What's wrong with Apple Inc?

I gotta say I'm a little bit annoyed with Apple.

At home I use an iBook 14" G3 800Mhz circa 2002. This is the model that had the faulty logic boards that caused a worldwide free replacement programme. I'm pretty sure this particular one has had at least one replacement logic board, if not more. - My one I used when teaching went through 6 logic boards.

Anyway this 5 year old iBook, used to be used by my wife, until the screen started showing logic board problems, whereby I switched her to a desktop iMac and put this aside until I could take a proper look at it. So a couple of months down the track, I dig it out and boot it up - and no sign of a problem and my daughter and I have been using it steadily for the past 12 months (solely me the past 6 months).

Well yesterday I receive a text from my wife to say that my youngest daughter accidently knocked my iBook off the desk and now the screen is all funny and please don't be too mad at her when you get home. I'm already thinking - 'this is what I have insurance for!!!" So, no worries, I get home ring the insurance company, go through a few explanations and they say they'll send out the claim form. I'm thinking woohoo, new MacBook here I come.

Well tonight, in the process of getting some data off my broken ibook - I was booted into Target mode, connected to my G4 PowerMac via firewire - all of a sudden I notice the screen on the iBook looks normal (well at least normal for Target Mode). So I quickly unmount the iBook from the G4 and reboot into normal mode and wallah! here I am again using my iBook! Not a sign of a problem.

So my gripe is, why can't Apple make stuff that stays broke???
I can now see my new MacBook drifting away unless I can prove that this thing really is broke. And no, as much as I despise insurance companies, I don't have the urge to "fix" my iBook so it stays broke!!

What can I say?

Once again.......it's been a while.

Thought I'd just mention that I've linked to this blog from another great site I visit frequently - Nutterz, which is the reason I am posting again. Check it out - you won't be disappointed.

Been busy busy busy. I went on an Mac OS X Server (Tiger) course a couple of weeks back. Talk about filling your brain up with stuff. Very informative and well presented. We basically covered the course in 3 days which meant we had a day to play with Leopard Server and Client. Needless to say I can't wait to get my own copy of Leopard, so that I can further my education.

That's all for now. It's late on a Sunday night and I should be in bed.

I have a couple of ideas for some posts, which I'm looking at filling out soonish, I just need the time to sit down and get out, as I think they may be rather lengthy.

Cheers & blessings

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking......into the future....

OK so I'm slack, I know!

10 weeks and counting!

So much has happened in the last 10 weeks, I'm not going to go over everything. Needless to say, the 10 weeks is equal to one school term. So the kids are back on holiday now. Of course the first day today it rained! Well I was at work so it didn't affect me too much except that by the time I got home they were a little stir crazy.

A brief overview of what has been happening is as follows:
• I started my new job at CPIT - it's awesome. I absolutely love it.
• We've shifted house and are now back in the city and very happy with that.
• The sale of our house has gone through and so we are now mortgage free - but back renting.
• All but Rie and to a lesser extent Jim got hit by a rather severe flu bug during the term. The 2 other girls were off school for over a week and Ang and I took it in turns to get sick. It caused the postponement of my birthday by a week.
• Oh yeah I turned 41 back in August.

In the world of Apple, we've had new iMacs released - new 24" screens. Also a new line of iPods including an iPod nano that does video and a new iPod touch based on the iPhone.

So that is pretty much the gist of the term.

Hopefully I'll get some regularity of posts happening from now until Christmas at least.

So until the next one, take care and God Bless

A New Beginning

It's the end of the holidays and 2 weeks since my last post. I finished that one with 'What a difference a week makes', well things keep on changing.

The best news of all is that we have finally sold our house. We switched to a local agent, they had one Open Home last Sunday and we had signed an unconditional contract by about 6pm. What that actually means is that the first contract we signed which was conditional on the buyers selling their own house now has its clause come into effect. This gives them 7 working days to go unconditional themselves. So come Thursday we're expecting to find out whether or not we have sold our house to the first buyers which would mean settlement date is the 3rd August or the second buyers which would mean settlement date is the 7th September. Either way IT'S SOLD!!!

Now we just have to find a place to rent inside the school zone that our daughter is wanting to go to next year.

So that's been the major news of the holidays, other than that it has been a case of finishing off school stuff, clearing out my classroom, giving back my PowerBook and iPod (sniff sniff!), trying to find a place to rent, checking with the bank and lawyers that all documentation has been filed, and spending time with the kids.

To that end we went on our 'Mystery Drive' on Friday. Thankfully the weather turned it on for us and it was a beautiful day. We headed inland to Darfield before making our way through the Rakaia Gorge and onto Methven where we enjoyed lunch in the van consisting of hot chippies, muffins and mandarins. The kids enjoyed being so close to the snow-covered mountains and there was even snow lying on the side of road left over from the previous week's dumping. All in all it was a great way to finish off the holidays.

And tomorrow I start my new job. Who knows what exciting adventures that will bring? I gotta say I can't wait to start, I'm like a kid on Christmas Eve. Bring it on!

Of Phones and Jobs and Holidays

Well the iPhone has been launched in the U.S. and early reports suggest that it will live up to the pre-release hype. A few minor issues seemed to have arisen, but overall the response and reviews seems to be mostly positive.

