For Hanukah, my parents gave me and my brother-in-law a trip to the USS Midway Museum. Today was the day that we visited it and got to try out a flight simulator. My father took us and I think we were all pretty impressed with the carrier. The flight simulator was amusing, but our flying skills are pretty bad so we saw a lot of nothing.I went a bit trigger happy and managed to take 66 pictures in just a few hours. I took pretty random pictures, but some are pretty neat. I’ve put them all in a gallery for everyone’s viewing pleasure.
Tax Refunds
Why does it seem that many people are excited to get tax refunds? H&R Block is advertising a double your refund back giveaway implying that their customers get tax refunds. If someone gets a tax refund, it means they paid the government too much tax. The government got to use that money instead of the individual using it. While the amount of interest on most people’s refund doesn’t amount to much, it is the principal that matters. I haven’t gotten a refund in years and I like it that way. The goal is to pay as close to possible as the actual tax bill as possible without going over. People shouldn’t be excited about refunds.
Driving in Snow
It’s been a number of years since I’ve driven in snow and I had the opportunity again this weekend while we visited the San Jacinto Mountains. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience as my wheels were spinning a little; luckily I wasn’t going fast and was able to recover quickly. However, it is definitely a reason to get a four wheel drive vehicle if I plan on coming up to the snow more often than once every few years.
Cell phones glued to people’s ears
I understand how much of a tool a cell phone can be, but can’t people go a few hours without using them? I got on the plane to come home yesterday and this lady who is yapping away on her phone sits down next to me. She continues to make calls until the doors are closed including during the time that the flight attendant is making the safety briefing for those of us in the emergency exit row. Then as we’re getting off the plane, she starts making more calls and takes her sweet time getting off the plane and going down the jetway. If she wants to talk, wait until we get off the jetway, move to the side, or speed up so people don’t have to pass her.
Uggh.
Bad drivers
One of the nicest things about being in a big city for most of the week and being able to rely on public transportation (I used BART to and from the Oakland airport) is that I didn’t have to drive for a few days. It is such a relief to not have to deal with bad drivers. Within 10 minutes of me getting back into my car after the trip, I was almost hit by 2 drivers. The first driver decided he wanted to merge into me and then cut over 3 lanes. He got honked at for being an idiot. The second driver missed the big red stop sign on the entrance ramp to Pacific Highway. I saw the stop sign, saw the speed at which he was travelling, and knew he’d blow right through the stop sign. Geez. I’m not saying I’m a perfect driver, but at least I’m paying attention and try to merge without ticking off other drivers.
Hand washing after using the bathroom
This past week while at Macworld, I saw a number of men use the restroom and then walk out without washing their hands. This is beyond disgusting; I can’t understand how/why people do it when there are sinks with soap and towels right there. Some of the men were in suits. Yuck.
While exiting the bathroom, I only open the door using a paper towel (or my shirt sleeve if a towel isn’t around) knowing that men use the bathroom and then open the door with their hands.
Macworld – Day 3
Day 3 started out with me crashing a customer’s Treo. He was complaining that the PhoneCallDB file wouldn’t backup and would hang the sync. So I thought that purging the call history (which uses the PhoneCallDB database) would help out. So, I purged the call history for calls older than 1 week. His device immediately reset and then wouldn’t start up again. After a few minutes, he was able to get it running again, but the phone didn’t work. He kept blaming me and our software and didn’t understand that his problems were most likely caused by a corrupt database which clearly (in my mind and the mind of one of my colleagues) is evident by this chain of events.
Lessons learned: 1. Never touch a customer’s device; let the customer screw up his/her own device. 2. Give customers ideas on how to fix the problems, but don’t have them try the ideas in front of you. Let them wait until they get home so that if they have problems, I don’t have to hear about them.
Before the show I picked up a copy of iLife ’06 at the Apple Store. I knew that I’d pay an extra $0.39 by buying it in San Francisco (8.25% sales tax vs. 7.75% in San Diego), but I easily saved that in gas. I’ve only played with it for a few minutes and will have more to say later. Update went fairly smoothly except I was impatient (install took 45 minutes) so I launched the new iPhoto after it got installed, but before everything else was installed. This seemed to confuse things as my dock disappeared at the end of the install to add the new icons, but never came back. I had to restart to clear things up. Maybe I should report it to Apple and demand my money back because I didn’t pay to be a beta tester 🙂 (That’s a reference to some users I deal with who complain about every little thing and except free stuff.)
I had a chance to walk around the show floor a little yesterday and I just wasn’t all that impressed. I’m not sure if I was just too exhausted to see what was neat or I really don’t care. I played around with a MacBook for a few minutes (the Apple rep at the particular demo station I went to said that he loved our software which made my head swell a little) and must say that the specs on the new machine are much more impressive on paper than in real life. The big way to demonstrate it was faster was to open up a video iChat with multiple machines (of course all were connected over gigabit ethernet, but the point was to show how fast the machine could handle the multiple video feeds). This worked well and apparently doesn’t work with the current generation of PowerBooks. I say apparently because I’ve only been part of a video iChat with more than one person once; that was when the Mark/Space Sales/Marketing guy brought me into an iChat with Seal (the singer); it didn’t work well because there wasn’t enough bandwidth to make it useful. Other than the video stuff, launching applications was a little faster (these were native Intel application), but it definitely wasn’t 4 times faster. This leads to the conclusion that the bottleneck isn’t the processor, it is probably I/O (hard drive), video, etc. I’m now less excited about getting one and can wait without feeling computer envy.
Three days of talking to people sure does wear me out. Good thing I go home today and am only on the show floor for a few hours.
Tech support for Sinbad
At the end of yesterday’s show (6 pm), a man comes up to the booth and says that his friend, Sinbad, has a support question and wants to know if I can talk to him on the phone. He dials Sinbad, hands the phone to me and I gave Sinbad some help with his issue. Do I think it really was Sinbad? Absolutely. I know that Sinbad is a Mac user and other Mark/Space people told me he stopped by the both last year. Kind of cool talking to a celebrity and helping him with a problem; however, I was a bit nervous.
A homeless guy with technology
We were walking back from dinner and I see a homeless guy sitting in a doorway in a sleeping bag. He had his iPod on and was playing on his PSP. It was one of the strangest sights I’ve seen in a long time.
Macworld – Day 2
Another long day at the show; great feedback from customers and the day was topped off with dinner with members of the Sync Services development team and other companies doing Sync Services. I’m quite excited as I see Sync Services the future to synchronization on the Mac.