Champs

AFC East Champs

Windows Mobile on an iPhone

I didn't really post this because I'm interested in it... although it is pretty cool. I posted this because of the ridiculous last question the woman asks the poor kid.

dinner tonight

Side Work

With everything going on with the possibility of being unemployed soon, I spent a lot of time updating my resume and looking at sites I've built. I remembered recently another site that I designed about a year ago, and passed on to another colleague to ad the content, and searched and found it. I'm glad to see they are still using my design, and I'll have to add it to my portfolio.

http://www.laacademy.org/

Now I just need to push the Maryland Recycle people and the Columbia Tech Partners people and I'll have quite a little portfolio to show off while I hope phocus designs takes off.

How to draw anything in one step

http://a.viary.com/bizblog/posts/how-to-draw-anything-in-1-step

silent film shows!

Bike Ride

So I bought a bike today from costco. Everyone online seems to think that it's a piece of junk cause I got it from a store that isn't a bike specialist, but I'm just starting to get into riding, and I have enough expensive hobbies, so $250 will have to do.

I took the front tire off which was super easy, took it to the gas station on the way home and filled up the tires, got it home and sat in my driveway for about 15 minutes trying to get the tire BACK on (that's the hard part) I then ate some food and went for a 1.5 hour bike ride. It's impossible for me re-do my route online to see how many miles I went, but I know it had to be close to 20 since the average guy cycles about 15 mph, so that's pretty exciting. my legs hurt, and so does my stomach, so I'm going to pass out and probably not make it to work on time tomorrow, but it felt great to get out and ride around.

EDIT: I mapped it out and from everything I can remember, which probably isn't everything I got about 18 miles.

unboxing video

I'm normally not one to post or really get into the unboxing thing. It's cool and exciting when you get something new I suppose, but not exciting enough to video the entire process.

anyway, this video is pretty amazing, so I figured I would show this off. I've never seen packaging like this before, and it's obvious Samsung is really trying to compete with the iPhone.

video game FAIL

Mobile Me Idea

Maybe this has been passed around and I didn't know it, but I got a great idea today. While at work, my phone has to stay in my car. I miss calls, and text messages all day, and then check them all once I get out to my car.

Wouldn't it be nice if mobile me was able to sync sms and the call log as well as everything else? it would be great to be able to manage sms messages, send them form my computer, see any missed calls, get my visual voicemail, etc.

I'm sure this is in the works or should be if it isn't.

too soon?

First Anti Smear Campaign, and now a Zunephone

it's got the megabytes!

Vista Anti-Smear Campaign

This made me LOL:

So apparently, thinking Vista is a piece of shit is the same as thinking the Earth is flat... sounds reasonable.

John Mayer - Merriweather

I think it's obvious that I have what you might call a man crush on John Mayer. I recently got his live bluray dvd which I actually had to turn off half way through because he embarrasses me as a guitarist. He's super talented, funny, and rich... pretty much 3 things I want o be eventually, and I only have the funny part in the bag.

So Jess surprised me with tickets to the show, although she kinda put on fora little too long that she got them for me, she's not 100% at surprises.

So anyway, we went to dinner at chevy's, and the rain started coming, and I was a little worried that she got lawn seats. I would sit through the rain no problem, but I knew she would be miserable, and I didn't want her to have to be miserable at a concert, but luckily she got pavilion seats so it was pretty nice to be dry through all that. I came up with a money idea also while there. I think they need to come up with a social networking ticketmaster. When you buy your tickets they ask you a series of questions, how old are you, how many drinks to you plan on drinking during this show, are you a dancer at shows, are you overweight, etc. Your answers to the questions will allow someone buying tickets to be able to see who is sitting around them and make an informed decision before getting their tickets. Who wants to sit in row b if they will be surrounded by 22 year olds who like getting their drink on and dancing like idiots around them... the answer is other 22 year olds who like to get their drink on. If you are 26 and hate all that shit, they should have a section for you with older people who just want to enjoy the music. I have to work on a few parts of this, but I think it's genius.

Anyway, the show was amazing. Other than our annoying seat neighbors. John proves to me again that he is amazing. I think his best guitar song was Mercy. His solo was out of control. I was surprised during the show to see him use a gibson and a PRS throughout the show, as opposed to Fender only which is how he usually plays.

