Month: January 2020

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So This Happened Today

It's not like I woke up this morning and said, "I'm going to buy some ridiculously expensive headphones today," even though they'd been on my radar since they came out a week after I bought my original series 2 AirPods.

I bought a pair for Ben for Christmas, not knowing if he'd actually like them or not. He'd been having so many issues with his own bluetooth earbuds that I figured it couldn't hurt. And since he'd just come back into the Apple fold with a new phone, I knew—based on the experience with my AirPods—they'd work flawlessly. (One of the few "it just works" things about Apple that actually does work the way it's supposed to.) Unfortunately they were on backorder and just finally arrived this past week. At first he didn't want them because of the cost and because he didn't need them. "You take them. You listen to your headphones much more than I do."

Well TLDR, he finally acquiesced to my demands that he keep them and he's loving them. I was still happy with my original AirPods except when I tried to use them in noisy environments (like Starbucks, where they still seem to think the music needs to be at disco volume). The noise cancellation feature—which by all accounts was awesome—was reason enough for me to lust for my own pair. Unfortunately, they've remained on backorder, and the fact no matter when I ordered them they wouldn't arrive until next month was reason enough for me to hold off buying them.

That was, until today. Out of curiosity I went online and checked availability. Still showing next month for a home delivery date, but they were in stock and available for immediate pickup at not just one, but both the Scottsdale Apple stores. We were sitting in Starbucks at the time and I waved to Ben across the table to get his attention  (because the noise cancellation is that good) and after plucking one bud from his ear, I asked, 'Wanna drive over to Scottsdale?"

And the rest, as they say, is history.

UPDATE 1/12: In use, the noise cancellation is AMAZING. It easily blocks out 98% of the horrific music at our local Starbucks.

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Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice…

I have a real problem with Instagram ads.

When they first appeared in my timeline they weren't all that offensive. In fact, I ordered a phone case through one of them.

Said phone case never shipped, and the only way I was able to get my money back was through my credit card company.

Since then I've been very gun shy about buying anything via Instagram, but last fall I bought a T-shirt that actually shipped:

Maybe things were looking up. Still, that memory of the phone case stayed with me, and it was only reluctantly I ordered this ODBII reader about a month ago though an ad on Instagram. I'd had a reader a couple years ago but it's long since been displaced, and the ad showed some amazing software for my phone that looked really useful in monitoring what was going on in Anderson.

The first red flag was notification that it was shipping directly from China, but I'd ordered other things (admittedly through Amazon) that shipped from China and never had a problem. After a small delay, it finally arrived last week. It was as described in the Instagram ad except for one glaring omission: you need to jailbreak your phone to install the native software.

WTF?

First of all, I'm not going to jailbreak my phone, and even if I was willing to do that, I'm not going to jailbreak it and install an unknown piece of software from China. I'm an I.T. professional. Call me…cautious.

I wrote the company asking for a refund—knowing damn well I'd never hear back from them or end up with some lame excuses and this would probably be another credit card company refund. Additionally I starting going through my feed labeling every damn ad with "scam or misleading." I'd had enough.

Surprisingly, I received an email from the company this evening. They included a different QR code from the one printed on the box to obtain the software. The QR code took me to a web page with links (all to legitimate App Store offerings) for a dozen or more different apps that work with the hardware I purchased.

I haven't had time to check it out, and I'm not going to stop flagging the flood of advertising spam in my Instagram feed, but this may yet work out and I won't have to get my credit card company involved at all.

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Quote of the Day

Donald Trump is not simply stupid. His idiocy is a complex system of ignorance, narcissism, and xenophobia wrapped in a web of insecurity and covered by a thick layer of self-loathing, afloat in a spiraling ever-widening miasma of dementia." ~ Middle Age Riot on Twitter

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The United States is a Lot Like Apple

Some commute thoughts from yesterday afternoon:

The United States is a lot like Apple. Once it had a really good product that everyone wanted. It was high quality, intelligent, well-thought out, and built well. Around the world everyone wanted to be like the United States. Like Apple, the US had a rough patch. (The US had the Civil War; Apple the John Scully years.) Both made their way through and came out the other side better than they were before. They both went on to become the beacons of excellence that everyone aspired to.

And then something happened. Suddenly both the United States and Apple decided they were the only ones who knew how things should be done and felt that because of their market share they could dictate the direction the rest of the world had to follow. It was hubris, pure and simple. We're The United States! We're Apple! If you don't like it, you don't have to follow but get the hell out of our way if you don't.

In a sane world, people would abandon these two entities completely, but billions were still addicted to the idea of both Apple and the United States—if not their current state—so with a only a few exceptions, the world still followed along—in some cases making the same foolish mistakes the US and Apple did in their "product lines" did because the neither couldn't be wrong…right?

I'm not directly comparing Tim Cook and the Orange Shitstain in the White House, by any means but I can see the correlation between bad decisions and the unrest we're seeing internationally. When Apple stopped including built-in floppy drives, it was fine. We knew it was outdated technology and needed to go. But then it arbitrarily got rid of industry-standard ports, forcing us into dongle hell. It stripped out the beloved Magsafe connector, and started soldering SSD and RAM onto the motherboards.

And then along came the butterfly keyboard.

While I can't draw specific parallels between any of these Apple blunders with things the United States has done over the last 70 or so years, you get where I'm heading with this. The good ol' "too big to fail" scenario.

Faced with the reality of what was happening to their reputation (not to mention their bottom line), Apple finally opened its eyes to what was happening and has made efforts to correct course. The question is, will the United States have its own 16-inch MacBook Pro/Mac Pro mea culpa moment or will it continue to stubbornly produce its own butterfly keyboard until it goes out of business or is crushed by a competitor?

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The Problems of Fandom

The trouble with having a rather prominent Doctor Who tattoo is that strangers you encounter expect you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every episode for the last 50 years. Hell, I don't even have an encyclopedic knowledge of the last 5 episodes!