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Tue - August 12, 2008Photo Booth efects for Leopard make me grinI've had a bit of trouble with some of the
Leopard installation (I have to force quit Mail, for instance, and I discovered
that me.com with its wonderful cloud implementation really screws with my
bandwidth on the WildBlue satellite, or at least that seems to be the culprit in
a 20-fold spike in outgoing traffic), but Photo Booth once again proves to be a
wonderful diversion.
I got a couple of freeware effects packages and have spent the past two hours dicking around. Posted at 09:42 PM Imagine it all
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Thu - July 31, 2008Leopard and iTunes 7.7 upgrade is painfulOnce again Apple forgot about us wackos living in
our rural compounds hooked up to the Ted Stevens Intertube to nowhere using high
latency satellite connections. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I bought a mini with
Leopard for my wife, upgraded my MacBook and G5, and then upgraded all three to
iTunes 7.7. On top of that, I bought an Apple TV and the 1 TB Time Capsule.
Guess what?
Posted at 06:13 PM Imagine it all
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Tue - November 27, 2007Well, I'm finally adding some memoryOrdered another gig for this machine and two for
the Core Duo MacBook. The MacBook, by the way, proves that even Intel products
can be used to support intelligent user centered design, although Intel could
never do it itself. Intel is what happens when Holocaust survivors apply the
same stupid paranoia to business that Israel applies to the peace process. I've
finally got most of the problems between Tiger and Hughes resolved by swapping
out switches and adding a router to avoid the annoying inability to reliably
connect to iDisk that I railed about earlier this year.
Posted at 06:00 PM Imagine it all
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Mon - September 24, 2007I got a bargain on a MacBook a couple of months ago......but I rarely use it, except to reprogram the
Logitech Harmony remote that starts sending random commands about once a month,
and I synch a remanufactured Nano with it, but I've gradually moved to using the
G5 for everything. Although I've never heard anything specific from either Apple
or Hughes.net, the disconnects from iDisk have become less frequent, and I
haven't received an NSURL error in weeks.
Posted at 09:43 AM Imagine it all
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Sat - September 2, 2006Still no solution to making MacOS and Hughes.net play well togetherBut there have been interesting new developments
that indicate Hughes has not been entirely truthful or forthright in our
dealings during the past couple of years (Hughes was formerly known as
DirecWay). While customer service has never been the strong suit of the
satellite provider under either name, it has recently become even worse.
Yesterday I spent five hours on the phone, repeatedly getting cut off while
working with Advanced Technical Support and having to dial in again and getting
the firewall service out of Bangalore. I call it firewall service, because it
seems designed only to keep customer problems from actually requiring solutions.
After going through the automated phone screening, you are asked to repeat the
information already provided to a technical rep who apparently writes sticky
notes that are attached directly a computer monitor, apparently believing that
this is how one enters information into the
system.
I spoke with 12 different people, 11 of which were unable to find any notes under any of the four cases numbers assigned during the round around which ended with an advanced techie escalating a call to a local installer to re-point my satellite dish because my signal strength was running between 47-49. He told me that signal strength below 52 was unreliable, although in the past I have been told that 35 was perfectly OK. In fact, I the last installer at here was satisfied with 45 signal strength. Posted at 01:25 PM Imagine it all
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Mon - July 10, 2006Apple still hasn't solved the problems with Tiger and Hughes.Net (formerly DirecWay)I've had several open issues dating back to last
December that remain unresolved. If you check elsewhere on this blog, you find
numerous comments about the absolutely unacceptable behavior of Tiger in
conjunction with Apple's own iLife applications and particularly the dotmac
subscription service. I have yet to successfully connect to iDisk from this
machine, despite several software update "patches," rumored to address the
problem. Hughes continues to mention the obvious: none of my other Macs or MacOS
systems has any difficulty connecting to iDisk or using the other applications.
Only this Tiger machine continues to puke and piss and moan and create massive
headaches when I attempt to use Apple products to access Apple
services.
Posted at 05:09 PM Imagine it all
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Wed - March 15, 2006Laugh, laugh, I thought I died..I'm avoiding two major snafus at present and just
writing and carrying out various annoyance missions on the Internet to test the
mettle of liberals in determining whether to more proactively pursue my
long-stated goal of bringing on the bomb. Thus far, I appear to have
sufficiently cellularized the dipshits over at the Al Franken board that whoever
the BigListNurse over there is has decided to block entire domains from even
looking at the pathetic horseshit they call communication and support, which is
fine by me. Poor pussies. I can still read their inane mass debation. It just
makes them look a little less silly in the eyes of God who occasionally leads
Her followers astray by leading over to that den of the developmentally
disabled. Now, more of those folks just get error messages. In fact, I succeeded
in locking out more than 100,000 potential recruits with a single post last
week. That's what I call win-win!
