Webthoughts

CBS is pulling a George Lucas move on Star Trek.

Apparently, the studio has decided to digitally enhance all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek television series with new special effects, new music and more.

I really don't know how I feel about that.

Yes, I'm you can accuse me of being a Star Trek "purist", and really, perhaps I am. But I grew up watching the original episodes in syndication and have a great love of that show and what they were able to do to put out quality science fiction in the late 60's (I should note, I wasn't around when the episodes originally aired). To mess with them just seems...wrong.

But I'm going to be two-faced about this as well. I look forward to seeing the remastered epsiodes--seeing what they've been able to do with modern techniques. It'll be interesting to see see a vision of what Gene Roddenberry might have done in today's world with Star Trek (as paraphrased from Michael Okuda).

I'll reserve final judgement until I see the episodes, of course.

My wife and I are off to close up the lake house for the year this weekend.

It's always a sad event when it comes time to pull the dock and boat out of the lake and close the cabin down for the year. Then, it seems like it takes forever for the following May to arrive when we head out to the lake to open everything up again. That's one bad thing about living in the area of the country that I do--the lake house is just not a year-round place.

Anyhoo, I'll be "off the grid" for the weekend, so if there are any support requests or registrations over the weekend, they will be handled on Monday evening when I return.

Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

I'm back now from the trip to the lake to practically close it down for the summer. It's always a bit of a sad trip, as it's primarily a work weekend to prepare the place for the coming winter.

The boat gets pulled from the water. The dock gets disassembled and stored. Plants and flowers are cut down to the ground. Life jackets and swim gear are put away. The entire time, you have the feeling hanging over you and the thought running through your head: "This is the last time this year I'll be seeing and using this stuff. It'll be another nine months before it gets pulled back out."

This year was no different. Except that it was mostly cold and rainy--the entire weekend. Luckily, we did have a window of a few hours of sunlight on Sunday morning where we were able to get the majority of the big work done before the rain started up again. Plus, the running joke of the weekend was that every time we looked at the thermometer, it read 56°. It really did seem like it was that cold most of the time.

Anyhow, the majority of the big work is done. I'll be heading out there one more time sometime in early October to do the final closedown of the cabin (tear off the bedding, winterize and turn off the water lines, etc.), but that'll be it for the year.

After having spent about a week with the MacBook now, I thought I'd post a couple of thoughts.

• I definitely need more memory. It currently has the stock 512 MB of RAM and that is obviously causing all sorts of issues with Rosetta. When I'm using only Universal apps, this computer screams. It's amazing the speed increase that I've seen with this. However, the moment I fire up a PowerPC-only app, the computer bogs down. That immediately points to Rosetta. I've read that Rosetta is a memory hog (and I can understand why), so throwing more RAM at the issue should probably help a lot. And, seeing as I can't work without Entourage (at least not easily), that's what I'm going to do. RAM will be on the way.
• The trackpad is taking a little getting used to. There are times it doesn't seem to register the fact that I'm dragging my finger across it. I haven't exactly figured out what's going on, but what I think might be happening is that I'm not yet used to the wider trackpad. I think a portion of my hand may be touching the edge of the trackpad while I try to drag me finger and that confuses it. I'm trying to pay more attention to the times the arrow doesn't move.
• Likewise, the trackpad button is taking a little getting used to as well. It seems a little..."mushier"...than the trackpad button on my PowerBook G4. There are times I think I've clicked the button, but nothing happens. I click it again and everything's fine. I'm not ready to call this a hardware problem, it's probably just me trying to get used to the new feel.
• Dashboard is a little flakey on this machine. I don't know if it's an Intel thing, a MacBook thing or a specifically this MacBook thing. When I activate Dashboard by pressing F12, it can take several seconds for it to activate (even if there are no PowerPC-only apps running). Then, once it's activated, at times, it appears as though some of the widgets don't update properly. They show incorrect or outdated information or they stay blank. It is as though those widgets requiring network access (such as the Apple-supplied Weather widget) can't make a connection to whatever server they're trying to access. I never had this problem with the PowerBook G4. I suppose I should hold off judgement until I get the additional RAM to see if this is just another symptom of the lack of memory.
• The MacBook definitely feels much sturdier than the PowerBook G4 does. When I move the MacBook around, I don't feel the fear of accidentally damaging it by improper flex or something like that as I do with the PowerBook. I don't know if this is actually the case, or if this is just a perception that I have.
• I miss the backlit keyboard.
• The screen is absolutely beautiful. I know I touched on this before, but the glossy finish on the screen is not bugging me at all, and everything is so very bright and vibrant on the screen. No complaints here at all.

I've run into a recurring problem with the MacBook that I haven't totally figured out yet: About half the time I try to print, the application I'm trying to print from crashes before the Print dialog ever appears.

I have a PowerMac G4/933 that the printer is connected to (an HP DeskJet 5500). The G4 has printer sharing turned on. The MacBook is connecting to the G4 via Airport.

About half the time I try to print, when I select "Print" from the file menu (or press Command-P), the application will hang for a few seconds and then crash (prompting the "Application has unexpected quit" message to show up). At other times, it works fine and I can print just fine.

