Being Amber Rhea

I didn’t lose my AIM buddy list; there was just no one online the other night. :P

I installed Jaguar this weekend. It’s cool! :D

IE crashes whenever I right-click, though. Weird. But then, I only use IE to test my web pages (I check their appearance in the six browsers I have installed on my computer) so it’s not a big deal.

I also seem to have lost my AIM Buddy List. Again, things could be worse.

iChat is really cool. I love the thought bubbles!

The people from my mailing lists were right – there is a definite speed increase. Things are much zippier now. Virtual PC is actually bearable under OS X now. Even so, OS 9 remains much faster than OS X as a whole. I currently use OS X about 60% of the time and OS 9 40% of the time.

This fool John Dvorak has completely missed the point. This article embodies my disdain for the majority of PC users:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,263476,00.asp

This article is so ridiculous that I think it speaks for itself. A few things do need to be commented on, though. Let’s start at the beginning…

“[T]here is no way that after the ‘Think Different’ campaign–which featured pictures of Einstein and other symbols of intellectual excellence–the company would suddenly promote goofy looking schlubs as its intellectual representatives.”
– Aside from demonstrating a total lack of common sense about advertising in general, this quote just goes to show that some people will pick on Apple no matter what. With the Think Different ads, these idiots criticized Apple for being “elitist”; now with the Switcher ads, apparently they’re criticizing Apple for not being elitist? I would say maybe they should make up their minds, but it doesn’t matter, because we all know that these types of people are going to bitch about Apple for the rest of their lives anyway.

This fixation with bashing one company befuddles me. I think these people have serious issues; perhaps they crave attention. But moving on…

“Did Apple ever get the message that ‘if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all?’ Trashing an entire platform in a personal way and insulting Windows users is not going to work. It’s a negative message.”
– Ummmm… hypocritical, anyone? If Dvorak really adhered to this mantra, he never would have written this article.

Plus, the Switch ads are not “trashing” Windows. In case he doesn’t realize it, those are real people who wrote emails to Apple explaining in their own words why they switched. And no one in any of the ads stoops to the level of Dvorak in this article. They state facts and frustrations that they experienced first-hand with PCs; no one started making fun of the Compaq salesman’s glasses..

“…Liza Richardson, a DJ who says she ‘traded her PC and “its stupid little speakers” for an Apple computer that worked better and sounded better.’ Seems to me she could have just gotten bigger speakers. Is she that ignorant? I mean, come on, I don’t know of any desktop machine that has welded on speakers.”
– This is what I mean by completely missing the point. You can tell this guy has never used a Mac in his life. (These are the people who I really have a problem with; don’t criticize something if you haven’t used it yourself. That would be like me ranting about why BMWs suck. [Obviously, I have never been behind the wheel of a BMW.]) So he thinks Liza should get bigger speakers. That sounds pretty kludgy to me. You can treat the symptoms or you can cure the disease itself. No, I don’t know of a computer that has “welded on speakers” but all Macs have built-in speakers (and have had them since day one) so you don’t need external speakers! The 6500 even had a built-in subwoofer. (If he wants “welded on”, many Apple monitors have speakers built onto the sides; the 15-inch AppleVision Display, for example.)

“This guy looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese.”
– That just needed to be quoted.

“He doesn’t even match the Mac stereotypes.”
– And that’s supposed to be a bad thing? Again, he has obviously missed that this is the point of these ads! See what I mean about people criticzing Apple no matter what?

Apparently people are supposed to match their stereotypes. What a noble idea.

“Finally, we have Sarah Whistler, who gave up her ‘horrid little PC’ to get a Mac. Maybe she should have bought a bigger PC.”
– Well, I had to quote that, but I don’t have anything to say about it; I don’t think I need to.

“If these people are the examples, then I fear for the future of Apple. Seriously.”
– Hmm, who’s the elitist one here?

Honestly, I could have picked apart every line of this ridiculous exposition, but I figured I should keep it to a minimum. I wonder how many people still take Dvorak seriously? Read the thing and tell me if it doesn’t sound like it was written by a 14-year-old boy.

My PHP calendar works! (No, it’s not the most feature-rich or user-friendly thing, but dammit, I am proud of myself!) :D I like PHP. I may make a few minor changes to the calendar, but all of the assigned requirements work correctly.

From the Quadlist:

“At work last week the exchange server went down, company wide, due to overload from one of those internet virus/worm thingies. Seems the corporate types keep passing it around. My non-techie friends were amazed that my 40mhz Quadra 840AV with $0 of software investment was still chugging away as my mail server while the expensive fancy exchange server had managed to blow itself up :)”

I love it! The smug grin on my face… (and, I’m sure, on the face of the writer of that message, too!)

