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Teh St00pid Is Not Just Limited to Microsoft Users

Recently I started reading posts over at Apple’s MacBook Air Support Forum for, as they say, “shits and giggles.”

OMG.

Do people really buy this machine without knowing its capabilities (and, more importantly, its limitations)? Apparently so.

Some examples (verbatim):

  • I have sims 2 disks. And i recently got a macbook air which i realised doesnt have a disk holder thing. I dont want to illegally download it. Does anyone have any ideas so i can play it on my laptop?
  • How can I add a firewire port to MacBook Air?
  • I am confused about the new MacBook Air. It would appear it does not have an internal DVD/CD drive as most computers do. Does this mean after the price of this Mac Air I still would have to purchase an external DVD/CD player to load software or play DVD’s and CD’s ??? That seems like technology is going backwards and the owners just want more money.
  • i recentely brought a apple macbook air 13 inch 128gb and am running low on gb. Is there anyway to obtain more as even software updates are taking too much gb up!

Do people just walk into an Apple Store and say, “Oooh! Pretty!” and drop $1200 without researching the product first?

Knowing that the internals of the Air are not upgradable, I anguished for months before I got mine.

Will 4 GB RAM be enough? (Yes, because I didn’t see any real difference when I upgraded my old 4GB MacBook Pro to 8GB.)

More importantly, will having only 256GB of storage be sufficient? (I had a 320GB hard drive on the MBP that was only about 2/3 full, so yeah…after some much needed archiving of old stuff to an external drive it was more than sufficient.)

Will not having a disk player impact the usability? (I used the disk slot on the MBP only a dozen times to install software, and only once to watch a movie. Worst case scenario I have an external DVD drive that I can pull out of storage for occasional use or drop $79 for Apple’s proprietary player if it ever becomes an ongoing need.)

Ben can attest to the fact that I had several rough weeks adapting to the Apple ecosystem when I first abandoned Microsoft, so I can’t read the forums with a totally jaundiced eye, but some of the postings tell me that no matter how intuitive or user-friendly Apple makes their products, there will always be a certain demographic—the same demographic that undoubtedly would quickly embrace a product like pre-chewed food—that simply will never get it…

Because, as Ben and I are fond of yelling out the car window, “THINKING IS HARD!”

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Squee!

I was raised in a very design-oriented family.  My dad worked as an architect before his retirement, and my mom was an interior designer, so I’ve always had a bit of an an eye for design.

I had hoped to follow in my dad’s footsteps and become an architect, but for a variety of reasons college and I just didn’t work out and I never got my degree. I regret it a bit, but it’s all water under the bridge at this point.

My failure to get an architectural degree did not, however, prevent me from getting into the business. Before I quit to go into a career of  babysitting PC tech support, I had worked as an architectural drafter for about seventeen years.  Even today there are still times when I sorely miss it and question my wisdom having given it up. When I was producing architectural drawings, I always felt like I’d accomplished something at the end of the day. And when the things I drew were actually built…it was a tremendous source of personal pride and satisfaction.

During my junior year of high school I was perusing one of my dad’s architectural magazines, and I ran across a spread documenting a new development on the Chicago shoreline called Harbor Point.

I was in love.

This was my high school vision of the future, what living in the 21st century would be like.

Somehow in those pre-internet days, I managed to locate the address for the sales office and wrote to request more information.  They sent me a beautiful portfolio that included  an overall building floor plan, prices, and brochures for each of the individual units. As I recall the units ranged in price from $50-$70K (a lot for those days).  Unfortunately, everything except the overall floor plan was thrown out in one of my various purges. How it managed to survive all these years speaks volumes about the persistence of youthful dreams, I suppose.

 (click to embiggen)

Back in the day, I often dreamt of owning one of the units with the curving glass windows, overlooking the cityscape far below, lights dimmed low and jazz softly playing in the background. (I seem to recall George Benson’s Breezin’ being the soundtrack at that time.)

It’s still a beautiful building in my opinion, and with the advent of the internet finding pictures of it was fairly easy.  But it wasn’t until the other day that on a whim I actually found pictures of what the interiors looked like. Squee! Apparently there are a quite a few units available for sale. Despite the rather dated luminous ceilings in the kitchens, it would appear they’ve aged fairly well.

These units so fired my imagination that several years after receiving the floor plans I designed a house around one of the curving-window units. The layout was pill shaped, raised one floor off the ground (to provide garage space) with a central atrium that I envisioned being open to a huge skylight above. The hand drawn paper architectural floor plan is one of very few out the dozens of dream houses I designed over the years that’s survived.

If I ever won the lottery, I’d snatch one of those bitches up in a heartbeat (most are selling for well under $500K), even if it meant only living there part time. (I can barely tolerate a Denver winter. Can you imagine me in Chicago?!? Me neither.)

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Willful Ignorance

This was posted by a friend on Facebook:

TRUE STORY: I ran into an acquaintance at the grocery story today that I hadn’t seen in several years. Somehow she got onto the subject of politcs and said, “President Obama just wants to make everything in this country Socialist, example: that Obamacare.” I looked at her and asked, “Didn’t you move into that Senior Federally funded low-rent housing a few years ago, aren’t you on Medicare (she’s 74), and you just used your food stamp card to pay for groceries – those are all “Socialist programs.” She replied, “That’s different!” I asked her how is that different, and she just looked at me, huffed and said, “You’re just a liberal!” and walked away. Hmmmmm.

This is the image that immediately came to mind:


“Does not compute…DOES NOT COMPUTE!!!”

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Fuck This Shit

It’s been in the 70s and 80s for over a week now and the trees everywhere are in full bloom. Then this happens.

I seriously hate this place.

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Road Trip!

Ben has this week off for spring break, and I’ve finally accumulated enough PTO to allow a couple days away from the madness that has become my workplace (more on that some other time). So what were we going to do with this newfound freedom from responsibility?

Road Trip!

But where?  Four days is not enough time to go back to Phoenix, or even to St. Louis—a destination we’ve had our eye on since I passed through a few years ago on my way to bury my mom’s ashes in Wisconsin.

One place I’ve wanted to see in person since the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. With all the years I lived in Phoenix or the Bay Area, it was always too far to justify the time and expense. Even when I went to Yellowstone back in 2007, visiting would’ve been a stretch since it was on the opposite side of the state.

But lo and behold, it was only about a six hour drive from Denver!

Day One: Where the Buffalo Roam

My initial impressions of the part of Wyoming we passed through? Lots and lots of rolling hills covered in light yellow grass and bovines of one type or another. Ben spent a lot of the drive today napping; he didn’t miss much.

One highlight however were the bright red roads in certain areas. Ben asked if they were paved with baby’s blood, and I responded, “Well, Dick Cheney is from here…”

Maintenance of this section of highway proudly sponsored by the Church of Satan.

Tomorrow should be much more interesting.

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Quote of the Day

“A hoodie makes a black teen look like a criminal just like a suit and glasses make Geraldo Rivera look like a journalist.” ~ source unknown

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