scott.hodson.blog

So I’ve been taking advantage of the various upswings of Apple’s stock over the last few months successfully enough that I took out some of my stock options trading proceeds to get a MacBook Pro! It’s pretty loaded, 2GB RAM, 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 2.16GHz Dual Core, etc, $2000 from Craigslist. I’ve got Windows 2003 Server running on it in Parallels as well.

Ironically I ordered a new Dell E1505 about 2 weeks previously with a smokin’ Core 2 Duo chip, 160GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 256 Aero-ready video card, etc., in other words also loaded. I got what I thought was a great deal, $1650! But I bought it with a Dell Credit application and a ship date with 1 month in the future. I was ticked about the so-far-in-the-future ship date but I figured they are just practicing UPOD (under-promise over-deliver) and the 160HDDs and Core 2 Duo “Merom” chip supplies are pretty new so I gave them some slack on that.

So in the meantime while waiting for the Dell to be built I saw this MBP for sale which seemed like a nice price. I’ve seen many well-priced MacBook deals on Craigslist for several months yet the seller usually never replies, probably because he’s just harvesting email addresses to sell by teasing us with cheap MacBooks, but I use my Gmail account so they can spam me all they want. But this latest deal came through with what seemed like a good price (new it would cost $2899+tax) so I pulled the trigger and the transaction went smoothly at a Starbucks in San Clemente at 9:30 at night.

Meanwhile, today I check on my Dell order wondering if I should keep the order going or just make a go with the MacBook Pro full-time and I notice that Dell has canceled my order! Without any notice! So I call the 800 number, get outsourced to some call center who can’t explain why the order was canceled, and somehow I get transferred to some call tree menu when she put me on hold. So I go to Dell’s website and reprice the same notebook with a similar coupon I had before and the notebook is now $300 more expensive! Bogus!

Sorry in today’s battle, Steve Jobs: 1, Michael Dell: 0. And if I’m not satisfied with using the MBP full-time I’m looking at HP’s now after having bought many dells workstations, notebooks and servers over the last 10+ years. In the meantime, I’m wondering how some of these near-thousand-class Visual Studio.NET projects and multi-GB SQL Server databases are going to perform for me on Parallels. I’ll let you know. If it works out I guess that would officially make me a “switcher”. Whoa…

UPDATE 10/2/2006 – I just called Dell and asked them to reinstate the order with a different payment method and they did, at the original price. They also upgraded the video card from the Nvidia 7300 to the ATI X1400.

I’ll be here on Saturday. If anybody else I know is going let me know and I’ll look out for you.

Among the many of today’s “Showtime” announcements by Apple is that the new iPods will include many of the same popular video games available on most mobile phones. These games are:

• Bejeweled — Match jewels to clear the board
• Tetris — Rotate falling bricks to clear rows
• PAC-MAN — Get the ghosts
• Vortex — Shoot on through to the other side
• Zuma — Slide balls of the same color together
• Texas Hold ‘Em — Practice your poker face
• Mini Golf — Make a hole in one (or five)
• Mahjong — Arrange tiles just so
• Cubis 2 — Match cubes in colorful arrays

Since most of these games are implemented on mobile phones via Java, does this mean the new iPods have a Java Virtual Machine running on them? How can third party developers develop games for the iPod? Is there an API? How do I upload my own games to my iPod?

Secondly, since these are games commonly found for purchase on mobile phones, for the similar price of $4.99, this only demonstrates that Apple is one step closer from creating an iPod + mobile phone hybrid. This only strenghtens recent speculation about an upcoming iPhone

Apple’s iPod Video Games Website

Several months ago I thought of writing a service that would send e-mail or SMS alerts when certain keywords would appear in new posts from RSS feeds. For example, if I was looking for a great deal on a Dell 24″ display I would want to monitor my local CraigsList RSS feed for the keyword “2405FPW” and I would get email alerts when any new posts show up in the “for sale : computer” area on CL. I was surprised nobody had really tackled this yet, especially that someone like Technorati or Feedburner hadn’t built such a function yet since they are plugged into just about every feed imaginable. Well, we have one now, ZapTXT. I’ve been using it for the past week and it’s pretty friendly and alerts me quickly once new posts arrive.

So the Apple site says the Mac Pro has nearly 4 million configurations. Having glanced over the configurations myself that seemed a little high. So I did the math.

I separated out the number of choices for each option and multiplied the numbers together. First, some clarifications.

1. I don’t count the size and number of monitors as a configuration option. It is external to the computer and should not be counted as a configuration.
2. I reluctantly counted the available application software options since when I buy a computer I consider the configurations of the computer as the sum of the hardware components, not bundled software, but I’ll give them this one.
3. Apple care, OS X version or language don’t count. Sorry, I gave you let you count bundled software as a configuration, don’t push it!

So I counted up all of the options for each “configuration” and only came up with over 1.6 million configurations. So how does Apple figure 4 million configurations?

One Windows tool I’ve been using for a few months now that I LOVE is Launchy. It’s a great way to launch apps without having weave through your Start | Programs menu. Now when I install new apps I don’t even care where in the Start menu they go because I can launch any app in there with Launchy by pressing “Alt-Space” and the small pop-up window appears which allows me to do a keyword search of all shortcuts in my Programs menu. And it’s free. Check it out. Any of you Mac users out there that run Quicksilver are smugly saying to yourself “Yeah, been there, done that.” And you Microsoft Zealots are saying, “So what, that’s in Vista (someday).” For the rest of us that want an easier way to launch our apps in Windows now, get Launchy.