Showing posts with label macs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label macs. Show all posts

22 February 2011

my birthday present to myself

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I got me a Magic Mouse. I'd hoped it to replace my Mighty Mouse, but... at least so far... does not have the functionality of the Mighty Mouse. The Magic Mouse, however, makes scrolling SO magnificently smooth, and invulnerably dependable, that you end up not minding at all that you might have to use it as adjunct to your Mighty Mouse, instead of replacing it. Mac-tude will go the way of all things soon, I'm sure, but I want to wring every drop of love out of it before it slips into the lake of bile that is consumerism on Planet Earth... which is to say: Steve Jobs is unfortunately NOT immortal.

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love, 99
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19 May 2010

i'm afraid this is not the least bit mysterious

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I think anybody with an IQ above room temperature could figure this out.

This is the first solid indication of what we have all felt uneasy about since the advent of the internet, what all these impossibly "helpful" applications on our machines and inscrutable backup file libraries that never get deleted when you delete stuff, and all the online "social networking" and oceans of personal uses for Google services, are about.

I mean, I could see it anyway, in this latest generation, dual Intel chip Mac, where it wouldn't matter in the least that you paid cash for it because everything about you lives on inside it and can be accessed through the net, EVEN when it's asleep, EVEN when you think you deleted it, but that wouldn't be quite the cakewalk on an iPad... it not coming with those gigs of storage for that programming and access.

You can't really hold it against Jobs, per se, because it's everywhere and there are probably heavy inducements, but still.

The airheads reporting on this matter at the image link are the twits my mother listens to for all her news religiously and on full blast. So the double plus good exposition of this post is that you will have an idea of what makes me rage against TVs every time I go visit my parental units.
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03 April 2010

let me explain

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Back when first I was going to become a computer-owning person, right when part of the Bay Bridge had just fallen into the bay, I was determined, determined, to be a sensible person, in sync with the rest of the legal professionals out there, not bucking the evil tide, functioning as yer basic respectable sort, someone whose PC could smoothly interact with those of my peers.

Everyone who knew me, except one very doggedly pragmatic, commonsensical and businesslike Yalie, said, "Oh, nooooo! You are a Mac sort of person. You just CAN'T do that!"

I did it.

Thus I learned in intricate detail the hell people go through to be computer-savvy citizens, functioning in the digital age.

You fucking fools.

For a very long time, the affordability thing was the big excuse. It was NEVER good enough, but now it's REALLY not good enough. I was not a destitute person back then. I am now. Still, I starved myself, stayed home, skipped movie rentals and the odd treat to a restaurant dinner, for five months to have my new Mac when my beloved old one blew up.

Turns out that three monster brown-outs, right in a stomach-churning row, at my mother's house, when my machine was plugged directly into the wall, toasted my power source... and a couple weeks later it went down. When I went to Radio Shack to see about one of those battery gizzies that won't let brown-outs reach your computer, the guy there freaked about what kind of monster-good power source had to be in my computer to have survived that even for a minute. There's still a chance I can get to a Mac genius to give it a new power source....

That's the ONLY thing that ever went wrong with my G5 iMac in the five years I had it. It would STILL be rocking if not for that apocalyptic electricity bullshit happening when I'd been too careless for a few days.

I know that replacing it turned into a nightmare for me, but Apple bent over backward to ease my misery, and they very seriously made good on the ordeal. I ended up with something quite more powerful and functional than I'd ordered to begin with, plus a free iPod Shuffle... and, bip-bam... I'm now working on a Mac that has not given me one moment of grief. I plugged it in and kazaaaaaaaart.

Everything looks a thousand percent better on a Mac, everything. It feels elegant, even when it's set up in the barn. It's not like having a small washing machine or a Cuisinart sitting on your desk. It actually makes yer desk look prettier. It's fun. It's intuitive. You can work your heart out on it and it never lets you down. I know there are guys out there adept at making their Macs crash, but that has to be a guy thing, that knack for finding the very least perceptible weakness and exploiting it and exploiting it and exploiting it until something finally blows, because a Mac has NEVER crashed on me, NEVER lost my stuff, NEVER refused to submit to the precise way I want it to act in front of me, and ALWAYS provided me with a way to get what I want, do what I want, with everything I do on it.

