Recently in apple Category

getting a new computer is always nice (thanks, james). however, the downside of having a dedicated it guy in the office now is that instead of a relatively unshackled windows box, i have one that’s, er, maintained. which means that i get an access denied message when doing basically everything. installing programs, mucking around with the start menu, deleting desktop icons, installing fonts. to some extent this is overzealousness in protecting me from myself (and goodness knows i’m capable of damaging a windows box), but at the same time (wait for it), the division of what anyone can safely do, what anyone can do with careful consideration, what only administrators can do, and what no one should do is handled infinitely more gracefully in mac os x; why? because at no point am i prevented from doing anything that i need to do on a daily basis. it will take some work to put this thing right.

windows is dumb, and people should stop using it.

i picked up my copy of os x leopard last night. it was your typical apple store event, which i suppose, to some extent has spoiled me, considering it’s not every store you go to that has such boundless enthusiasm for the stuff they sell. the line reached nearly to the door, but was quickly pruned by roving people with handheld checkout doohickeys. i was out of there quickly. with a free t-shirt, too.

so far, i like it. there’s no difference in speed. outside of the new ‘cover flow’ view, the finder is noticeably faster; the cover flow view not the quickest way to browse things—i couldn’t use it all the time, but for times when i do need to preview documents, it’s already proven its worth. ironically, this would be most useful at work, which brings up a somewhat interesting question of just when that might become a reality for more people. for people who deal with word and excel and pdfs every day, i’ve got to figure that at this point, it’s a demonstrably superior experience on a mac. me? i’m waiting for the long-rumored port of solidworks. but overall, what i find most interesting is that it’s all come full circle, and the finder finally feels ‘the same’ as it did in os 9. which is not to say it’s anything alike, but more that it finally feels not like an application, but the basis and root of the whole system’s experience. if that makes any sense.

spaces are cool, but i think i’ll have to train myself to use them. mail is noticeably faster. quick-look is pretty neat. the changes to xcode and interface builder are vast and awesome, enough so that i don’t even know what to do with all of them yet (i let my adc subscription lapse). haven’t used time machine yet, but i do plan to once i buy an external drive.

conveniently enough, this has been a good excuse to finally push spendthrift 3 out the door. the website’s been updated, the last bugs have been squashed, the help files have been written, and it’s ready to be released into the wild. and yes, it works in leopard.

in other news, i’m headed down to the meadowlands tonight to watch the revs take on the red bulls on the road, which should be fun, although possibly wet. they’ve been pretty lousy lately, and don’t have a great history in the first game of two-legged playoffs, but we’ll hope for the best.

charlton have also been in rubbish form lately, which makes me just as glad that they weren’t showing their match at the phoenix landing this morning.

fortunately, my own team has won two out of our last three, and played four times in the last two weeks, so i’m a bit tired, but should hopefully have another game to look forward to.

any recommendations for a good bar to watch the sox in in north jersey?

unsurprisingly, the whiny masses got their way. good ol' uncle steve caved, and is giving me a $100 gift certificate as an i'm-sorry-you-bought-your-iphone-so-early present. boy does his pr department write good letters. i'm not the least bit bitter, actually. in the three months i've had my iphone, it's allowed me to do dozens of things that would otherwise be impossible, slower, or a pain in the ass, wherever i damn well please. that includes doing work from the back seat of a rental car somewhere in the midwest, checking on the sox from somewhere else, juggling phone calls and voicemails from the office, finding suz coffee and donuts west of st. louis, giving a guy in raleigh directions even though i had no idea where the hell i was, taking dozens of pictures of prototypes and random crap, ditching the laptop, surviving in an apartment that doesn't have cable... on that last point. comcast blows. it's bad enough that rcn wasn't available and we're now paying $15 more per month for slower connections and fewer channels, but yesterday they stood me up for an installation appointment, claiming their voicemail droid had told me it'd been rescheduled. a: fuck you for rescheduling it. b: have your jawas take a look at your voicemail bot. between the fact that i work a job that bills out my time, and the fact that i work goddamn long hours, i kinda begrudge them that four hours. kinda a lot. my time is valuable to me. more so when i think of how i could be wasting it in front of bad tv right now. so yeah, jessica and i moved to a new place. the old place was awesome in its way, but i like to think of it as a bold experiment that just didn't work quite as planned, kinda symbolic of the past year, now that i think of it. i am not sad to leave. this is a time for starting anew, notwithstanding the typical connotations autumn has. and it's really the best time of the year, and each and every year i remind myself to savor every time i walk out the door and find it bracingly cool, every time i wake up at 3 in the morning and roll back under warm blankets, every time the sun just looks a little less intimidating outside. but every year i look up and find that it's already december. i get to play soccer a week from tonight.

i have one. it's awesome.