I just don't understand traffic

Yesterday my wife and I went up to Anaheim and I usually dread the trip to Orange County as it is completely unpredictable as to how long it will take. The traffic can be just awful or we can breeze right through. The trip yesterday was an easy 90 minutes each way; going up, we saw several backups and several accidents which, if we were caught in that, would have easily added 30-45 minutes to the trip. All my worries about the drive will be eliminated when I get my personal flying machine.

Is there an upside to May gray?

May and June are very depressing months in San Diego due to the weather. There is a marine layer that hides the sun for much of the day; it's a bit clearer away from the coast where I live, but still the overcast makes it kind of depressing. (May is called May Gray and June is June Gloom). However, this year my attitude is a bit different. The marine layer keeps it cooler and makes it easier to run. A slight increase in temperature wears me down quickly when running. Less than 2 weeks until the marathon and I actually hope is it kind of overcast for it otherwise I'll be going real slow the last few miles!

I'm not a super dork

I think that the Apple stores are pretty neat, well designed, and promote a good shopping experience. However, I can't say that I'd wait in line overnight like these dorks just to be some of the first people to goto the Apple store in New York. Some customers came from Texas, Scotland, and California to the opening. I sure hope they didn't come just for the store opening, but the video clip sure makes it sound like they are king dorks. Do I care if I see Steve Jobs? No, he may run a company that has cool products, and he may be a good speaker, but I could care less if I see him in person.

Apple always blames bad RAM

As I was talking to the guy at The Chip Merchant, we both said that Apple (and the Apple store) immediately say that bad third party RAM is to blame. While it is quite easy to blame RAM, it is such a cop out. For awhile now, my PowerBook's DVD drive has been flakey, probably due to dust on the lens. However, I've needed the machine all the time, so I never sent it in for repair. Now that I have a spare machine, I decided to clean off the PowerBook and reinstall the OS. Due to the flakey DVD drive, it took a lot of tries and attempts at blowing the dust out of the drive to get the computer to read the install DVD. So, I called up AppleCare to see about replacing the DVD drive. They had me do the usual BS steps of using Disk Utility to repair the disk and repair permissions and then zap the PRAM. Of course, I knew this wouldn't help as I probably already cleaned out the crap for now. The next thing they asked was if I had extra RAM in the machine. As I'm not one to lie, I said yes, knowing full well that RAM was not the cause of this problem. The lady on the phone was nice enough to send out the repair box anyway and let me "test" the machine without the RAM to see if the problem persisted. Yeah, sure the problem is caused by faulty RAM that I've had in the machine for almost 2 years.

I'll send the machine in for repair when I get the box as it is still covered under AppleCare and the DVD drive either needs to be replaced or cleaned. I realize that the support reps work from a script, but given the age of the machine (almost 2 years old), isn't it quite possible that the drive needs a cleaning?