Zzot!

Moving, at its best, is organized chaos. I’ve never been particularly good at it, and I’ve had to rely on friends from time to time to get me through — this one was no exception. A sign of a good friend is that they help you move, and then help you again the next time you move, even though they remember just how much help you needed the last time.

Our clever plan was to take Friday off to meet the movers, so we’d still have the 3-day weekend to start unpacking, finish off with the old apartment, and generally try and keep ourselves sane. I don’t know how much of that we accomplished, but all the stuff we wanted to keep is here, a lot of stuff we didn’t want went into the dumpster, I turned in the keys I’d been issued, and our cats have started to recognize enough furniture that they’re calming down — a little.

I don’t know what I’ll do differently the next time, but I hope that I have a much smaller pile of stuff I haven’t gotten around to getting rid of. We have a list of things we want to do better here than we did there, and some idea how to accomplish a few of them.

On the plus side, when we look out a window now, we see grass and trees. Real grass and real trees with birds and squirrels in them, not the carefully orchestrated 1000 square feet of grass with a few trees that never lets you forget you live in an industrial park.

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I use my PowerBook everywhere — including at work, where I am provided a perfectly functional Windows box to work on. One of the ongoing concerns of anyone who works similarly is security; how do you minimize the damage if some jerk swipes your computer?

So, having presented the background material, my pet-peeve every time I go through any list of common security precautions is screen locking. The little checkbox in the Security preference pane controls both screen-saver passwords and wake-from-sleep passwords; I only want to turn on one of those.

The thing is, my PowerBook starts the screen saver on me a lot when I’m still (more or less) working with it; when that happens, it irritates me to no end that I have to type a password, which ultimately leads to me turning the setting off again, even though I don’t want just any goofball to open up my PowerBook and start messing with my stuff.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. My preference lately has been to turn screen savers off completely and fiddle directly with the “Power Saver” settings on all my machines. For my PowerBook I’m going to try having the least CPU-hungry screen saver (which appears to be Computer Name) activate a bit after the display goes to sleep, and check that password preference. In theory, I’ll react to the display sleep before the screen lock if I’m still there. In practice, who knows?

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I drove home from work yesterday, much the same as any other day. What makes this noteworthy is that I’ve been driving a rental car for two weeks — I last drove my own car to work two weeks ago today. There’s something mildly unsettling about sitting in my own vehicle, the one I picked out, paid a lot of money for, and have no regrets about, and yet having it seem somehow unfamiliar.

Progressive has a repair depot in the area, so I drove my car in there after starting my claim and drove right out again 15 minutes later in the rental — they have an on-site Enterprise car-rental. I wasn’t at fault in the accident, and our coverage waives the deductible in such cases, and rental costs are also covered, so figure I saved about $838 today between the rental and the deductible.

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So, I was reading this story on what might threaten iTMS, and what Apple might have up its sleeve to respond to such threats, and a quote in the middle really jumped out at me:

Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates followed with a few jabs of his own — proclaiming that mobile phones should replace the iPod as the primary device for listening to music, and hinting that Apple shouldn’t get too comfortable with its current position.

Now, I heard that Bill Gates said Apple shouldn’t get too comfortable on top, and I have no reason to think he wasn’t implying what that says he was implying — aside from it being a really dumb idea. I know a lot of people with iPods. I know a lot of people with mobile phones. All of the people in the first group are also members of the second group, so I guess iPod users largely already have mobile phones they could use instead.

The thing is, an iPod is a great mobile music player — I don’t know anyone who has a mobile phone that’s even a great phone. Is there really a growing demand from people who want to replace their lousy phone and good music player with one device that’s both a lousy phone and a lousy music player? Even if there is, who would want to be the major player in that end of the market?

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I had no idea. Don’t get me wrong — some of it I expected or even predicted.¹ Did everyone turn into movie critics when panther released? Okay, so they probably did. Maybe I just repressed it.

Here’s something a little tiny bit less dramatic; the release itself. Not the software, mind you, I’m talking about standing outside of an Apple Store waiting for 6:00 PM local time and making small wagers with the nearby Mac-ites about what lame melodrama a couple of the employees will do this year thinking they’re clever.² Anyone who guessed they’d just blare Eye of the Tiger really loudly as they opened the door won some slightly weathered Panther dog-tags from the person next to them.

I was there with a friend — our respective Fiancés stared mockingly at us from the top floor for a couple minutes, then ran off. There’s a tradition of sorts at these things — spot the posers. Why someone would pretend to be a Mac user is beyond me, but there they are anyway. Even the techies look like Mac-using techies; we must have an aura or something. A couple years ago, that same friend and I were walking into the very same Apple Store when I wondered aloud whether I was looking more and more like a Mac-user by the day; my hair was pretty long at the time.

Anyway, this Friday one of the “employees” really stuck out. I thought he was swaggering way too much; like a roadie who is in it to look important setting up for the band, rather than for love or money. My friend thought it was rather odd that he had an iPod Shuffle and regular iPod hanging on a cord around his neck. You don’t really think people work at an Apple Store because they pay well, do you?

The one thing I really didn’t get was the other people in the mall. It’s 5:45 PM on a Friday night, the Apple Store is the only store in the mall that’s closed, there’s a line of people in front of it, and you have neither a Mac nor an iPod; do you really think that when you ask us what we’re waiting for, it’ll be something you care about? Sheesh!

1. Granted, my prediction was subject to my NDA with the Apple developer program — so there’s no record of this anywhere. [↩]
2. For Panther, and I swear I’m not making this up, two idiots burst out of the stairwell at one end of the mall a couple minutes before opening, one of them carrying cheap briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Sure, I believe you crammed the many dozens of boxed copies of the OS into a briefcase and set them up all over the store in two minutes without mangling them all — really. [↩]

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