I haven't yet tried to connect the printer directly to the printer via USB and see if the crash continues to happen, but may have to try that here soon. It hasn't gotten to the point where I'm ready to throw something. This is just mildly annoying at best at the moment.

WOO-HOO!

Omaha finally gets an Apple Store! (Not that I have any money or anything at the moment...)

My wife and I headed out to Village Pointe Mall this morning for the Grand Opening of the newest Apple Store. First--let's get this out of the way--I did take my camera and I did take pictures. Here they are.

The store was scheduled to open at 10:00 a.m. We got there about 9:00 a.m. When we arrived, we found the line waiting to get in already wrapping around the corner and down to the end of the block. When we got in line, a security guard that was nearby estimated that there were about 230 people ahead of us. As we waited, the line simply got longer behind us.

We spent the time waiting for the store to open chatting with the couple in line behind us. They were very excited about the opening of the store (especially the wife), but were very surprised about the line of people. They mentioned that they had driven by the night before and there were already people camped out in order to be the first in line.

About 9:30 a.m., a string of about 30-40 Apple Store employees walked/jogged/jumped by making a huge racket, doing the really excited about the opening of the store thing. They shook hands with people in line and thanked them for showing up. Some stopped and chatted for a small amount of time. Many in line responded to their excitement to cheers and claps of their own.

Finally, 10:00 a.m. showed up and the store opened. We could hear a huge cheer from up around the entrance. Obviously, we didn't get into the store right away. Omaha police were on hand to make sure that the store never went over capacity. Once the store first reached capacity, they waited for 20 people to exit the store and then they would let 20 more enter. My wife and I finally were able to enter the store at about 10:40 a.m.

The store was packed. It was literally very difficult to move around. The interior was bright and well lit. It had the standard tables with various MacBook and MacBook Pros set up for people to use--and using them they were. Along the walls were the Mac Pros and iMacs. Strangely enough, I don't remember seeing any Mac Minis. I'm sure they were there, but I do not remember seeing any. iPods were also on display toward the back left of the store.

One thing that surprised me was that there was only a small selection of software (on two shelves framing the back wall of the store. I know this is one of the smaller Apple Stores, but with these stores geared toward "switchers", having such a small selection of software isn't going to do much to change the impression that there is no software available for Macs.

They were giving away free T-shirts (all extra large)--black shirts that had the Apple logo and the text "Village Pointe"--to the first 1,000 people in the store. There was also a drawing for a $2,500 shopping spree in the store. The drawing for the shopping spree is on Monday, apparently.

The employees were very friendly and genuinely seemed excited to see the large crowd. Three different employees asked if there was anything they could help me find while I was in the store (all of them very politely). While I turned each of them down, my wife asked one to show her some arm bands for her iPod Shuffle. Although they had none on display, the employee offered to go back to the store room to get a few items that might fit the bill for her that they hadn't put on display yet (none of the items worked for my wife, but it was very nice of them to retrieve them anyway).

When I was able to get near one of the computers (this was really hard to do because of all the people using them), I was surprised to find that even though all the MacBooks I tried showed an AirPort signal, they could not connect to any websites. Similarly, the desktop Macs (a Mac Pro and an iMac) were directly wired (via the Ethernet port), but also could not connect to any websites. I know some computers did have internet access because I saw other people browsing the web, but I could never get to any of those computers. Very odd.

There was also a small kids area with iMacs set up with games. The kids I saw appeared to love the fact there were computers they could use. There was even an Apple employee watching over them and cheering them on.

There was also a small selection of third-party hardware (keyboards, mice, hard drives, etc), but make no mistake, most everything there were Apple products. The third party stuff was in the vast minority.

My wife and I spent about 20 minutes in the store. I'm sorry there aren't a lot of pictures, but when I was in the store, it was difficult to move, let alone actually frame a picture. I was a fun experience and had drawn a lot of interest. When we were walking around the rest of the mall, employees of other stores kept asking us all about it (after noticing the boxes we were carrying around with the t-shirts in them).

Apple looks to have a good thing going here. With the only real competition in town being the CompUSA (which is actually a pretty good store within a store) that is really on the entirely opposite side of town. Granted, it's only the first day, but it looks like there was a lot of interest, so hopefully that bodes well for Apple in Omaha, Nebraska.

A few more thoughts regarding the MacBook:

• The right side of the screen at the hinge has developed a plastic squeaking sound the the screen is moved up or down. The hinge doesn't seem any looser or anything like that, but the sound is a little annoying. Luckily, I don't move the screen much unless I'm putting the computer to sleep.
  
• I had to put off getting additional memory for the computer for a variety of reasons, and now when I look at memory prices, I see they've gone up almost $100 for 2 GB of RAM since early September. Ouch! 1-800-4-MEMORY.com had 2 GB RAM kits for $163 in early September. Now they are $255. What's going on with RAM prices?
  
• Probably related to the memory issue, but switching between PowerPC apps running in Rosetta and Intel-native apps is dog slow. Doesn't matter if I'm going from a PowerPC app to an Intel app or the other way around. Switching between Rosetta and native is slow. Switching between PowerPC and PowerPC or Intel and Intel is just as fast as I think it should be though.