I had to ship some boots back to New Hampshire this evening. I visited the local UPS Store in Park Slope and the gentlemen there helped me out. However, they charge a whopping $1.25 to tape closed a 6" box. For the average 100m roll of 3M packing tape, that's about $750. C'mon, Brown, give the tape away!Labels: rant
Do not buy a Sandisk Cruzer. First of all, I use a Mac, so the U3 "technology" was useless to me and even gummed up my system a bit. I was able to remove that firmware and get the USB drive working properly. That said, it was never terribly stable (it would disconnect intermittently when the computer woke up) and the power consumption of the bright blue internal LED made it unusable in some keyboard low-power hubs (like the mac alum keyboard, see rant below). The final straw came recently when it failed to be recognized on most of my computers. This drive has been so unreliable that I'm going back to my trusty old Kingston 256MB key. I'll carry less around, but I know it'll be there when I need it.Labels: rant
File under: rant. I'm using Apple's new slimline aluminum "chicklet" keyboard to post this message. I've had it for a while and I like it a lot. It has a USB hub that's built into the underside at the edges, but the ports will only power devices that draw 100mA or less (a typical mouse). An iPod or a USB flash drive won't work unless the keyboard is plugged into a new iMac (which I don't own). The old keyboards' USB hubs have all worked (for every iPod or thumb drive I've ever owned). This is pretty shoddy... Apple shouldn't have let the new wired keyboard out the door with this limitation.Labels: rant
I've been using OSX "Leopard" for some time now. My review: meh. There are some things that run faster and I like the data detector. The UI "improvements" are actually downgrades in most cases: e.g file icons try to "preview" even at 32 pixels on the desktop so any useful information, like the application with which the file will open (preview? acrobat?) is lost and the missing dock in ical makes editing events a many-click process. There are stability issues in some applications (Safari, which never crashed under 10.4, has crashed repeatedly in the last month). What drives me most insane are little quirks like: all of my calendar events disappear (sometimes to reappear) when I add a new item (an apple-z/undo takes care of the situation, but then I have to edit the event again). My favorite: in the window bar of mail.app (or when I'm in exposé and I mouse over mail, see picture) the program informs me that I have 4.3 BILLION messages in my inbox. Now that's a lot of email!Labels: rant
M got me these Etymotic ER-6 headphones about a year ago. I've been using them during my daily hour-long MTA commute ever since. They sound great. That is, if you don't mind the "ear plug" design and if you can ignore the noise that is transmitted directly to your cranium when you walk or when you touch the cable. Despite these formidable cons, I really do like these earbuds and I don't know how anyone can use those shoddy, wide-open earphones that come standard with popular MP3 players in noisy environments (except for while running or if they need something with which to block a drain). Labels: rant
My latest corporate crusade was against AT&T/Cingular: I tried to upgrade M's and my phones. We're on a family plan so the hyper-incetivized offers from Amazon do not apply (the small print indicates that if you try to upgrade any part of a family talk plan they'll charge you full price for the handset retroactively). I called and emailed customer service over a dozen times and was getting nowhere. (However, prior to all my calls I had dropped a letter in the mailbox to Kansas City laying out my position: upstanding customer, wants free phones, will take refurbs). Just when I was ready to give up and buy phones from eBay or CL or take one of the crappy free phones, Kansas City came through and offered me the phones I wanted. The math works out like this: paper + mailbox = stuff gets done. (I haven't received the phones yet, but I'm hopefully optimistic).Labels: rant