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

Blogged with Flock

Some Propoganda

There are some great pics over on Woot

What are we teaching and why?

A couple more public articles have reported on the announcement that Microsoft are no longer providing MS Office for Mac as part of the MS Software for Schools Agreement with the Ministry of Education.

These can be read here and here. Needless to say it has kicked up quite a storm in both the education community and the Tech community.

So here's my spin on it:
How it all worked - as I remember it, was that the government struck a deal with MS to provide a full range of software to schools - this included Visual Studio developer tools, Windows Server, as well as XP, Office, Publisher & Encarta and the like. Also included I think was office 2001 for Macs. The licensing for this was on a year by year basis, we had to fill out all the forms each year. Of course by this stage a lot of Mac schools were running OS X - and so had to pay extra to get the newly released OS X version of Office for Mac (this was free in the second year).

A few months later Apple struck a similar deal and we were all given OS X Panther and iLife for free - all we had to do was apply for it. Of course when Tiger came out we automagically got sent those disks to. (In fact they arrived at school before anybody knew we were actually getting them - just a couple of disks in a brown envelope).

So what has happened now is that the MS deal only includes the software for Windows and the OS X version of office is no longer included in the bundle. But Apple have already extended their offer to include iWork.

This has created quite a stir in the Mac Ed community. With some for and some against the move.

Somebody who I respect greatly (and is an Apple Distinguished Educator to boot) has a great response to it here

The point the original articles seems to miss (and I have argued this for years) is that the computers - and apps for that matter - that we are using today will probably be nothing like the ones children will face in 10-15 years time when they are ready to join the workforce (although Vista SP2 should just about be ready to ship).

We are not teaching children 'how' to use a computer and its programmes - most of them already know that and those that don't, quickly learn. We are trying to teach children to think and use tools that best help them to think. At least at the most basic level that is what we are endeavouring to do.

So access to MS Office isn't a pre-requisite to be able to function in the workplace - but being able to problem solve (ahh maybe that's where it comes in), think creatively, work collaboratively, communicate effectively, use sound reasoning to make decisions - are all attributes a valuable employee should have.

Unfortunately I think there are forces within the MOE that truly believe the world would be better off without Macs. The really funny thing is - if you go to any Education conference that has an ICT focus and the predominant platform is Apple-based. The movers and shakers in NZ education are the Mac based schools and we're going to take a lot to budge.

Smack Down

Yeah I know it's been a while, but hey, better late than never.

Anyway the main thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the so-called anti-smacking bill that is before parliament at the moment. Basically for those who aren't aware of what I'm talking about, we currently have a bill before parliament that is wanting to remove from law a clause (not sure if that is the correct term) that says parents are allowed to use reasonable force to discipline their children. There have been a few cases where parents have been acquitted of child abuse because of the clause.

So of course people are up in arms about removing parents' rights to smack their children, about how this will turn parents into criminals, - the proponents suggest it will better enable us to prosecute child abusers and of course deny that it will create criminals of 'good' parents.

Well here's my opinion. I think that the bill is a waste of time, money and energy for one reason and one reason only. That is that the people who commit serious child abuse, and I mean the 'beat them senseless' couldn't give a rat's backside whether it is legal to hit their kids or not. If they did, then they wouldn't be doing it in the first place. The people that do it aren't worried that the kid is going to be taken away from them when they lash out. All they care about is making the defenceless little sod pay for whatever misdemeanor they have committed.

So OK the two major political parties have got together and made an amendment to the bill that means the police can use their discretion on whether to prosecute or not - this is supposed to appease the opposition to the bill. I call political point-scoring on this!! The amendment isn't going to prevent John & Mary Toogood from being investigated by the police and CYPFs when they give young Johnny Jnr a whack on the hand at the supermarket because he just wouldn't stop pulling things off the shelves. In fact if somebody was to complain then the police are obligated to investigate. Hands up here who wouldn't mind being part of a police investigation? Not me, that's for sure.

So once again the people who are generally lawful are going to be punished while those are breaking the law anyway couldn't care less if they have another conviction beside there name. I liken it in some ways to the micro-chipping of dogs debate, which is supposed to give us better control over dogs' whereabouts. From all I've read the dogs that are causing problems are either A: unregistered, in which case they are hardly likely to line up for microchipping or B: registered, in which case the owners are easily tracked down and prosecuted anyway - so the current system should work fine.