Vultures
Waiting on the World to Change
I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Bigger Than My Body
Crossroads
Mercy
No Such Thing into Why Georgia
Free Falling
Belief
Say

ENCORE
Who Did You Think I Was
Panama
Gravity

I think the highlight for me was the cover of panama by van halen. His black rhythm guitarist sang during I don't trust myself, and I was like, man that guy can sing... He should just do his own thing. So during the encore, John came out alone and did who did you think I was.. when the song was over, he was talking about how he never gets the opportunity to just take his shirt off and play guitar and have someone else hold the show down, so the black guy came out and sang for him while they covered panama. It was amazing. I was surrounded by people that had no idea what the song was, but it was great.

Another highlight was a girl had a sign that said "John, I'm legal in 2 years" and John said "Well, I'm a pervert now".

He also introduced his band like a 1920's radio announcer.

I know I read that he was thinking of doing a standup thing, and I think he could do it.

Anyway, you can check out an awful pic I took with my new iphone on my mobileme gallery. This link will take you there... As I take more pictures with the phone, they will be uploaded there right after the pic is taken so you can check that out for real time updates when I'm doing something cool.. I'll write a review of the phone soon, as well as a review on the John mayer signature strat I just bought. Happy early birthday to me!

Apple's Mobile Me - Awful Logo Decent Product

I've been a member of Apple's overpriced suite of tools dotMac for almost a year now. I knew it was overpriced when I first got my iMac about 18months ago, and turned down the discounted rate after my month free trail. Back then it was 1gig of space shared for web pages, and e-mail.

About a year ago they updated the product. The promise of IMAP e-mail, and the addition of the web gallery which is seamlessly tied to iPhoto was what helped me make the jump. the syncing of my contacts was also a benefit, and having a place to put things to be easily accessible of the web helped as well. They also bumped the storage from 1gig to 10gigs.

Shortly after my purchase, I noticed a few things. Number one, the web gallery couldn't be slower. I liked the interface, I liked the idea of people being able to add to the gallery, but the speed was terrible. I've noticed a similar issue with picassa though, so it's not only mac struggling to keep speedy galleries. Number two, Gmail began offering IMAP email for free. Plus the dotMac email system is ridiculous. It looks like yahoo mail looked in 1998, and it automatically logs you out after 10 minutes, which sucks for people like me who are used to keeping their gmail open all day. I also found dropbox (which I will blog about soon) which is a money alternative to dotMac's iDisk. I can store 2gigs for free of files that are shared to any computer I want them to, and also all changes I make to the files are synched as well, in case I need to go back to an old file. I have the ability to easily share files, and they have a much faster smoother (yet with less features) web gallery option.

With all these shortcomings, it was easy for me to decide to drop dotMac when I needed to renew in August.

Of course, that all changed, as usual with Apple, when they announced that they were dropping dotMac for MobileMe. The logo is awful, it reminds me of Windows ME, and we all now how well that Operating System ran. But the demo showed serious promise, a much nicer looking email, new servers could mean speedier galleries. But the killer for me was the ease of syncing between my iphone (which I'll buy) and my computer. Over the Air syncing of contacts, calendar, and e-mail is a great feature, and well worth the 100 bucks.

Currently My web contact list still lists Dave (our new drummers) phone number as his old phone number that he changed 4 months ago because I haven't synced the contacts from my phone to my computer to the web yet. This would happen automatically with mobileme. Another example is last year while we were playing a lot of shows, my cell calendar often was different than my at home calendar making it difficult to book shows while on the go in case i booked something that didn't sync back to my phone, this is another thing that won't happen with mobileme.

They are transitioning to the new system in mid July, which will give me about a month of free use before I decide if it's worth keeping, or if I should just still drop it. I'm sure I'll post about it once I get to use it.

wussha drank?

when did this become an acceptable way of asking what you would like to drink while at a drive through. And it's not like I can complain, because it happens at EVERY drivethru (except Chic Fil A). Checkers, Wendys, McDonalds, BK, Hardees, if they have a drivethru and some sort of combo option, I can guarantee you've been asked "wassha drank?"

surprisingly enough, they guy who made this is richer than me

why can't I ever think of anything like this?

Makes me hungry

John Mayer Writes a Song

Now that Silent Film is back to rocking, and we need to start making music again, I look to John Mayer for inspiration.

