Got a little busy around here all of a sudden, and the madness will continue today with various deadlines involving ’toons and words. Plus it’s gonna be about a thousand degrees outside. Well, 94, anyway. And me with no air conditioning. Oh, the humanity.
Colorado’s typical speed-shift from 60-something to 90-something is always a shock to the system. The cats and I spend the first few days of summer sprawled on the floor, licking our butts and coughing up hairballs. Ain’t nothin’ but a party.
Meanwhile, in cooler climes, The Black Turtleneck Mob is expected to announce the impending arrival of many pricey, shiny objects today at the Worldwide Developers Conference in Gay Bay. Items to look for include a new-and-improved iPhone plus iPhone OS 4, perhaps refreshes to the Mac Pro and Mini series, and various bits of this, that and the other.
The New York Times will be live-blogging Steve Jobs’ keynote speech this morning. I’m not all that interested, frankly, though I am in the market for a new laptop. When my Internet croaked yesterday and I had to leg it over to Dogtooth Coffee Company for their free wi-fi I learned pretty quickly that I’m not going to be able to easily work the VeloNews.com website using a 12-inch G4 PowerBook. Ain’t nearly enough screen real estate on that bad boy to operate a WordPress blogging platform the way the VeloNewsers have that sucker tricked out. It runs this site just fine when need be, but we’re talking a skateboard compared to a White Freightliner here.
Thing is, I’m not all that impressed with Apple’s quality control lately. My 2006 2GHz MacBook Core Duo blew up its hard drive in under three years of extremely light use and still emits an annoying processor buzz and sports a fiddly trackpad; it has been demoted from committing journalism to running our home theater setup. And a photographer pal just completely detonated his 2-year-old MacBook Pro while on the road — probably a fried logic board.
So I dunno. Maybe it’s time for something completely different. I can pick up a 2.2GHz Intel Core Duo Dell Inspiron 15n running Ubuntu Linux for $579, which is about half the price of the low-end MacBook Pro. Any Linux geeks in the audience with experience running a WordPress blog? Feel free to speak up in comments.
Mad Blog Media 
Wow….thankfully Patrick isn’t picking horses at the track because the WWDC was a total bust. New iPhone and mobile OS….woo wee!!! Until they get that damn cool arse phone on Verizon I won’t be spending $$$ for it – no matter how I could actually use it. Something about being able to make and receive calls in more places than the AT&T store is what does it for me. Not that I even use my phone for calls as it is…but heck how nowadays does that anyway?
James: quick note on AT&T vs Verizon. Here’s the thing: without a carrier who was guaranteed a 100% captured audience, Apple doesn’t get the iPhone off the ground. They had to have a 1-on-1 relationship with the carrier, or it just wouldn’t happen. And it’s easy to say Verizon’s better on paper, but they didn’t have to incorporate a massive invasion of bandwidth on such short notice. When the iPhone hit the 5% mark of market share of smartphones, they were accounting for over half of all phone-based web traffic. It’s kind of like saying, this go-kart track seems to handle these 10hp scooters just fine … let’s go ahead and put an F1 monster on it.
Patrick: should have seen the writing on the wall when the Jobster took the world “computer” out of Apple’s official name. Computers are now officially no longer platforms for processing but are just docking stations for pods and phones. Won’t be long before the only real computer left is some old Cray mainframe in the basement of the Pentagon, running simulations of Global Thermo Nuclear Warfare, while the rest of us walking back and forth at the mall, talking to the person standing next to us through our video-chat mobile devices, or sitting at the dinner table texting someone to please pass the salt and pepper.
Funny thing happened at the iPhoney launch, Jobs couldn’t get a connection. Seems the server was over loaded due to all the live blogging going on about the event. I too have heard plenty of stories on the current Mac products having reliability problems, so I think it’s probably that I couldn’t afford the product. My Windows 7 machine is (knock on wood) cruising along without a hiccup. After a bit of farting around, my Vista lapper is doing just fine. A told, I’m happy I saved over half the cost of the comparable Mac stuff. Time will tell, as they say, if they hold up.
Hey, Steve,
Yeah, you can just see ol’ Steve stopped dead in his tracks, staring into the Promised Land and knowing he’ll never get there. I appreciate the first spastic steps along the Yellow Brick Road of advanced technology by the iPod Touch and iPhone — I have one of each — but as a semi-working stiff, I need a Launching iPad to send stuff upstream while accepting it downstream.
Functionality. Reliability. Simplicity. There’s my podium when it comes to technology. I have a couple 10-year-old Apple computers that are still capable, reliable earners. Not pretty, not fast, but I can still do research, write nonsense and draw cartoons with ’em. Better yet, I can tinker under their hoods.
Meanwhile, my iPhone 3GS has inexplicably decided to start randomly launching its iPod in sleep mode, thereby murdering its battery (and mind you, I have never, ever used the iPhone’s iPod app’). And my iPod Touch has commenced pitching a bitch whenever I use its Public Radio app’, which worked flawlessly for the better part of quite some time until I “upgraded” the iPod’s OS.
These are a few of the reasons why Linux is starting to appeal to me. It reminds me of Italy. A whole bunch of people fucking up, all at once, yet somehow it works.