The bright side of a Moon
Walking past the shoe store at SW 4th and Morrison yesterday morning, I noticed that it was nearly empty. Several copies of a sign hung in the window:
Click to go to larger, uncropped version
“Are downtown location”?
Hey, but I’ll bet it passed spell-check.
My appetite tends to run in cycles. Lately, for instance, if it weren’t for Mike’s Drive-in cheeseburgers or Pizza Schmizza’s slice-and-salad lunch specials, I’d be… um… very very hungry.
I stopped by my Apple Store (Pioneer Place Mall, Portland OR) on my lunch break to see if they had any new Mac Pros (the desktops Apple announced and shipped this week) in I could pop open and take a look at.
There’s a discussion on one of the tech boards I read about the Mac Pros. I wanted to see if I could resolve the issue with a visit to the store to see one in person.
They have built-in hard drive sleds that don’t use cables – just slide the drive in and it plugs into a card in the back of the drive bay. Cool, but that means you’re stuck with the bus they provide. What if you wanted to put in an internal RAID of SCSI cards? Or had some older non-SATA drives to use?
The discussion was based off pictures posted on the web. Some folk were saying that the plugs for the drives was on the motherboard and that there’d be no room to get alternate cables in there.
Others thought that the plugs were on separate riser cards that could be removed without taking a Dremel to the mobo.
I wanted to provide some actual observational data to the discussion. Plus, ogle the sexy hardware.
…sadly, that was not to be. It was a busy lunchtime, and for some reason there was only one sales person the floor. The sales girl (not a Genius – there’s only a few of those in the store and they were all busy behind the bar) started to pop the only floor model they had open (a 2.66 GHz), realized it didn’t have the protective plastic cover like the G5s did, and then closed it back up because she didn’t want to run it while it was open.
She then pulled up the web page for the Mac Pro and pointed to the pretty pictures.
“Um, I’ve seen the web page. I just need to take a look inside” I said.
“Oh, well, we can’t do that without shutting it down” she said. I was kinda frustrated. She was cute – a redhead. My weakness. But I didn’t want to flirt with her, I wanted to see the sexy computer.
“Well, why don’t we shut it down?” The look on her face told me that she was looking for an appropriately customer-service-y way to say “no”.
“You can’t shut it down?” I asked one last time.
“…not really” she said.
So, sorry I have nothing to report. As a side note, is there some actual technical reason they can’t shut down the floor computers? Like they’re configured to automatically power back up or something? Wouldn’t that be easy enough to disable in System Prefs?
Since my run-in (literally) with a poseur fixie-rider, I’ve discovered that there was, indeed, damage to the screen of my new sexy thing.
When viewing darker images, there’s a thin whitish line, directly in line with the shallow dent on the outside casing. It’s not visible all the time but it’s there.
And it’s similar to a problem I had on my iBook. I have a pretty good idea what it is – there’s a white backing material on an LCD screen that helps the backlighting reflect evenly. I imagine that the bicycle impact caused the backing material to bunch up or wrinkle and press against the actual LCD part from behind, reflecting more of the backlight, and causing this visible “line”.
You may or may not have an idea how incredibly sad this makes me.
Especially so because Apple’s warranty excludes accidental damage entirely. If a tech suspects abuse or accidental damage they will deny warranty repairs and charge me. And you can only imagine what replacing an entire LCD screen can cost – it might be almost as much as I paid for the whole laptop.
And in my worst fears, I can see a stubborn Apple tech refusing other, non-screen-related problems, on the grounds that I’ve abused the laptop and caused those other problems.
I’ve only had the thing since the end of February. My credit card isn’t paid off yet. And now I’m looking at having wasted the extra money I spent on AppleCare, extending the warranty.
I am kicking myself for not getting the name and contact info on the biker that hit me. Fucker.
But… I was thinking about it, and I remembered that sometimes credit cards include things like warranty extensions on items purchsed on that card. I decided to contact BofA, the issuer of the card I used to buy the new sexy thing.
And as it turns out, yes, my card includes something called Warranty Manager Service.
In reading over the terms, they don’t specifically exclude accidental damage. I do have to contact them within 60 days of the “product failure” but I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem here. Heh.
I’ll update after I’ve gotten off the phone with them…
Damn, the terms of the warranty extension only cover the same things as the original manufacturers’ warranty. Fuck.
Spotted downtown last night:
First, the two signs on this door contradict each other. Be careful opening the door – but don’t open the door!
Second, obviously some anti-authoritarian has disobeyed both signs at once. Not only is it open, but there’s no one else around to take the special care that this door apparently needs when it is, in fact, open.
Third… isn’t a door that is never supposed to be open… not “a door” any more?! I think that it’s forfeited the right to be called a door at that point. Might as well be a wall or something.
Lastly, I think that last point clarifies the top sign in relation to the bottom one. “Be careful when opening this door… because it’s not actually a door.” See? Just a reasonable application of logic and rational thinking can resolve almost anything.