Silent Film is Whole Again

Back in January Rob, Brad and I decided it was time to start rocking again and we started advertising for drummers and singers. We fell upon little Dave Kliensmith (not jewish, don't let the name fool you) and he started beating the skins, but we still needed a singer. After dozens of tryouts and a few almosts, we think we finally found our guy. Tim used to sing in Aisle of View and he is going to be rocking out with us. We are going to be practicing the old stuff to catch him up and work on the new stuff we already have written, plus a few ditty's he's written and then put it all together in one big mix of rock and start playing live. I can't wait and neither can you.

Saves the Day in Philly

I've seen Saves the Day live about a dozen times.. Probably more. I've seen them open a hardcore show and get booed for not being hardcore enough. They are always at the top of my list for favorite bands. I've seen em acoustic 3 times. I've seen sets consisting of a majority of new shit (usually after each CD release) and I've seen them do sets of classics, usually their acoustic shows, and the time I saw them after their B-sides release. I've seen em with like 4 drummers, 3 bassists, just Chris, let's just say, I've been through the gamut of possible Saves the Day shows. If I were to have to pinpoint my favorite show it would be tough. I really liked them at Recher with Thursday after Stay What You Are came out. Chris was still only singing and not playing guitar, the setlist was all Through Being Cool and the new CD which I really liked, and overall it was just a good show. I really didn't like them at Recher with the Deerhunter. That would probably be the worst show I saw of them. Mostly In Riverie tracks, nothing really old, and just boring.

Last night all of them have been trumped. I don't think it would be possible for them to have played a better set. The last few times I've seen them, they have been big on taking a few requests during the set, which is great, because most Saves the Day fans, like me, prefer the older stuff. There are a few quality tracks on each of their newest CD's but there are also some really really bad songs (she on In Riverie as well as Monkey, and a few off of Under the Boards could be better as well). Last night they changed it up by playing all requests. Every song was a request... All THIRTY THREE of them. 33. That's 2 hours of rock. I found the setlist on Absolute Punk:

1.) Shoulder To The Wheel
2.) Always 10 Feet Tall
3.) The Last Lie i Told
4.) Jukebox Breakdown
5.) Sell My Old Clothes
6.) You Vandal
7.) Ups and Downs
8.) A Drag in d Flat
9.) Handsome Boy
10.) Tomorrow Too Late
11.) This Is Not An Exit
( brief pause for shots of tequila courtesy of Set Your Goals )
12.) In Reverie
13.) Kaliediscope
14.) As Your Ghost Takes Flight
15.) Wednesday The Third
16.) At Your Funeral
17.) Holly Hox, Forget Me Nots
18.) I'm Sorry I'm Leaving
19.) Hold
( Second Tequila Shot )
20.) The Choke
21.) My Sweet Fracture
22.) Sometimes New Jersey
23.) Where Are You ? (Chris's favorite)
24.) What Went Wrong
25.) Bye Bye Baby
26.) See You
27.) Bones
28.) Stay
29.) Woe
( Third Tequila Shot )
30.) Take Our Cars Now
31.) Deciding
32.) Nightingale
33.) Rocks Tonic Magic Juice

That's 5 off of CSD
6 off TBC
6 off SWYA
3 B-Sides
3 Acoustic CD
5 IR
1 STA
4 UTB

That is out of control. At one point Chris said, we have a 120 song catalog, and we only know 70 of em, so we might not know it. We don't know Banned from the back porch or Jodie (two I would have liked to hear) I also would have liked firefly and through being cool. But I think I'll deal. It almost felt like a going away show, the drinking, they played everything by request... it was weird. People were doing everything to hear their requests. Throwing paper on stage, typing what they wanted on their cellphone and giving it to chris, making hand motions, and just screaming. People were tearing paper off the walls to write their requests on signs and holding em up... it must have been a great experience for Saves the Day as well. I did actually like the requests for newer stuff too... You could tell Chris likes playing the newer stuff even if the audience doesn't like it as much. The only songs I didn't like of the evening were Woe and Stay off of UTB, I don't really care for either of them, and they did them back to back.

I also realize why Rob loves Manny. That dude is a beast on the bass, but not only that, he is so chill when he does it. Everything is effortless, and he's just bobbing up and down, chilling, with a toothpick in his mouth. And damn, him and the new drummer learning 70 songs is also impressive.

