I ordered my wife one of the new dual-core iMacs early last week, with an expected ship date of January 26th. Imagine my surprise when I received this email on the 26th:

Due to an unexpected delay, we are unable to ship the following item(s) as follows / Dû à un délai non-anticipé, nous sommes forcés de reporter l'expédition de votre commande ainsi:

Z0CX0LL/A, IMAC 17/1.83/1GB/160GB/SD-USA
will now ship on or before / sera expédié au plus tard
le Mar 10, 2006
We regret any inconvenience this delay may cause. / Nous sommes désolés
de l'inconvénient que ce délai vous poserait.

Imagine my further surprise when I received this email on the 27th:

The following products shipped on 01/27/2006. Transit time will depend upon whether you have chosen standard or premium freight options. If your order is shipping standard freight, it should arrive within 12 days of shipment.

Les produits suivants vous ont été envoyés le 27.01.2006. Le délai de livraison varie en fonction du mode de transport choisi, par voie ordinaire ou exprès. Si vous avez choisi la voie ordinaire, votre commande devrait vous parvenir dans les 12 jours de la date d'expédition.

Product Description Qty Ext Price
Produit Désignation Qté Total
__________ ________________________________________ ____ ________________

Z0CX0LL/A IMAC 17/1.83/1GB/160GB/SD-USA 1 CAD XXXXXXXX
With the following configuration:
Configuré de la manière suivante:

Not that I (or rather my wife) is complaining, but that was a rather wild swing in delivery dates in the course of two days.

Incidentally, and quite timely, a new Dashboard widget which monitors Apple Order Status was recently released and can be downloaded here:

DashboardWidgets - Apple Order Status

Windows Media Components for QuickTime/Flip4Mac

I'm pretty pleased with the new Windows Media® Components for QuickTime, with the exception that the 2.0 Flip4Mac caused horrible crashes in Safari (for me anyways). Happily the 2.0.1 update seems to fix the problem. Inline WMV streaming seems to work quite nicely in Safari now.

My New Favorite Dashboard Widget

Is SysStat nano; a visually attractive widget that shows detailed information on CPU usage, memory, hard drives, IP addresses, bandwidth, uptime, etc.

DashboardWidgets - Showcase

Well, I'm a bit late on this update due to a variety of reasons.

I managed to replace the hard drive in my wife's iBook over the holidays using the directions which I linked in a previous post. Disassembly and reassembly was quite a bit easier than I expected it to be - so easy in fact that I did it twice after realizing that I had forgot to put the little bar that holds the hard drive in on the first try (!). Having all of the tools laid out beforehand, and a bunch of little baggies to hold parts simplified the process - it really is about 2 hours to replace the drive assuming you only have to do it once.