Snow Leopard came with a few minor glitches, and even those were correcting themselves instanter, and the updates to fix them have come with due dispatch. I know there are some scarily tolerant humans out there, who daily endure veritable Perseids of glitches and hassles and mistakes and insults and do-overs and faux pas and breakdowns without complaint, but for those of us who value every micron of serenity, there just can't possibly be anything better than life with a Mac. If this makes me a Moonie, so be it.
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26 January 2010

mac rulz

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I had a heck of a time getting a new Mac that acts like a Mac, and I think my old one just tanked at the extremely inopportune moment, with only the dregs of the last of the model I ordered left to send. Still, they made good on it, and I now have way more RAM, an impeccable monitor and enough hard drive to run the planet. If I could afford some toner for my printer, I'd be jake.

This sucker rocks so hard I can barely express it. There are still bugs in the Leopard OS, and I wish I had my elegant matte monitor still, but, well, I just don't know how to describe how much better it is to work on a Mac, even with Intel chips, than a PC. It's just stupid how vastly much better it is. Even people who want the PC because there are more programs for it are still outta their minds. Even with the big hairy old hassle I just went through, my years on a Mac have been utter serenity compared with my years on PCs. Whenever I need to do anything on anyone's PC it just doesn't stop freakin' me out how awful it is to compare, even when it's not malfunctioning... or not malfunctioning much... for a PC. It's just night and day. Night and day.
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12 December 2009

oh boy

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Building a data center, putting a video camera on the iPhone and approving iPhone apps with live video-streaming functionality are all precursor steps necessary for Apple to build for an always-connected, share-everything future.
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09 December 2009

the slightly psychedelic neck thing

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I am way so rockin' out while making this machine do stuff that made the last one lock up and honk at me. Doin' my stretches into my camera testing too. Looks like we get a spot of the psychedelic again when it's only the flash reaching the skin, but that's still a big improvement over the camera in the last one. Daylight and twilight are fine, but when it's full-on night time, still gotta try to smudge out the rainbow spots.... I'm glad I am a monkey woman, too....


Have I mentioned yet tonight how great the speakers are in this puppy?
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no. really. great speakers.

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really good speakers, too

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08 December 2009

almost confirmed

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The great psychedelic neck problem may actually be history... and I just got out of my semi-annual shower....

07 December 2009

high emotional noon

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I was reading this post, and those it links, when an email about a psychotic old friend came in. I was in the middle of expressing my agony in response when there was a loud pounding at my door. FedEx with my new replacement computer. Left Shanghai four days ago. Went to Anchorage, Memphis, Sacramento, Eureka and landed here in the middle of me flipping about all this... just about exactly at noon.

So I'm going to be quiet for the next little while, transferring everything to my new machine, but I will be in a hurry about all of it so I can get back online, searching for ways to turn it away from destruction, poring over all cyberspace for the tear in the fabric of delusion through which sense might shine at last.

01 December 2009

i woke up to pleasant surprises from apple

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I had begun to think Apple might not be Apple anymore, which was threatening to break my heart, but, here I am blearily reading emails from them that put me positive this was just a cosmic wrinkle and Apple is really Apple still after all.

I may live.

I'm sure our government has perpetrated all kine absolutely brain-powderizingly awful stuff today, but... well... guess what? I'm not going to look until after I go giddily beg use of a local fax machine and kick up my heels a little in this spurt of vitality from a sense of renewed hope.

Buy a Mac.

30 November 2009

we interrupt this program to announce -- updated

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... that 99 is in the middle of doing all kine heavy duty troubleshooting on her SECOND brand new iMac with a computer genius somewhere in Canada. So image manipulating capabilities and scores of other things are not happening until we get this figured out.