So back to the smacking debate. Many years ago we did away with corporal punishment in schools - teachers were no long allowed to strap or cane a child. I can't remember the reasons for this, possibly along the lines of - abusive, violence begets violence, children's rights etc, which are all very honourable reasons. The question I'd like to ask now is: How are we doing with that? Are the children of today more respectful of their teachers and for that matter anybody in authority than the children of say 20 years ago? We hear so much talk about children's rights and protecting children, that we've forgotten that they are children and as such need to understand that some things, although painful, can be instrumental in learning to be an adult that contributes to society and doesn't just take from it. Like falling out of trees, falling off bikes, and a smack on the backside for being defiant of your mother.

When an adult breaks the law, they are dealt with through the justice system and on the whole it does a reasonable job of issuing consequences for the adult's actions, whether it be a fine, community service or jail-time for the more serious offenses. However when a child does something wrong, while we are OK for the misdemeanors, the more serious offenses have been left without an equivalent consequence. As such children quickly learn that the adult they are defying are basically powerless to correct their behaviour and realise that the power has been shifted to them. Are the able to use that power sensibly - the behaviours we see in today's children would suggest not.

Is Ignorance really bliss?

I've just had cause to change a signature on a forum I frequent as I had a link to this blog with the blog's title as the link. I feel sad that people can be offended by the word intercourse, when they are quite obviously misinformed about its meaning.

As stated in the heading - Intercourse is about communication, which is what I'm endeavouring to do with this blog.

I appreciate that 'foul' language has no place in public society, however when a word such as that starts to cause offence then I believe the pendulum has swung too far.

Yes, I grant that I've chosen the word to encourage people to investigate, but that it is offensive is just absurd. What next? Organ? Masticate? Member? Yes 2 of these words can have other meanings or innuendo, while the other just 'sounds' like another word.

At least here I can write whatever I like.

Sorry if this offends any one - but maybe you need to find something that is worth being offended by.

Cheers & Blessings.

Still here?

How time slips away from us.

Life has been quite busy, what with putting the house on the market, end of school term, birthday parties, Easter and everyday life in general.

I am determined to keep this blog going, so although it might seem I have fallen off the face of the earth, I shall return and continue to write down these mind-numbing entries if for no other reason than I enjoy doing it.

So the house is listed with Harcourts and we've had one person go through it so far, unfortunately they were unable to raise the finance. Things have slowed down a little now over Easter but we are hoping for some action as the listing has also appeared in the Harcourts BlueBook. Keeping things in a state of perpetual tidiness can be stressful so we're hoping for things to speed up.

School's out for Easter and we don't go back for 2 weeks!


So we had people over yesterday to dye eggs for Easter and enjoy some yummy Hot Cross Buns. It was a beautiful day, I even got to wash the van. Today, Rie has to go to a birthday party and I have to see if I can find a part for the shower door which got broken when it was being cleaned. Hopefully the place I need to go to will be open today, otherwise it'll have to wait until Tuesday.

Apple have announced a new Mac Pro model with 2x Quad-core processors - that's 8 cores altogether!
Check them out on Apple's Web site. I had a play with customising one one Apple NZ's online store and maxed out all the options including 2x 30" Cinema displays. It came to around NZ$35 000, so I don't think I'll be going through with that purchase anytime in this lifetime!!

That's about all for now. I'll try and post a little more over the holidays. Well that's the intention anyway.
Oh and if you happen to read this check out www.godsmac.com/forum - Technology Meets Eternity

"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit"

Real Estate

So we've finally bitten the bullet and signed with a real estate agent. After 10 days of having it on TradeMe and getting no enquiries we felt that in the interests of expediency it is best to let the professionals handle the sale. So we've gone with Harcourts and are very happy to have that responsibility taken off our hands.

Maybe I'll sleep better tonight!

In the meantime of course I have my big girl away for the week on school camp. Apparently today they went to Mt Cook and tomorrow they will be re-enacting the battle of Pelennor fields from the Lord Of The Rings - Return Of The King. So she should be having an awesome time.


Just over a week to go until Easter, and boy am I looking forward to the break. 2 weeks off work will be jsut what the doctor ordered. Hopefully by the time I go back we should have a buyer for the house and we can start getting on with our lives.

Well I know it aint much but at least I'm posting something!

Time or lack thereof

Well it has been nearly a week since my last post and I'm wondering where the time has gone.

I'm also wondering if I even have time to be doing this, but then again I figure nobody reads it anyway, so why do I do it?

