Walt's Corner

Bottle of Bayer Aspirin: $3.00

Tin of Altoid mints: $0.99

Getting your wife to chew on an aspirin tablet thinking it was a mint: Priceless.

Carol mentioned that she would like some Aspirin. I thought, no problem. I can stop by Walgreens and get her some. So I did. She was at work, and doesn‘t really have anyplace to put it. My quick thinking made me realize that I had this thin metal container that my mints are in. An Altoid tin. Problem solved. It was one of those mini tins. about a quarter of an inch thick, and a couple inches long, and about an inch and a half wide (yeah, I’d never make it in a metric world).

I emptied the mints from the tin and refilled the tin with about a dozen aspirin tablets. More than enough to last her today, and small enough to easily fit in her pocket. I locate her at her work place and and give her the tin. I tell her that it’s aspirin in my mint tin so that it will fit in her pocket. To my surprise and utter respect, she pulled out an aspirin right there and started chewing on it. I tell you what. I have a deep respect for anyone who can chew on an aspirin tablet as though it were candy. I bow before your superiority. Then she had this horrible look on her face. She almost puked right there on the spot. One of her coworkers asked her if she was all right when he saw the look on her face. When she told him what I did, he wanted to shake my hand. He told everyone how cool I was for slipping my wife an aspirin making her think it was a mint.

What happened was this. She thought I had said that I found some aspirin that was mint flavored. Big difference. Anyways. I couldn’t have played a mean trick on her like that if I had wanted to. That was the perfect psych. Had I thought of it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp4Bs-HeOFU

A little background on this video, then check it out. A student calls the house of an administrator of his school asking why it wasn’t a snow day. Nobody answered so the question was left in the form of voicemail. The student received a voicemail of his own from the wife of the administrator. The video above is the voicemail along with a list of suggested reading material for the wife. Seems appropriate to me. Who’s the real child? You decide. You can check out the news story here if you like.

You can argue all day long over whether or not the kid should have called in the first place. I don’t think that really matters. It was a listed number. He is a kid. All kids practically have cell phones today; it’s the instant communication age. He did use his cell phone at a school where cells are prohibited, so there is definite fault there, and probably why he received Saturday detention for it. The wife has no excuse though. I think the correct response would have been to just let the administrator handle it. The punitive results would have been the same and the embarrassment the wife provided wouldn’t have happened. And you wouldn’t have been reading about it here.

Remember when NBC’s Zucker and Dear Leader Steve got into a pissing contest last fall? It went something like this:

NBC: You make too much money off your iTunes eco-system. We want a percentage of all sales of your iPod and Apple TV and iPhones. We want to charge more money for what we sell on iTunes.

DL: siooma.

NBC: What?

DL: siooma.

NBC: What does that mean? That doesn’t even make sense!

DL: siooma.

NBC: Fine, then we won’t renew our contract in December to sell our shows on iTunes.

DL: Fine with me. Oh, about selling on iTunes – I won’t let you sell any new content from your TV shows that start new this TV season, even though your contract doesn’t expire until December.

NBC: pft.

DL: You’ll be back.

Well, maybe it didn’t go down exactly like that, but that’s pretty close to what was said. I might have thrown in one too many “sioomas.” Then came last week’s Stevenote. Dear Leader talked about movie rentals, and how all major and most minor movie studios were on board. That means Universal is on board. Who owns NBC? Universal. After I saw that, I told Carol that it wouldn’t be long before NBC came crawling back with it’s tail tucked between its legs, asking – nay… begging – to be able to sell its content on iTunes once again. And now we read this article. How long before we see NBCs crap on iTunes again?

I’m not the first to make the observation that most tech rags (magazines) are becoming obsolete. But I recently cancelled my subscription to Macworld Magazine. To be honest, I didn’t really cancel. Technically I failed to renew. In my mind I cancelled it. I also cancelled (for real) my subscription to eWeek over a year ago for the same reasons. There simply is no new information. By the time I receive the magazine I have already digested all the news that was in it. Either by that magazine’s own website or from other like-minded websites – many of which are the sources for the writers/editors of the magazines I subscribed to.

I held on to my Macworld subscription for one reason this last year: I was feeling generous. Or maybe I liked looking at pictures of the iPhone while I was waiting for it to become available. It stayed open to some prime pictures, like a Playboy centerfold, only not.

