MarcFriedenberg.com

I love the MarcBook, but Microsoft Word under Rosetta runs slower than molasses on a winter’s day. That’s problematic since pretty much all I do every day is take notes in that program. I’m looking for an escape plan because apparently an Intel-compatible version of Mac Office is not due until around July to September 2007. NeoOffice takes 63 seconds to launch on my machine, which is just around enough time to prepare the noose. Will I be reduced to running BootCamp and Win Office? Stay tuned! On second thought, don’t, it’s a pretty boring story, even for me.

The 30G hard drive on Becky’s iBook started making a really loud clicking noise a few weeks ago, and it was clearly dying/dead. I don’t have the mechanical wherewithal to replace something like that myself, so I started calling around to a few repair places. Connecting Point in State College offered to do the repair for around $250, but I found an outfit called MacService that offered to do the repair, and install a 60G drive, including shipping to Santa Clara, all for $195. The choice was clear.

After MacService received the machine, they took a look at it and said that not only was the hard drive dead, but also that the logic board needed replacement due to a liquid spill. That’s a lie. It’s possible that something was spilled on it a few years ago, but it certainly wasn’t related to the hard drive clicking problem, and the machine had been working perfectly until that started. I asked if they would just repair the hard drive and let me “roll the dice” on the logic board, but apparently their rules require them to send out all machines in a bootable state. They claim that they put a new hard drive in the machine and that it wouldn’t boot up at all. The total price for their suggested repairs? $600!

I had them send the machine back to me, and then I brought it over to Connecting Point. They were able to swap the hard drive out in about an hour, and it’s working perfectly. They made no mention of any logic board problem. So it seems to me that MacService offers ridiculously low prices to lure people into sending their computers to them, then says that they need more repairs than they actually do. The $45 return shipping fee probably forces a lot of people into accepting whatever they’re told they need (I actually argued with them and got them to let me send them a $16 USPS label, instead of using their preferred carrier, DHL). So, in my first attempt at consumer advocacy on this page, I have to say: do not do business with MacService.

UPDATE: Hmm, perhaps there was more to this story than I thought. The new hard drive worked wonderfully for about two weeks, and then suddenly the machine started throwing up horizontal lines on the screen. After that, it booted up to a blank screen. Connecting Point immediately identified it as a faulty logic board. Apparently this was a known issue with this particular model, and there was a faulty logic board repair program from Apple. Unfortunately, the machines are only eligible for this free logic board replacement up to three years after the date of purchase, and I hadn’t even heard of the program until four years after. After about an hour of pestering Apple on the phone, they agreed to repair the machine at no cost.

I’m not sure if this is the problem the MacService people were referring to, but even if it was, they blamed it on a spill, not on a known hardware defect. My verdict does not change.

Oh. My. God.

The great thing about blogging packages is that they make it really hard for people to create Web sites like this.

I’ve posted this in other places, but I want to copy it here, too:

The Penn State Mac User Group will be hosting a programming tutorial on Sunday, November 6th from 10am to 5pm in 205 IST Building. An engineer from Apple will be teaching Objective-C, and people with all levels of programming expertise are welcome to attend. Another session will be held next month, and more are planned for next semester, so be sure to attend this Sunday’s event to get a strong foundation. Lunch will be provided for all who attend.

Please email me if you want to come.

One of the announcements Apple made yesterday was that it will be shipping an iSight built into each new iMac. On the surface, this looks like just a great way to bring video chat to the masses - masses who normally wouldn’t go through the hassle of buying an external camera. Even though iChat made it easy to do video conferencing before, sometimes you need to lower the entrance ramp for beginners even more. So, kudos to Apple on that front.

As with all things coming out of Cupertino, though, there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Over the past few years, Apple has shown a renewed interest in innovative interface design. Exposé, Dashboard, and the Mighty Mouse are three of the most obvious examples, and they fit together well. Imagine, then, if the iSight built into all Apple machine was used for recognizing user gestures:

• If I hold my hands together in front of the screen, then part them, Exposé is invoked. I could then point to a particular window, bringing it to the front.
• If I turn my head past the screen, then turn it back and focus my eyes in the lower-left corner, Dashboard is invoked.
• I could turn my head 360 degrees, which would launch QuickTime and begin playing The Exorcist

There are an infinite number of things you could do. It looks like Apple’s gemini twin, Nintendo, is already beginning to embrace the importance of gestures in gameplay. If Jobs & Co. included a feature like this in Leopard, Bobcat, Caracal, or Ocelot, they would be even more light-years ahead of Microsoft, and thus Windows users could expect to have the feature around 2015 or so.

My computer setup at work features two 17-inch monitors, for a total of over 3.5 million pixels. That’s a lot of space. The menu bar is always at the top of the right-hand screen. If I’m working on the left screen and I want to access the menu, it’s quite a hike. Thus I propose that somebody write the following program for me: Move the menu bar to the top of whatever screen contains the mouse pointer. It would also be acceptable if the menu were mirrored on both displays, and I’m fairly certain OS X doesn’t offer this capability natively. I can wait up to two (2) weeks for you to complete this assignment.

Even though it won’t run OS X, I still think that this idea really kicks some ass. One for every middle and high-school student in Massachusetts? Unbelievable.

I’m debating with myself how much of this site I should host myself versus host at other sites that “specialize” in a particular type of content. Currently I’ve got my Schedule posted on LionSchedules, my Wishlist posted on Amazon, a Facebook profile on, well, thefacebook, and Links on del.icio.us. I even host my Photo Gallery with Gallery, rather than a custom tool I created earlier. Last but not least, I’m using WordPress to power this entire site, rather than the handcoding I was doing before.

The benefits of using these other sites/tools are many. First and foremost, I don’t have to create or maintain any homegrown applications. The downside, though, is that I don’t have as much of an opportunity to flex my PHP/mySQL muscle, which is potentially pretty important for what is ultimately an e-portfolio. That being said, it does seem redundant to continually “roll my own” when more complete tools already exist. Perhaps potential employers might even appreciate the fact that I’ve been able to integrate a number of tools and have efficiently created a site in a few weeks that would otherwise have taken months or more.

Still, I have given up a little bit of control, and I never like doing that.

If you want to apply to law schools using LSDAS, you better have access to a Windows computer. The site requires plug-ins that don’t work on the Mac. Lame.

For many months now I’ve been hearing all sorts of buzz about Flickr, the online photo sharing site, but I’m not sure what the big deal is. From what I can tell, it’s pretty basic. Yeah, it allows you (or the whole world) to add tags to pictures, but I don’t get much of a thrill out of that. If I’m looking for something as a replacement to the Gallery installation I’m currently maintaining, what does Flickr offer me?