Our cable has been out a lot. Apparently Charter is “doing some work”. But I think we’re going to call them Monday and see if we can get any updates.

This deterred me from printing out more of my weblog at work Friday. And of course, it’s all about me, really.

I have discovered a really good iTunes radio station called “The Kingdom of Swing” – it’s excellent background music to studying/doing work.

The dearth of entries here is due to the amount of work I have. In a word, tons. Alas, it must take priority. I am having fun (and, admittedly, occassionally getting frustrated) learning more about PHP.

I have yet another Javascript/DHTML success story to post. This is assignment 7 for my CS class – it’s a “countdown to impact” clock. (Apparently some asteroid has a 1-in-300 chance of striking Earth in like 878 years or so. This clock counts down to that date.) There are two versions:

http://ebiz.terry.uga.edu/~arhea/Assn7A.html (this one works in all browsers)
http://ebiz.terry.uga.edu/~arhea/Assn7B.html (this one works only in IE)

:-) Yes, I am proud of myself, goshdarnit.

Next assignment is a PHP version of the appointment calendar.

Tonight we went to see Mo Rocca (he was here at UGA). We had a good time. He was very funny and entertaining. And what makes it even better, it only cost us two bucks. (Chris’s ticket was $2 because he’s not a student; mine was free because I am a student.) That’s the beauty of academia-sponsored events!

A couple days ago, a fellow Mac addict who works at EITS brought over two boxes of old Mac software that would otherwise have been tossed in the dumpster. It’s all in excellent condition (some of it is still shrink-wrapped, in fact). The best find among everything, though, is a copy of MacProject. This is in the original box, with all the original manuals and everything, including the original “Macintosh Basics” cassette tape, still shrink-wrapped. This is one of the boxes with the Picasso logo on the inside, the embossed Apple logo on the plastic casing that holds the disks – original, 1984 Mac software. The kind of stuff where the box alone would fetch $50 on Ebay. (I’m not selling this stuff, though! Hell, no!) I can’t wait to try it out on my Plus! This is particularly cool for me because next semester when we start really working on our projects, we have to use Microsoft Project to make Gantt charts and stuff. A big, expensive, bloated M$ program. I think it’s beautiful that an almost 19-year-old program that fits on a 400k floppy (along with a System Folder – since this is from the days when most people didn’t have hard drives) does the exact same thing!

And the pictures at the beginnings of the chapters of those old Apple manuals are the best. If you have one, you know what I mean.

The box-o-software also included an original copy of MacDraw, in the same original packaging. I already had MacDraw (though not a complete original like this) so it’s a little less exciting for me than MacProject, but still very cool.

Another really cool thing about this copy of MacProject is that the box has a sticker on it that says, “This software runs on Macintosh and Lisa.” :-) [Now if I only had a Lisa!]

For the past few days, I have been booting into OS 9 more and more. For a while there I was all gung-ho about OS X, but now my more ambivalent attitude has returned. The fact is that OS 9 is just faster (on my machine, anyway). Hopefully when (if) I get Jaguar, things will improve significantly. I’ve heard only good things from people using Jaguar on a G3 about performance – shining praise, actually. But for now, I think I’ll probably be going back to OS 9 more.

I don’t need the “latest and greatest” show-off thing-of-the-week; I just want to get my work done and get it done efficiently!

My most common OS 9 apps? BBEdit, iCab, iTunes, AIMM (no, that’s not a typo – it’s a freeware AIM client, without the annoying ads), Outlook Express (I’m ashamed to admit it; but I can’t get Eudora to load my .mail IMAP folders, no matter what I try; and at least OE is better than Entourage!), Appleworks, Fetch, Now Up-to-Date, and Excel (the only M$ product that I honestly do like). Five of these are Carbonized; I have Office X as well as Office 2001; I use Netscape 7 and/or OmniWeb for browsing in OS X, and I use Fire for AIM chatting.

You probably could care less what apps I use regularly. But I’m rambling.

Anyway… this brings me to another comment. In my previous post I mentioned MacAddict’s excellent article about the benefits of Macs over PCs. But they also have this whole section (albeit on the “Shutdown” page) called “Just Say No to the Operating System Formerly Known as OS 9.” [I think it's a joke, or at least partially, but still...] They are so ridiculously anti-OS 9 lately! They’re as bad as Steve Jobs, I think! It’s starting to piss me off. And I know it’s pissing off other people, too, because there have been letters. There’s a survey on their web site asking “Are you ready to say goodbye to OS 9 for good?” and I voted no. Apparently the results are supposed to be in the February 2003 issue.