With quality news readers increasingly adorned with more features and power, and now available for free* to anyone for the asking, the situation is only going to get worse.

As I see it, there are two causes for this. One is a secondary effect to the first. The first being the information being available far in advance from the rag going on sale. The second is the fact that the average audience is getting far more intelligent than the same audience 10 or even 5 years ago. This leap in average intelligence is because all this information is available on the web.

Here is an exaggerated yet perfect example. The author of this story is very young, clocking in at about 15 or 16 years old, so he has somewhat of an excuse for this poorly researched article. But sometimes it is easier to use an exaggeration in order to see a point. The crux of his story is this: damn Apple for only offering HD (high definition) rental content through the Apple TV and not through iTunes on your computer. He goes on to say that Apple is money-hungry and wants people to buy an Apple TV in order to view HD content.

If he were to do a little research instead of instantly whining about Apple he would come up with his answer. He found out almost immediately by his commenters. When I first read his article, I thought man, I’m going to have to find those other tech articles explaining why, and then write a comment to his story explaining it to him. Then I read the other comments and everyone else already had it covered. And then it really hit me. How intelligent, or at least tech savvy, the average readers have become. Most of the readers (or at least of the ones that commented) already knew the reason why and told this “Macintosh news info source” a very basic reason why something he was complaining about was happening.

Macuser is a dependent child of Macworld. Most of these guys at Macuser are also editors of one sort or another over at Macworld, or what they refer to as “the mothership.” So this provides me with just another example of why the need for me to keep a Macworld subscription, or any other tech magazine for that matter, just isn’t necessary anymore.

*Of course it’s not really free. They give you software, you let them analyze and use your anonymous and aggregated trends in pie charts to show larger paying companies so that those larger paying companies can tailor their offerings to their specific target audiences.

Now that the Reality Distortion Field has worn off the Stevenote, let’s take a look at what Macworld brought me this year.

First we received some really nice statistics. Leopard sold more than 5 million copies in the first three months. Wow. Astonishing. Lumped into number one was Time Capsule. Time Machine is part of Leopard, and Time Capsule is intended to seamlessly back up (up to) 50 macs on your network. Not so much important to me. I’m already happy with my current Time Machine setup. Maybe in a couple years or more I’ll be ready for this.

Second, Steve talked about the iPhone. 4 million iPhones sold to date. That’s an average of 20 thousand sold – per day. Again, wow! He also mentioned the SDK that will be available in February, and talked about the iPhone update that would be available today. Nice. This second part of the Stevenote makes me pretty excited. I have already updated my iPhone with the latest software. The the updated maps application is awesome. He also talked about the iPod Touch. That part doesn’t really show up on my “wow” scale since I have the iPhone.

Third, Steve introduced rentals on iTunes. Now this is what I’ve been waiting for! Now my Apple TV will be used twice as much. Free software update coming to the Apple TV within a couple weeks. Apple TV will become my source for pay per view. Sweet. Watch the movies on my iPod, computer, iPhone, or Apple TV. Keep the movie for up to 30 days, and once you start to watch it you have 24 hours in which to finish it. Sounds great to me!

Number four, and final – the MacBook Air. Go ahead. Check out that link. I’ll wait. The world’s thinnest notebook computer. .7 inch thick on one end, and .1 inch thick on the other. It does have it’s compromises though. Battery is not user-replaceable, therefore no swapping when one battery dies, like you can on a standard notebook. Slower processor. No optical drive (CD/DVD). No Firewire ports. This machine is not intended to replace your Mac, whatever flavor it is that you have, but is meant to augment it. It’s also available with a smaller hard drive that is really nothing more than a RAM disk. That baby will run you over $3,000.00. But I guarantee you it will be lightning fast with that flash drive.

Back in the day, and by the day I mean in the mid 90s, I would partition off some of my RAM into a virtual hard disk. It was super fast. I eventually created a startup script that would create the RAM drive, copy over the necessary files for the application I wanted to run from this RAM disk, and start the application. This will be similarly as fast, I’m sure.

Tonight I rented a movie just to see if it would play on the Apple TV yet. No dice. Guess I have to wait for the Apple TV update. It does play on the computer and my iPhone though.