it gets spread across 1, 10, 100, 6×10^23 DVDs?

There are a number of OS X utilities that will keep indexes for me, but I’m a real man, dammit. My solution is going to have to be incredibly complex to the point of (and perhaps beyond) non-usability before I’m happy with it.

So I’m basically doing this.

What am I going to do with / how am I going to use this metadata when all is said and done? Will I ever be able to find a single thing I archive off to DVD? These are not important questions for now, fool, for they will all be answered anon. Stay tuned.

[1] All legitimately, uh, handbrake‘d from my own DVD collection, mind.

[2] Poor and variable shelf life, marginal cost-per-GB value, horrible options for automation, sub-shite performance.

[3] Probably more reliable than spinning disk given c 1940’s fuse-based electrical grid in my house, relatively low cost barrier to entry, DR suitability.

[4] The example pop-up in the Wiki features Lisa Loeb, who is hot.

[0] It should probably be noted that this great purge actually began last week within iTunes, but that’s another post.

[ image source ]

This is funny in a somewhat Fight Club/Project Mayhem-esque sort of way.

[ image source ]

I look at various web stats regarding my blog much less than I used to in the past, which I feel is an indication of nothing other than being a slightly lesser douch**ag than before.

I did take a look just now, and while I’m very disappointed that “devil” accounts for only 0.8% search traffic now[1], a melange of rockstar-related bits litter the top ten.

Come on, lurkers - step up! Right here, right now!

[1] I’d like to get that up there around, you know, 85-90%

Hot news, to be sure.

My initial impressions:

1. I don’t know how I will ever be able to travel with all this additional weight. I may need to jettison something from my laptop bag to compensate, like the two AA batteries I keep in there for whatever reason may arise.
1. Scrollball is as responsive as the original. That is a good thing. I expect that, as with the original, I will need to harshly clean this one with baby wipes every two weeks to keep it functioning. That, or stop picking my nose and then immediately using the mouse/scrollball.
1. Side-buttons are much tighter than the original. I’ve read (and a friend has mentioned) that the side-buttons on their wired MM were so tight as to essentially be unusable[1], but mine were actually so responsive they tended to go off at times I didn’t want them to. Maybe this is what they’ve been referring to, or maybe it’s just newness.[2] Or maybe they’re jerks.
1. The tracking in general was, until a few minutes ago, awful. Not when compared to Mighty Mouse v.Wired, but in general… as in, to the point of near-unusability. I went into photoshop in order to draw a “straight” line I could paste in here (expecting it to turn out as a sawtooth sine wave), but… then everything started working. Stay tuned, I guess.
1. Urgh - the retuuuuuuurrrrrrnnnn of blluuuuuuuuuetoooooooth keeeeeeyyboaaaarrrddd goingggggg ouuuuut toooo lunnnnnnnch occasionallyyyyyyyyyyy. I guess one wireless mighty mouse is, indeed, one wireless device too many in the pan.

[1] Unless willing to crush/destroy the mouse in the process, which is a funny, sort of corner case of “use”, I guess.
[2] Or maybe said friend, who will be nameless here as to avoid shaming, has the hands of a four year old girl-child

Geeze, finally.

I was a late jumper re: the Mighty Mouse bandwagon, but since locking in I’ve never looked back. The scrollerball is OOTT[1].

And on the topic[3] - re: said Mighty Mouse scrollerball, and the inevitability of it getting dirty and no longer working:

1. Acquire electronics-friendly moist towelette (ex. monitor-cleaning cloth)
1. Use it to firmly and repeatedly wipe across the scrollerball again… and again… and again…
1. … and again…
1. … until function resumes.

You’ll know (good) things are happening when crud starts to come off of the ball and get picked up by the towelette. Trust me[2].

[1] One of those things.
[2] Caveat emptor.
[3] And this is discussed a lot in the comments for the TUAW article

So, the MacBook Pro 17″ hardware gen 1 arrived today. Although it has already been used long enough for an I.T. Guy[0] to install OS and a few apps, there are no visible signs of heat-related warping, charring or exploding… yet.

I think this is probably the 1,024th web site to do the “oooh, look at my new MacBook!” thing…

Things… seem to be in order. No visible warping. Nothing on fire.

Note the absence of a charred stump at the wrist on my left arm…

Note the same on my right arm. Some bloating, but not related to MBP heat issues.

Things seem squared away. This laptop will never be this clean again, so it’s another good reason I took this picture: memories.

So, at the end of phase one, I can state:
1. The MacBook Pro was not on fire when it arrived.
2. There was no visible heat-related warping when it arrived.
3. I had more or less two functioning hands when it arrived.

