A few thoughts, as I sit here waiting for the cable guy to finish drilling holes in my walls...
Adding a den? Much as I don't like to comment on rumors (well, not too often, anyway), the one about Apple closing down its flagship Apple Store in Palo Alto for renovations, and temporarily relocating the store to a venue a half a mile away in the mean time, has really piqued my curiosity. What on earth are they doing to it, that's going to take so long that they have to set up shop in an alternate location in the mean time? Or is it just that Apple Stores (or perhaps the Palo Alto store in particular) have become such valuable revenue centers that Apple doesn't want to be without one of them even temporarily? I can't wait to hear more about this story.
Live and learn: At this point, I've been around the broadband block enough times to know that the only proper way to get a cable modem installed for use with your wireless router is to follow these three steps:
1) hide your wireless router in the closet
2) let the installer guy connect the modem directly to the computer
3) wait til he leaves, then get out the router and spend eight seconds connecting it to the modem yourself
The broadband companies (or at least the ones I've dealt with) could care less whether you use a router, whether it's wireless, or just how many computers you might be splitting your signal among. The one thing they do care about is that none of their technicians ever has to touch your router.
The ignorant never die, they just get offended: Fark.com, my favorite not-necessarily-the-news site, ran a headline the other day that read "British WW II supercomputer, used to crack Nazi secret codes, rebuilt. Runs as fast as new computers, but without Windows platform crashes, viruses, spam." The headline was almost undoubtedly written by a Windows user, which merely goes to show that most Windows users have no respect for their own computing platform, but use it anyway because they falsely believe that there are no legitimate alternatives. But on the other hand, there always seems to be at least one Windows fanatic in every crowd, who will step up and try to defend his platform by any desperate means possible. Such as this Beavis, who posted the following to the comments section of the same Fark article:
"I take offense at the headline, only because if you read the good tech sites, then you would have known that over the past week, not only has a major exploit been found in Apple's OSx, but the patch that was supposed to fix it, does not. At least all the games, major hardware, ect. is being made for Windows."
Wow...just how far off into in-defense-of-Windows delusionland do you have to be that you could jump into a conversation that had nothing to do with the Mac, and A) actually be offended by the fact that another Windows user made a joke about the problems that everyone knows Windows suffers from, B) take a really lame stab at trying to pretend that MacOS X suffers from the same kind of massive security issues as Windows, C) pretend that Apple refuses to fix the Mac's supposedly massive security issues, D) bring up something as asinine as video games as a reason why everyone should be using Windows, and E) misspell "etc."?
Anytime anyone wants to know why it is that we Mac users feel as if we must defend our platform choice, it's because idiots like this guy are out there spending every waking minute going around and making up crap about about Apple, in an attempt to scare disgruntled Windows users away from the idea of switching to the Mac. So who are the fanatics, again?
Meanwhile, back in reality... Despite the desperate cries of a few Windows-clinging fanatics, here's how most Windows users currently view the Mac, courtesy of the up and coming site MacMove.com:
"At the Orange County, CA airport the other day, I literally had a crowd of four who gathered around the [15 inch PowerBook] to look at it. 'It really does everything my HP does?' said one woman road warrior waiting for a flight to Chicago. 'Yeah but what about Excel files?' asked a pony-tailed guy sporting a Thinkpad. 'You mean a Mac does Excel? I didn't know that.'"
Read the whole thing here, it's a real treat. And in my book, it's proof that Apple has already won the battle when it comes to cracking the ridiculous myth that the Mac is simply not an option for most Windows users. Apple has built a platform of the future that Windows now has zero chance of catching up to, the gap between the two platforms has never been this wide, and it will only continue to grow even wider. For most people, there are literally no reasons not to switch to the Mac, and now that reality has begun to breach perception, it's only a matter of time. I don't need Windows users' nodding approval to vindicate my platform choice, but the more of them who come on board, the stronger our platform gets. Now that the public is slowly waking up to the notion that we Mac users have had the right idea all along, I get the feeling that the next few years are going to be really fun.
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