Last night was a nice night for a walk along the river. A little warm and humid but not too bad.
I had borrowed my brother-in-law’s GPS unit, and was planning to mark off sections of the Springwater Corridor Trail to help me determine distance for my various favorite running loops. Many of the landmarks I use don’t show up on Google Earth (the trail is only about 2 years old and many of the images in Google Earth are a little older than that) so I thought having exact latitude and longitude would suffice.
Quick question: why are the boxes they sell for getting GPS coordinates always called “units”? “GPS unit”. My laptop isn’t a unit. My iPod isn’t a unit. My cell phone’s not a unit.
I was near the north head of the trail, heading south, looking at the GPS… thing. A lady and an older guy were on bikes, single-file, going the other direction.
Suddenly something smacked me in the back and I went down. A guy flew by me, followed by his bike.
I was stunned a moment, and my elbows hurt. My first thought – “Is my new sexy thing OK?!”
It had been in my messenger bag, slung across my back. It had taken the brunt of the impact. I pulled it out of the bag and the padded sleeve I keep it in, with visions of the beautiful screen being cracked, shattered.
As I did that, the lady and older guy had stopped and was asking first the fixie-rider, then me, if we were OK.
For the uninitiated, a “fixie” is a fixed-gear bike, and the subject of some recent controversy in Portland. A judge ruled last week that a city ordinance requiring brakes on bikes does, in fact, require a separate friction brake on bicycles. A bike messenger had recieved a ticket, and was fighting it on the grounds that her legs were good enough. The judge ruled otherwise.
Yes, the guy who hit me was riding a fixie, with no brake.
As I was examining my laptop (screen was fine, although there is now a barely-visible dent in the top case just to the left of the Apple logo, and it woke from sleep normally) I looked at the fixie-rider laying on the ground. “Is that a fixie?” I asked him. He groaned a reply. “Those are illegal, you know.”
Even stunned and injured, I’m a smartass.
The older couple fussed over us a bit, offerred us water (why? Did they think we were dehydrated?) and finally let us go on. The guy offerred his apologies and admitted he had been going too fast, and that the accident was his fault. I was just glad my laptop seemed fine, but if I ever get turned down for service from Apple because of that small dent I’m going to be beyond angry…
I didn’t have an opinion on the whole “fixie” controversy before last night. And maybe I shouldn’t blame the bikes for what happened to me… in fact, I don’t blame the bikes. But I do blame the whole elitist mystique that seems to surround fixie riders for their cavalier attitude for pedestrians.
Look, fixie poseurs, if you’re riding on a sidewalk or a trail or in a park, where there are pedestrians, you need to be going pedestrian speeds. Save your racing for the streets or a bike track.
I swear I’m in a good mood today. Had a good run this morning, weekend is almost here, weather is beautiful…
So why are people (from Tracy, to my sister, to the counterlady at SubWay where I had lunch, all telling me otherwise?
How can there be such a large gulf between my internal state and my external cues?
…it can’t be because I might, somehow, like being in a bad mood. Because I’m not in a bad mood. I’m in a good mood.
Maybe I just don’t like giving away my internal states? Defensive, much? Heh.
Storm turned in a masterful, subdued, powerful, honest performance last night on “Rockstar: Supernova”. I’m not sure the audience is going to appreciate that, considering the other contenders just belt out the songs and play it up, but hopefully for those who have been paying attention they’ll see that Storm knows when to rock and when to hold back.
Other performers? There were other performers? Heh. OK, watching the bald kid sing “Home, home, where I wanted to be” (from (still-not-as-good-as-Radiohead) Coldplay’s “Clocks”), knowing he’s missing his baby’s first steps back in the old country, was a sentimental moment. And it’s nice that the boys are flying his family out to be with him. Demonstrates that rock stars take care of their own, y’know?
And… what’s the deal with Jill? I didn’t think she was that bad. Did she piss off the boys or something? Not sleep with them? Sleep with them wrong, or something? It was actually painful to watch her face go from “Happy to have performed well” to “Smiling even though they’re tearing her apart”. And she had to maintain that zombie-fied smile while Brooke Burke hugged her and talked until they went to commercial. I felt really bad for her.
…still voted for Storm, though. Duh. Love her.
I need more:
When I heard that Kari Byron from MythBusters had done a 4-page pictorial for FHM magazine (in the July ’06 issue) I knew I had to find those pictures.
However, when I found them (at least the ones online), I was a bit disappointed.
So, in the interest of science, try the following yourself:
(Note: this is not a trick to get you to click on something horrible. I promise.)
My thoughts: this is an example of how you photoshop someone to the point of making them look worse.
Ken said “She is young and hot but in those pics she looks like the winner of a hottest moms contest.” I agree.
Ken also pointed out the obvious photoshopping done – check out how the lines of the tile grouting aren’t straight when they go behind her legs.