We will stick with this story as long as we have to.

tbc.

[0] The CIO of my company, actually, who is a huge nerd and a Mac weenie in addition to CIO.

I’ve owned a number of first-generation Apple products in 21 years, and plan to own many more in years to come. that’s how i roll. in other words, i am extremely reckless and stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.

Assuming the MacBook Pro 17″ currently en route to my home office doesn’t burst, spray battery acid or otherwise cause third degree burns and a charred nub where my credit card-swiping hand was. For certainly the negative experience would likely not drive me away from Apple, but rather drive me towards learning to live a life devoid of thumbs.

A short list of charges:

Mac IIsi c1991 This Mac sort of just sucked. It was underpowered for its time, the internal audio was constantly failing, and was a pain to take apart, which fortunately I rarely had to do since there were few upgrade options other than RAM. It never failed completely, just failed to impress. But notably it did not throw off enough heat to blind / scorch / cook / vaporize anything. Then again, it was not on my lap while in use.

Why this Mac a “gen 1″, you ask? It was the first Mac in a sort of quasi-pizza box chassis that was neither the fx,cx/ci full-height monitorless workstation, nor the true pizzabox style of the Centrix 610 / PowerMac 6100. I think the LC (which was even crappier) was the only other model to share the form factor. I am a huge nerd.

Titanium Powerbook 15″ - c 2001 till future (on hiatus) You could hold it firmly like you’d hold a cafeteria tray, one hand on each horizontal side, and sort of twist[1] just a bit. And that was an uncomfortable feeling, followed by the other heavier, hurt-ier feeling of the battery pack dropping out the bottom of the unit like the Marine drop ship in Aliens. 24 missions, simulated. 2 combat drops, including this one. And landing on your foot. No spraying battery acid, though… at least not for me.

One night I was drunk at my friend’s house, and I opened up the TiBook shell way too quickly, instantly decapitating the monitor from its way too-weak latches back to the main body. I screamed for about a half hour straight the same way b.spears might had she just performed the same action on her child, and then I stayed medicated for a week as said friend, who was not in a state of constant panic, packaged the pieces up and sent them to some Mac experts in Cali to perform emergency surgery. I think I paid each party (friend Mike, and MacExperts) $500 for this activity.

She (Stella was, and is, her name; she was a diver but she was never down) came back from that journey (thank you brother Mike), but she just wasn’t the same. I had to treat her really gently, which meant I could no longer use the open laptop as a foot rest when sitting on a couch. When I configured the screen at certain angles, video would drop out, then I’d tweak the screen back and things were fine, but my mind’s eye was quite clear on the fact that some video signal/power cable was slowly being sawed off inside the connecting hinge. I could see the shoddy job the “experts” out west did with regards to tucking in and covering Stella’s wiry, braided lady business between the main CPU and the screen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be blind soon, so I didn’t. I just tool her into my bedroom, hooked her VGA port up to a relic (but perfectly-working) Apple Sony 21″ Flat Screen Tube. A new lease on visual life. She had a gig of RAM, she had Airport, she had 100Base-T to file servers, and she had a big brother external color screen and a willingness to fight and live. And she did not feel shame when I relegated her to bedroom media access center. I didn’t have to tell her it was mostly going to be about displaying p0rn, and she never complained. When I switched her off at night, the monitor and the tibook module went dark, and she was beautiful when she dreamed. Eventually the laptop’s screen (post-decapitation/re-union of screen and keyboard) blinked out a second time, and Stella knew she’d be running permanently through external video means from here on in. Maybe she considered it sort of like being on dialysis. Maybe more like having a colostomy bag. She didn’t complain. Then again, she was “it”, and it was a laptop. I hear the new ones are complaining, though.

For the last eight or so months I lived at that place, Stella was carefully packed up and tucked into my sock drawer level of the closet to rest. if the machine was going to participate in a miracle and start regrowing leads and synapses from motherboard to monitor, I could think of no richer, more maternal environment than to be surrounded by my sometimes sorted, always filthy, “white” gym socks that I wore with everything (formal, informal, sandals), for that was my impetuous personal style at the time.

When I moved out of that place last October, I was faced with a decision to make about Stella and her head-problem v. prolongued usefullness in another role, among a few other tech-will-she-stay-or-will-she-go issues. Stella, dead screen still attached, was light, and she didn’t take up much space. And she was strong, at 1GB RAM and 500GHz G4 processor. She could do …stuff… like search for aliens. And I watched The Deer Hunter (bittorrented) for the first time through her (driving the aforementioned 21″ outboard monitor). We weren’t giving up on the old girl — she’d come with us, be backed in a box between some summer clothing and comforters and stuff, kept soft and cozy and in a sort of suspended animation until we can do something about it… in the future, when Apple releases a product called iDoctor which is a robot that first kills all employees at the Genius Bar and then fixes, using nano-technology, your old computer… old Apple computer. So you can keep them with you, like your children. I wish Apple would hurry up. Meantime, Stella is packed in towels, in a box, in an attic. Far away. A sleeping giant.