I suppose I do it because I can and I actually enjoy writing when I can get off my sorry butt and do it.

So what's been happening? Well on Saturday it was my little girl's birthday and we had 12 additional 6 yr olds here for 2 hours. The party was a success thanks to my wife's wonderful planning. Everybody had a great time. Then in the evening/late afternoon we went out to a buffet restaurant where they had a great area for kids to play in, which made it quite relaxing for the adults.

We've had no interest shown in our house, so on Sunday afternoon we made the decision to engage an agent to sell for us. It will mean less $$$ in our pocket, but hopefully it will sell faster this way. So we are meeting with one on Wednesday night to crunch some numbers.

My big girl has gone away today for a school camp for the week. I didn't realise how much I was going to miss her, but I have felt quite emotional all day and she has been in my thoughts a lot. I know she is going to have an awesome time, I just pray that she keeps safe.

Well I might try and get to bed early tonight as I haven't been sleeping well lately, I keep waking up in the night with pins and needles in my hand from lying on it and it takes ages to fall back asleep again waiting for them to disappear. Maybe I should try a different sleeping position.

Hopefully I'll make time to write more frequently - I suppose I could do it when I wake in the night!!

A day in review

I've had a new bus driver this week. In fact he is the same one I had when I first started catching it from out here, but is relieving for our regular. He's awesome! No pissing around - just get on and get going. I'll be catching it with Rie in the morning as she has a student council meeting before school and has to be there early - nice to be able to spend some time with her.

Anyway had a good trip into town this morning, snoozed a little, watched some video podcasts - GeekBrief TV and StrongBad's Teen Girl Squad. Also listened to the Christian Comedy Podcast which is a fairly new one for me, but one I can tell I'm going to continue to enjoy.

While I was waiting for my next bus in town, there was an almighty bang outside which involved two buses colliding. Everybody swarmed outside to see the damage, except me and a few others. I wasn't that interested given that my bus was due to arrive and the more people gawking, the longer it may take to clear up and as the buses were blocking the exit of the bus exchange, I wanted it cleared up PDQ.

So I got to work in plenty of time - and checked the recovery of my HD on my PB. (Historical context insert: My PowerBook's HD gave up the ghost and although I have recovered some data from it, there is still plenty more I need so I have set it to do a "Thorough Scan" using Data Rescue II and now it is recovering the data.) It is a very slow process, made worse when somebody decided to come along and unplug it from the wall last time it was recovering data, so I had to start the whole process again.

The rest of the day went to plan and we had our weekly meeting after school and I stayed a little longer than my usual hour which meant I didn't get home until 6.15pm, so that was 11hrs 15mins away from home for the day. No wonder I'm feeling a little wacked.

Read an interesting thread tonight over on Mactalk about homophobia. Why was it interesting?

It never ceases to amaze me how people can get so strung up on what complete strangers say (or type), and how people can take offense at, what I see at least, the smallest things. We all carry prejudices with us, but we gotta be able to laugh about them. I am short, bald and rotund, only one of those characteristics I actually have any control over - short of surgery - and I could quite easily take offense at all those adverts that show hair replacement programs, or weight loss. Or feel aggrieved when somebody accuses me of being a Mac fanboy, or when somebody mocks my faith. I think we all need to grow thicker skins and get on with our lives, doing the best we can with what we have, wherever we are.

Tomorrow's hump day - then it is downhill to the weekend!
Take Care!

Remember:
"It is more blessed to give than to receive"
(Acts 20:35 NAS).

Secret Conversations

I was having a conversation with my wife the other day and realised about half way through that although we both knew what the other person was talking about, neither of us were using specific language.

The reason for this? Kids. That's right, our kids were in the room at the time and we didn't particularly want them to know what we were talking about specifically, so we were referring to general things while at the same time giving 'the look' so that the other person knew exactly what we were referring to.

After 4 kids, we have developed this ability into a fine art so that our conversations can go like this:

You know that thing we were talking about earlier?
Yeah
Well, I was thinking, we don't have to get that, we could quite easily get the other thing.
Oh you mean the... (look)
Yeah. Because, you know we don't really want to encourage...(look)
No! Definitely not. And the other would be better suited for ...(look)
That's what I mean, yeah
I agree, let's do that then.

So we can talk like this quite comfortably and still perfectly understand each other.

The trick is though to remember not to do it with people you don't know that well or else they may think you're a little touched in the head.