Posted at 11:44 AM Imagine it all
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Tue - March 7, 2006The machine is wonderful; the networking sucksI haven't heard back from 2nd or 3rd level tech
support at Apple for two weeks. What I'm doing these days is research and design
on the new machine while using the older machines to upload and update. All
information I have so far indicates Tiger does not play well with Direcway.
Apple blames Direcway, and Direcway provides a compelling response: "If the
problem was with Direcway, while would only the Tiger machine be having
problems?" Hard to argue with that.
Posted at 11:40 AM Imagine it all
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Sun - February 19, 2006Network problems continueIt's a good thing Jean has been reorganizing my
office. I can use the iMac for lots of stand alone work, but networking is
hopeless with my satellite arrangement. The problem clearly involves MacOS 10.4
(Tiger) and its inability to properly connect with Apple's own iDisk service
through DirecWay. I have spent at least 80 hours in the past month trying to
track the problem down and resolve it, but I suspect it will take lawyers, guns,
and money (and perhaps a fully fueled Air America transport) before I can use
the new machine for the reasons intended and with the promise 20 years as a
Macintosh user had made me expect. Even worse, the 10.4.5 update now makes me
shut down my routers before I can even get Safari to connect on the G5 iSight. I
wonder how much the shift to Intel processors contributed to this G5
failure.
Posted at 11:43 AM Imagine it all
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Thu - February 2, 2006iSight Problems Remain UnresolvedI've gone ahead and upgraded to the DW7000 from
Direcway, hoping maybe that will help, but in the short term I'm resigned to
using the big beautiful box for music and entertainment rather than work.
Posted at 11:45 AM Imagine it all
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Sat - January 28, 2006Sorry to say that this is the first Mac that disappoints meI've spent the past two weeks trying to resolve a
problem that involves a basic network bug that keeps me from using iDisk with
the Finder in Tiger, which is loaded on the iSight G5. I have spent at least 60
hours with Apple Tech Support without a resolution. Apparently 10.4 is
incompatible with satellite DSL connections such as the one I have through
DirecWay. I feel I am being used as a beta tester for a product that does not
live up to the promise I've come to expect from 21 years of using and
championing the Mac position on human factors engineering. This experience has
shown me that Apple is just like any other company when it comes to dealing with
a problem it does not want to admit.
Posted at 11:42 AM Imagine it all
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Mon - January 23, 2006I have more problems with the siteI just couldn't hold off until iBlog 2.0 was ready,
so I waded in and tried to fix things on my own and everything started breaking.
Some of the breakage was iBlog itself with the loss the navigation editor in the
application and the gradual disappearance of variables throughout the blog. But
the biggest problem appears to be some weirdness in the disk controller on this
iMac. For some reason, it has begun losing connections with iDisk while all my
other machines are working fine.
Posted at 11:46 AM Imagine it all
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Mon - January 16, 2006There's a preview of iBlog 2.0 outand it makes me want to wait for actual version
to fix the stuff wrong with this blog. I prefer to write and play to coding. I
do that for pay. Why beat myself up here on a Mac? I'm waiting for my copy of
iLife 06 to arrive to see what simplicity iWeb has to offer. The implied
functionality of iBlog is impressive, and the product appears to be much more
intuitive than it was before, and it's always been Mac-centric.
Posted at 11:39 AM Imagine it all
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Fri - January 6, 2006This new iMac looks better all the time.I just
read
that Robert
Fripp
is composing music to accompany the Microshaft's
latest salvo against productivity, privacy, security, and ease of use currently
known as Windows Vista, nee Longhorn, aka a Lighter Shade of BSOD. There's even a
video. Funny enough that Brian
Eno
did some of the ambient music for Windows 95, and that Fripp and
Eno
spent some wonderful time together composing such
catchy tunes as Swastika Girls and Heavenly Music Corporation , but now the same
dynamic duo has tapped into the Microshaft money machine.
Posted at 11:38 AM Imagine it all
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Fri - December 30, 2005PhotoBooth is a hootI hope someone is coming up with more filters and
effects. What really blew me away was the sheer genius of deciding to use the
entire LCD as a directional flash. That's elegant engineering. Even better, I
can clearly see that it's time for me to lose about 50
pounds.
Posted at 11:43 AM Imagine it all
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Mon - December 26, 2005I was born two weeks before ChristI've also already lived more than a quarter
century longer than that hanging man did. Pearl Harbor occurred on a negative
anniversary date of my induction physical. I took my step forward for God and
country in a ceremony called the draft as part of a pre-Independence Day
clearance sale in 1967.
Posted at 11:46 AM Imagine it all
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Total entries in this category: Published On: Aug 12, 2008 09:43 PM |