Of course all this means little to us Mac fans down under, as we have no idea when or even if we will see it down here. If the iTunes Store is anything to go by, I certainly won't be holding my breath for one.

So I made it through to the end of the school term and what a final week it was. On the Monday we had our Religious Education Review and we were all very nervous as the reviewers observed our lessons, asked us questions and interviewed children, parents, board members and even our priest. However it all came out good.

Tuesday saw us hosting approx 30 children from Our Lady of the Snows School in Methven as well as about 10 teachers/parents/helpers. It was a great day had by all as we showcased our Pacific heritage and the children all got along really well. I'm sure it will be day they all remember and I know the St James' children are looking forward to the return visit which I think will included a trip to a dairy farm. The day ended wonderfully with the OLS children joining our children in a Samoan sasa.

Wednesday was relatively normal, however on Thursday I had a job interview at CPIT for a position as Macintosh Systems Administrator. The interview involved approx 15 mins of proving that I can find my way around a Mac, followed by a 3-person panel interview which lasted about 50 mins. I felt it went quite well but you never can tell with these things and they said to allow 14 days before I should hear anything. Back at school that afternoon I received a phone call from Michelle at the agency to tell me I was their preferred choice and just needed the referees reports to confirm that I was OK! Man what great news that was! I was like a kid at Christmas!

Friday dawns wet and windy which doesn't bode well for the Mission On launch that our school was hosting that day. However before the Minister of Health, Pete Hodgson arrives I get the phone call from CPIT to formally offer me the position, which after calling back later in the day to discuss what the package entailed I happily accepted. So with that out of the way I got on with the Mission On launch which included a school welcome for the guests, a range of activities for the kids including a Hip Hop Dance workshop, a cooking demo, skipping and other games based around health promoting activities and eating. All in all it went off very successfully considering we had to move all the activities inside the classrooms. The kids finished off the term on a high note and got to take home lots of healthy recipes and cool gear like skipping ropes and t-shirts.

So now we have the school holidays - 2 weeks off - and I need to finish off all my assessments for end of term and clear out my classroom, ready for the new teacher. School has been really good about letting me go, the fact that I've effectively been on a term by term contract means that I could leave without having to give too much notice anyway, but I know it will be a pain to have to find a replacement at such short notice.

What a difference a week makes!

Let's go surfin' now, c'mon a Safari with me!!!

Just thought I'd update you on my browser experiences.

I've pretty much gone back to Safari (the new Beta) as Firefox was doing some strange things occasionally - like simply not opening up a page when I clicked on a link. It had some really cool features that I wish were in Safari - like scrolling Tab bar and the linkification plugin was way cool.
I've deleted SAFT on Safari - the Ad-blocker - which seems to have stopped the memory usage from going as high as it was, however, it has been running all day and the Safari memory usage is around the 170MB range. I was just about to quit, when a little pop-up warning window appears asking me if I'm sure because I have 22 Tabs open. (this warning is a new feature in this release). So the memory usage isn't too bad considering I have that many Tabs open.

Haven't discarded FF completely and the Flock browser is pretty cool - just needs some plugins - and of course without SAFT - I have to put up with advertising on webpages for a while until Pith Helmet updates to work with the new version.

So I'm pretty happy with Safari v3.0b - certainly not having nay of the problems that other early adopters have.

Time for a new Browser

First posted on Mac Browsers - Nutterz

OK, so I have been slowly getting frustrated with my default Mac Browser - Safari - which up until recently I've had no reason to change from. I have had both Firefox and Opera installed and although they partially satisfied there were always things that sent me back to Safari (Firefox took ages to load for example)

However recently two things have caused me to consider changing from Safari. The first and strongest reason is that Safari has become extremely sluggish and unresponsive lately. Here's my setup:

I'm running OS X v10.4.9 on a PB G4 17" with 1GB of RAM and using the latest version of Safari - with the SAFT plugin to stop all those annoying ads and flash ads. I have a folder of bookmarked sites sitting in my bookmark bar and with one click it opens up all the sites in separate tabs.

OK, so that's the background. Here's the issue. I've been noticing lately that pages have been taking a long time to load, that clicking on links have not been as responsive as I would expect, switching between tabs can take a new a sec or two and the occasional freeze and/or lock-up requiring a force-quit. Which all adds up to me looking at alternatives, not however, before trying to 'fix' it. I have run various utilities which clean out caches, logs, cookies and anything else that might be slowing things down all to no effect. I then looked in the activity monitor to see how much memory it was using and it was using a heap of actual memory and even more virtual memory, basically leaving me nothing free.

So I've been listening to a few podcasts lately and I've heard them talking about FF quite a bit and also another browser called Flock which is still in beta. So I thought I'd give FF another go - and WHAM! it only took about 3 dock bounces before it opened (previously taking about 12-15). I then downloaded Flock and I gotta say it is quite a tidy looking browser, with some quite neat features. So after tweaking FF with a couple of extensions and a nice brushed metal theme - it is now going to be my Browser of Choice - with Flock my secondary one.

By the way - this post has been published using the Flock Browser's built in Blog support! Pretty Cool Eh!

technorati tags:Browsers, Mac, Firefox, Safari, Flock

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