Holy shit. I almost didn't go to this show. I feel I'm getting a little old for shows. I'm 25, I'm usually about 10 years senior to a majority of the crowd, and I don't like being cramped up front, and I can't hear as well in the back. Meghann talked me into heading up with promises of beer and cheese steaks(this will be another blog) and I'm really glad she did.

New Bathroom

We are in the process of updating the downstairs bathroom. New tile, new fixtures, and having a shower put in to up the value of the house. While looking for he stuff at lowes, we decided we would also update the upstairs bathroom as well. While we are waiting for the contractor to get started downstairs, I figured I would post a few pictures of the upstairs update. I'm pretty proud because I did all of it myself.

I removed the old sink, vanity, mirror cabinet, and lighting fixture. I put the new vanity together, rebuilt the drain which was made of steel before, and is now using much easier to deal with PVC. I hung two shelves over the toilet, a new towel rack, and a tp holder. I did all the electrical work on the lighting fixture and it worked on the first try without me electrocuting myself. Everything is level, nothing leaks, I even installed a new shower head. Big props to Jess for doing all the painting while I assembled all this stuff, but we were able to knock it out together in 2 Sundays. The first sunday was paint and sink, and then this sunday I put up the new medicine cabinet, and hung the new light.

All in all it cost about $400 for everything and the difference is huge. Here is a link to my mac gallery to see the pics. While there, also stop by and see all the pretty pictures form when I was snowboarding in Utah.

Rendering a site in IE on a Mac

Every since I switched to mac, there have been a few unavoidable problems. I had to install Windows XP when I first got it because of two main reasons. There was no Universal Binary for the Adobe and Macromedia suite of products so I needed to boot into windows whenever I did web work. The other reason had to do with synching my windows mobile phone. The only software available to synch my phone was the missing sync which was buggy and lacked pretty much any decent support, and it was like $40. Once the Adobe suite was released in Universal Binary and I found a freeware sync application that works wonders (syncmate), I was able to cut ties from Windows for good.

One thing I seemed to have forgotten about though, until recently is the ability to check the rendering of a website in IE. As anyone who codes websites knows, IE is the devil. They ignore all standards, and just do their own thing. I did some searching for people who maybe could write a plugin for firefox or something to make the page behave like it was rendered by IE so I can debug. Unfortunately most developers see this as a step backwards... why would we cater to IE.. IE needs the fixing, so make them fix their product, not cater to it.

I was able to find this nifty online application (netrenderer). Basically put a site in the box, and what version of IE you are trying to use. They offer IE7, IE6, IE5, and even the new IE8 beta. It returns only a screenshot of a maximized 1024x768 window, so if what you are trying to check is far down on your page, you won't be able to see it, but obviously there are workarounds for that.

Overall, it's free. I don't have to instal XP on my mac, and I don't have to leave a windows computer laying around just for this anymore. It has it's shortcomings, but it's helpful to look back at only one version ago in IE when they didn't render transparent png files...

It also gives me hope that at first glance, IE8 seems to have fixed their box model.

I wish I knew why everyone in the web community used:

Margin - Border - Padding - Object

but IE felt it necessary to use:

Border - Margin - Padding - Object

Amazing

I Wish This Was My Dad

T-Mobile's Parent Company is Retarded

So apparently T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom believes that they can send threatening letters to people who use magenta on their website because it is a copywritten color. They sent basically a cease and desist letter to engadget mobile because of their use of magenta in their logo.

A bunch of phone blogs out there have been changing their color schemes to now include this shade of magenta, but since I'm not going to spend the time doing all that, I figured I'd fight the good fight, and post this image which I took from Ryan Block's personal blog.

Who's the King of Pop Now?

2 hour layovers and jet lag

So we arrive in Denver CO last night at 7pm their time, 9pm Baltimore time under the impression we were about to have a 2 hour layover. "Don't worry about it though" Jess said, "they have this money mall inside the airport that's really cool to occupy us." We get off the plane, and head to the big departure screen to find out our plane is delayed and won't be taking off until 11pm their time, 1am Baltimore time. ugh. I'm already exhausted. We've been in airports since 2pm, and I just want to go to bed. Plus our destination is still an hour away from the airport. And the mall Jess talked up, was a tie store and food court.

We did however get to watch Gone Baby Gone, which was pretty decent. All in all, I got to bed at 5am Baltimore time, and I am pretty miserable. The Utah mountains however are really nice, so thats a plus. I'm off to hop in the hower, we are getting breakfast, and then diving n hour back to the airport t pick up our rental car. The rental car place was closed by the time we got there because of the layover.