I have to spend most of my time trying to make the lockup-and-honking-at-me thing happen in "vanilla mode" and so who the heck knows WHAT will happen... or when....

While I'm away, or limping along, or flipping out... please alert the entire internet about my need for a wealthy socialist gentleman. This is not a drill.

XOXOXOX

[And, heck, give Robert Plant a listen on this one... since we're here anyway....]

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8:30pm -- By some miracle, I guess, it did not take me long to reproduce the problem in vanilla and got to talk to my tech genius again before he got off shift. They are sending me a bigger, faster, more gigs of RAM replacement... AND my tech genius will walk me through porting all my settings from this machine to that one... assuming, of course, it lives that long.

So. If I suddenly go silent for longer than usual, I'm dead in the water and waiting for my white knight.

I think, actually, that my hair has turned white today. I'm afraid to look. Anyway, now I have to run around and bump into walls and the post office and store and stuff before I completely lose track of everything.

08 October 2009

you know what? i'm not even going to gripe about my day....

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I got my replacement machine, and it took the whole day to deal with the switchover.... The old new one is all boxed back up and at least I can tell this monitor isn't as upsetting. This one on its brightest was dimmer than the other one on its dimmest... so maybe I won't be able to tell if anything's goofy with this one... ya know?

06 October 2009

just got my new two gig ipod shuffle

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It's a little over an inch and half long, half an inch wide and an eighth of an inch thick.

Whoa.

I got mine in basic chic matte black....

05 October 2009

when the air is hollow

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I'm sorry I'm being so boring today. I have too much craziness going on in my life and too little ability to hang with anything flashing in front of me by way of news. I'm a whippy, fizzy wreck today. My Zen went surfing or something and I only hope it will be back tomorrow.

Just in case you were dying to know, though, Ahmadinejad is not Jewish....

I'm sure that's a load off everyone's mind....

And Apple withdrew from the US Chamber of Commerce because of their anti-environmentalist activity... and so guess who's glad she's a Mac freak?

01 October 2009

apple is replacing my new mac

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Too many issues and a scary noise is developing... beginning to think it's the fan trying to go kittywampus on me....

23 September 2009

better to look good than feel good

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I'm really working hard back here to make this dual Intel chip version work as well as my Motorola chip iMac. I hate that it doesn't have the gorgeous matte screen. It's shiny and blares too much. Nothing is as subtle or well-constructed about it. There are numerous bugs in numerous new versions of software I've been using a long time. There are some new features that pretty much rock, or would if they hadn't thrown out some of the great ones from before. Just one for instance: I'm big on fooling with the gamma on images. It's not on my software anymore... or if it is, they've hidden it.

The thing that is bothering me the most is the darkness of colors near the top of any window. The color of my sideways masthead was nearly black at the very top, and truing up as you went down a couple letters, and then going to too bright by the time you got down a couple more. So I had to take that off for now. It was making me mad.

[Update: I figured if I turned it black I could go back sideways. This involved downloading Sun Microsystems' Open Office because my new Pages program is not changing background colors for some unknown reason, and because my Mircrosoft Office is in my dead computer. This puppy is FREE and... well... seems to have just done better by me than either of the ones I paid for.... Anyway, we're back sideways, but just in black so I don't go postal about this before I can talk reasonably with someone at Apple....]

I'm going to call them and see if there isn't an adjustment that gets rid of this obnoxious problem... or if they will send me a new one that doesn't do that.

So. I paid $800 less this time, ostensibly for much more Mac, but really this is a lesser machine, even as it looks so casual and yet so, so chic, and it is so fast it makes my head swim. Struth, dudes. I'd finally gotten used to computers being so much slower than my brain... maybe even let my brain get slowed by them... but this one's getting on toward the speed of thought. Startling.

It is my theory that the bean counters have been screwing with stuff while Steve Jobs has been too ill to prevent them. I hope he feels hale enough to crack the whip now!

09 September 2009

01 September 2009