In summary, some people probably think that drunkenly decapitating a laptop is not an Apple engineering problem per se, but they’d be wrong: it was a design flaw. Those hinges should have been the strongest part of the system, but they were the weakest[5]. Also, the thing was hotter than hell.

My blue and white G3 - 1998-2005 rip , Bucky (named for Buckminster Fuller), did not receive such a honored fate; I gutted the PCI cards (”What am I going to do with a SCSI card? We’ll address it later.”) and RAM, took an ice pick to the hard drives, and eased down the ramp into the dumpster, and had to goad two nagging guilt-driven realizations into getting close enough to each other to cancel out:

a) Bucky was too old / slow to do anything of modern worth. not to mention the jelly blue+white aesthetic was sort of so 1998. I guess it could have been a good target at a firing range (if packed with dynamite), but i don’t have the hardware and memberships/ready access to make that a practical approach.

b) to leave Bucky so gutted, but technically still usable, is like leaving a vampire on a ship at sea with no human crew, only rats to drink.[3] it was a disgrace. I loved the computer, and it got a lot done for me. I paid for it [2], it was paid for, and now this is happening: it’s on the edge of the dumpster/crusher sled, its sliding down, crash. the chassis is down there. i’m looking at the dumpster hole, and i can see the G3 chassis in there. i don’t believe it has any feelings about it’s fate, since the box doesn’t have a loaded OS or… electricity or consciousness of a soul. That doesn’t stop me from, momentarily, wondering how dirty I’d get if I jumped in the hole to retrieve it, or what it would feel like if, during said process, the crushing claw came down like something from that “Layla” montage from Goodfellas and cut me and my former computer in half. No, I just walked away. And told myself that computer served its purpose, I got the data off it i needed, destroyed that which I couldn’t, and we were done, and that next time I should buy a cheaper and less pretty computer, perhaps, so the eventual emotional issues present at system disposal aren’t so gut wrenching. Except I can’t; I’m an Apple user. This process is just going to continue and I need to grow (or find) a pair and move on.

So, to pause, my 17″ MacBook Pro is coming soon, and this is a machine that will mean some new things, good things. It means my wife Kelley will get my 17″ PowerBook (G4), which has a history of not exploding, to replace the G3 chicklet I got her (used; from friend Eric) for Xmas three years ago. This will be an appreciated step up for her, and I will find myself in the cutting-edge world of wielding this first-gen platform that can not only the operating system I need to primary productivity (OS X; duh), but any number of others that could come in handy (Windows, Linux…, VMware stuff?) to take my productivity to the stately pleasure dome of uber-productive.

It should be here this week. Given the goings on with exploding batteries and warp factors, I think I’m going to have to stop taking the Tylenol PM, start taking pictures, crack out the thermometer, and add some fact and opinion to the canon of this story: will my new MacBook Pro heat to hot-hot then orange then white-hot, warp, jump to warp speed, split and spray me with battery acid[4], like the Alien queen in Aliens?

Uh, I hope not, because I actually have work to do, and I like my eyes. Stay tuned. We’ll take this one step at a time. I’ll be posting other stories of first-gen Apple woe along the way. tbc.

[1] I’m not saying i’m doing this…
[2] I had probably just finished paying the Apple loan a week or two earlier. HOOT!
[3] It would also be like when Ripley ran into the cyborg in Alien III in the junk yard, and he’s “alive” but all messed up, so he begs her to shut him down, as that would be preferable to just sort of sitting there forever, rusting. That is an android with honor. Bishop, was he?
[4] Note: To my knowledge so far, I don’t think any Apple laptops in the new lines have actually sprayed acid or exploded. They all seem to have gotten the memo leaving that to Dell. For now. But we also know, from experience, that when the machines choose to rise up, they tend to all do so at once.
[5] This assertion is completely non-qualified, but sounds good.

I think a wormhole recently opened and this thing shot out. The plasma cannon and oscillating red eye seem to have been photoshop’ed from this particular image.

[ image peter bollinger / cnn ]

In semi-related thought, the Six Million Dollar Man battles this cool tank-like cyborg on the show. My queries to the Googleplex (in the first time in recent memory) yield neither name nor image of this thing, although jumptheshark.com’s SMDM entry does make an oblique reference (search for “tank”). Does anyone remember it?