Dreamweaver security flaw? helpful to me

So I'm getting ready to embark on a trip to Utah to visit Jess's family, and on the way there I figured I would do some side work to keep me busy on the ~6 hour flight. I installed dreamweaver, and photoshop on her macbook, and started setting up the site for the site I'm going to be working on. Then I got to the FTP password field. W.T.F. I haven't had to update this bad boy since I started working on the site over a year ago, and there is a zero percent chance that I'm going to remember this password. I have to change my password at work every time I drop duke, and with every other password I have, I cant be expected to remember client passwords too. In a panic, I first hit up my email. no dice. Although I did find the SQL server password which will come in handy when I'm doing DB work, but I probably won't be doing much of that on the trip.

I go upstairs to my iMac and hit up the site there, and of course it's a password field so I can't view it. I try copying and pasting, and that doesn't work. I start cruising the inter-tubes, and nothing there. I have no idea at this point what to do... I could pull the files over my network that are already on my mac, and then ftp them when I get home, but I was planning on doing some testing while gone, and my computer doesn't have coldfusion, and I'm not about to set up jess's laptop to be it's own server, just for this short trip. As a last ditch effort, I highlight the password on my iMac, and drag the highlighted text to another form field, and it magically appears. I dunno if this is SUPPOSED to happen, but it worked, and I was able to connect to the server.

This exited me enough to post. If this interests you, drop me a comment and see if this works in other password fields, or if it's just a problem with dreamweaver. I'm currently setting up my phone as a modem, because I hear they only have dial-up in Utah still. At least that's what my old co-worker Wilson led me to believe.

Flock -Your New Favorite Browser?

At least that's how they advertise it. It was enough to grab my attention. So far it's not too bad. It's got a lot of things built in, letting me check email, blog, check feeds, pretty much everything internet is built in to it. Sounds like a swiss army knife of browsers.

I've always been a fan of Firefox. From when I had a windows xp computer, and since I do web work, IE has always been a joke, so I've always preferred Firefox. It really takes a toll on memory usage though, but it's the price to pay. When I moved to the Mac world, I tried using safari for a while, but I never really liked the experience so I stuck with the memory hog Firefox, I also had a short stint with Camino which seemed to marry a lot of what I liked about Firefox without the memory issues, but I ended up going back to Firefox. With Leopard and the release of Safari 3, I've been really happy with it, and I've been using Safari pretty much exclusively.

My school's online courses don't really work well with Safari, so whenever I'm doing school work, I have to switch to Firefox, and I've been using Firefox beta 3, and I really have been liking that, and I actually would say it's about 50/50 with Firefox and Safari.

I grabbed this new one from an ad, and so far it's just okay. I like the idea and direction it's going. It shows the digg feed so I can see what's going on with digg without going to digg. If I had a facebook, which I don't, I would be able to see when people commented me and updated their profiles. When I get new e-mail the browser tells me. With all this stuff going on, it's kinda hard for me to concentrate on just surfing the web. The interface is really busy with a bunch of small buttons that I'm not sure what they do. I'm sure its a work in progress and I'll keep an eye on it, but hey, it got me to post a blog, so it has that going for it.

iPod Touch January Update - No Thanks

So a few weeks ago Apple put out those nifty iPhone apps for the touch which I already had on my jailbroken touch for a few weeks, so I thought it was lame for anyone to drop the 20 bucks on them. Who is going to use their iPod to check their stocks? But I did like the rearranging of the desktop. So I upgraded to the new software, 1.1.3, however skipped the 20 dollar upgrade. Well you don't get the customizable desktop without shelling out the 20 duckets either, so I found someone who already made them available for the jailbroken community, so I went ahead and jailbroke my 1.1.3 touch, and added that software. Everything was fine.

A few days ago, I was rocking out to the touch in my car, and Saves the Day, Under the Boards came on, which I legitimately purchased form the iTunes music store. It didn't play. I didn't hear anything. So I went hunting through my library to find some other stuff that I got legit, and those songs didn't play either.

I went online, and looked around, and figured there was probably some checkbox I had to check or something to get those songs to work. When I plugged my touch in to update it I got the same ol' ad again trying to get me to purchase the space agreed January upgrade, and I politely declined again. This time I was taken to another screen, AGAIN asking me to buy the upgrade. When I clicked the okay button at the bottom (the only button available), I was shot right to the iTunes music store, to purchase their upgrade. I don't want it. okay! leave me alone.

So I get to thinking. Maybe this is cause my touch is jailbroken. Maybe they figured me out. So, I looked around and found out that the only way to un-jailbreak my phone is to hook it into itunes and restore the iPod. Well, I CAN'T DO THAT. Becuase when I hook my iPod up, I'm forced into an endless loop of "Buy the January Update" and I'm never able to get to that nifty "iPod Management Screen" that lets you pick the photos to upload to your iPod and everything. So I went to the delete all information from your ipod option on the ipod to get rid of everything, hoping that maybe that will suffice. Nope. Still trying to sell me the January update.

I went downstairs and hooked it up at this point to my girlfriends macbook which seemed to fix the issue, at least, I was able to restore the iPod. I brought it back upstairs, and I'm getting the same thing.

She didn't upgrade to the new version of leopard that was released today, and she still has the last version of iTunes. I'm guessing that one of those are the culprit for this bug, but now I'm without an iPod until they fix the situation. This is worse than microsoft. Damn.

Superbowl = Lame

Out of the 4 possibilities of a Superbowl, the one that ended up happening has to be the least interesting.

Giants-Chargers: See which QB is better after the whole draft deal from a few years ago.
Packers-Patriots: Potentially the best QB of all time (Farve) against potentially the best QB of all time(Brady)
Packers - Chargers: Actually I guess this one isn't very interesting either. But I hate the Patriots.

I guess I just hate the Patriots. I hate their surly coach. I hate Junior Seau. I hate Wes Welker. As a Dolphin fan, i hate that 80% of the fins ended up on the Patriots and they thrive. I think a lot of that has to do with crappy coaching that the fins have had over the last few years, and I hope that Parcells changes that, although it seems like he is running the organization like Bush runs the country. He's getting all his buddies jobs, and that usually means trouble. But I liked the Saban hiring, I liked the Cameron hiring. And I was way off on them, so maybe I'm wrong about Parcells too.

I kind of went on a tangent there I suppose... but yeah. The Superbowl is lame to me this year. I think it's obvious who is going to win. They just played a few months ago. I'll be rooting against the Pats which I've been doing all season, and that hasn't worked very well, but who knows.

I'm tired of hearing people complain about the Mac Book Air

Just a little background as we get started here on the macbook air. Let's go back a year ago when the iPhone was announced. Bloggers everywhere began attacking it's shortcomings. While I didn't have a blog at that time, I expressed my displeasure for it as well.

It had quite a few shortcomings. The glaring one to me was it's lack of 3g. Considering I already had a phone with 3g, and cingular was offering phones for free with 3g, I didn't understand why apple would skip that little antenna. The claimed it was for battery life, but with a full size touch screen, I assumed you would be charging it every night anyway. After benchmarks came out, I noticed that this omission wasn't really that bad of a decision. Considering two iPhones next to each other, one using wifi, and the other using edge were able to view pages in the same amount of time. Turns out the bottleneck isn't with the data network, but with the slow cellphone processor. The only way you would really see a change in speed is if you were tethering the phone, which we all know is a no-no according to AT&T.

• Other complaints were the fact it was tied to AT&T. (A must for GSM phones that don't want to be on T-Mobile) a lot of people don't understand how phone networks work, and would like to think that a phone made to work on Verizon would work anywhere else in the world outside of America.
  
• No replaceable battery but not a surprise as it's the Apple way.
  
• No Physical keyboard was another huge complaint. By myself as well, as my last 3 cellphones have had full keyboards (Treo 650, Samsung Blackjack, HTC Mogul)
• Cost. People bought a RAZR for $50, why would they pay 8 times that for an iPhone?
  

What I am getting at is apparently, everyone was wrong. Everyone except Apple. The iPhone is still selling ridiculously and everyone wants one. I bought a touch, and the interface really is terrific. I've jailbroken it, allowing me to install the maps, mail, weather applications that Apple now wants me to pay $20 for. (No Thanks) And for what it's worth, it's a great little device.

The same kind of people are now out, and again (it seems worse this time) are complaining about the new product released by Apple, the MacBook Air. The complaints seem eerily similar. Complaints about no replaceable battery, cost, the omission of different wireless networks. Apparently people wanted Apple to put a 3G antenna in it, which would of course give them another thing to complain about as the laptop would be tied to Cingular, and you would have to pay Cingular's ridiculously high data fees to use it. One thing I will agree with, is Apple seems to think that every city is like San Fransisco with WiFi all over the place, and that simply isn't the case. I always struggle to find a connection to WiFi in Baltimore, but I think it makes more sense than including extra hardware that would thicken the laptop that many people wouldn't use because they would have to pay monthly for it. A solution to this problem is bluetooth tethering to a cellphone if your cellphone company allows you to. (Sprint does) Allowing me access to the web from anywhere, just by hitting a button on my cellphone. Plus Sprint is fast. Much faster than Cingular.

It seems as with the iPhone, people are skipping the positives and constantly pointing out the things Apple, "shoulda" inculded. Insisting that an optical drive is a necessity, considering that I used my optical drive on my laptop frequently when it was my only computer, but don't think I have opened it since I got a desktop. I do not think Apple is marketing this as a desktop replacement. If this is your first Apple computer, or only computer, I'm sure you would be more compelled to get the cheaper macbook, or for a desktop replacement, the macbook pro. Either of those computers would be much better suited for someone like that. If you are a graphic artist and you want to do animations on the go, it's not the computer for you, but you probably wouldn't be looking for a portable solution in the first place.

I say portable and not ultra-portable because I don't believe this is an ultra portable. However I've used ultra-portables, and they are not for me. The screen is just too small to see anything, and if I actually wanted to write a paper on it, I would go blind. Plus most ultra-portables run Windows, which out of the box doesn't have a solution for multiple desktops, which in my mind is a necessity when working on such a small screen.

I've heard people complain about a bunch of other problems with it, but I haven't heard many people praise what Apple has done, which surprises me. People will complain about everything.

I go over most of the complaints I hear, and then ask you a question before you continue to bash the product.

• You can't remove the battery. It has a 5 hour battery life with WiFi on. How many times have you changed out your laptop battery since you got it. Actually removed the battery and put another one in it's place? My answer? Zero. I've never done this. According to Apple's site, if the battery goes dead when the warranty is up, it will cost $129 for the battery and be installed in a matter of minutes free of charge.
• No Optical drive. If this isn't your only computer what do you use the optical drive for? Installing applications, Apple has you covered with the remote disc application. Get music on your laptop, pull your music over the network from your desktop. Watch movies? rip movies to your desktop and handbrake them and get them that way. (I am in no way recommending renting a movie from i-tunes and paying a ridiuclous price for something that shouldn't cost half that price. The only way I can see this as a benefit is if you are in a hotel and you wanna see a movie, becuas eI know how much hotels charge to rent a movie over their TV system)
• Only 1 USB port. What are you dragging around with you that you need more than one? thumb-drive or external hard drive? that's one port. mouse? get a bluetooth mouse or unplug it when you need to use the hard drive. It's not like these things are running windows 98 and you have to reboot when you unplug the mouse. Plus if you are using this for the portability, you shouldn't be lugging around a bunch of peripherals anyway. That's not the point of this.
• No Firewire. If you plan on editing movie clips on your MacBook Air, shoot yourself.
• Same footprint as the macbook, I want smaller in footprint not in weight/thickness. Then get the macbook. footprint wise, if you go smaller you get a smaller screen size, making it more difficult to work, in my opinion.
• Too expensive. Compare it to the Sony which has worse graphics, smaller screen, and a slower processor for more expensive. While I agree that 3k for a laptopis ridiculous, a quick search on newegg shows how much solid state drives cost. I'll probably get the ipod hard drive anyway because of that.
• Not enough hard drive. Again, this baffles me. People say it's too expensive, and then want a larger solid state drive. I think one of my main gripes is that I want a SMALLER solid state drive. it would make costs lower, and again, this isn't my only computer, I'm using it to take notes in class and code some coldfusion pages. I have a networked hard drive to store files I'm not using. I would have loved a 32GB drive.
  

What I'm getting at is, the people who bashed the iPhone (and I was one of them) were way off base. The iPhone has been ridiculously successful and there is no reason to think that the MacBook Air won't be either. I'll let you know either way, because I plan on buying one after I'm able to use one in person to make sure it's sturdy enough. Because all this is null and void if it falls apart if I fart with it in my lap.