Stuff – Page 2 – DavidPierron.Com

Current Events: Playing catch up …

Okay, I haven’t posted in a very very long time. (My English teacher said never to use “very very”, choose extremely or some other word). Not that I haven’t wanted to, but I don’t always have the time and I am easily distracted. I get a topic in my head and decide that’s what I’m going to post, but I forget about it when I get home or whatever, it just never gets done. So! Here are the current events and hopefully I don’t forget anything.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO): I went to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to do a New Year’s Eve show with Fosterchild. This was to perform for the troops at GTMO, the world’s oldest Naval base … It’s beautiful down there. It was more like a vacation than a job. What I bring back the most was snorkeling … I enjoyed that very much as I’d never done it before. The water was so salty that it was effortless to float, but nearly impossible to dive. Coral was very sharp, but I saw fishies! We played two shows, one New Year’s Eve and another two days later … We toured the entire facility – yes, the entire facility and they were clear that they wanted the things we saw be shared with everyone when we came back. They showed us “Camp X-ray” (which was only open for 70-90 days) where the detainees were held in 2003 and all the media photographs depict when referring to GTMO. This camp is grown over with grass and weeds and hasn’t been used since. They showed us Camps 4, 5, and 6 which become more restrictive as you go. We saw what the detainees were provided in the way of clothing and things to pass their time. How theirs customs are respected and attended to. It was certainly an experience all in itself.

Bo Bice: On a lighter note (whew!) … American Idol’s fourth season runner up to Carrie Underwood was also performing at Guantanamo Bay as well. We even shared the 30 seat plane ride with him to the island. There was a problem with his sound guy’s passport, so he was left at the airport in Florida. Because of this fact, I performed double duty on New Year’s Eve day by sound checking Bo Bice at their venue and then going to the venue where Fosterchild was playing and complete that sound check. Bo Bice played that night with Tony, the electrician who is assigned to setup and break down PA systems at GTMO and his crew. I also had a monitor guy who worked with Tony’s department. It was a Venue system, and the next day, New Year’s Day they moved that entire show to another part of the base that is their outdoor movie theater and I was able to sound check and come back and mix that show. So, on New Year’s Day 2011 (1/1/11), I mixed Bo Bice in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – and I got his autograph.

I better get this posted now, more later …

If you’re a Mac, you’re a PC …

A PC is defined literally as a Personal Computer. If you’re using a Mac, you’re using a personal computer. The Mac vs. PC commercials are obviously Microsoft vs. Apple commercials, and they’re spot on when put in that context. But why confuse everyone thinking that “PC” is a bad thing? Or “PC” is the derogatory term that has opposite connotations than “Mac” … I mean, don’t get me wrong, as a computer professional since the mid eighties, I have found my place in the Mac world. I find myself utterly and completely more productive and enjoying my environment and experience 100 times more. I was in misery at the hands of Microsoft products.

Probably many people don’t know that before Microsoft, it was an IBM world and the PC had become known as an “IBM Compatible.” At that time we also had the Commodore, Apple ][ and Franklin. Franklin was an Apple ][ clone and were sued by Apple. Result being, you don’t see any Franklins around, do you?

People also probably don’t know that the CPUs in the first IBM computers were AMDs. Seems that AMD came late to the game to most people, but my IBM XT had a 4.77Mhz AMD chip installed in it, and I used the “Tiny Turbo” to up that baby to a whopping 8Mhz. I imagine Intel struck a deal early on with IBM and that’s how they cornered the CPU market as well as Microsoft pushing IBM’s PC-DOS out of existence with MS-DOS.

But, is it just me? Someone like me that knows all the history of the little boxes and where they all came from and how they started? (Of course I skipped over the earlier Apples and Tandy’s attempt at PC greatness, the 5.25 floppies and 3.5s that don’t exist anymore, etc). Is it just a simple fact that “PC” now means IBM Compatible running Microsoft Windows and “Mac” means awesome computer that puts PCs (in this context) to shame?

I write this post on my 800MHz PowerPC G4 iMac with 768MB SDRAM that I bought used off of eBay and received January 14th, 2004. It’s running 10.4.11 Tiger Mac OS X … It shipped with Jaguar (10.2) but the previous owner gave me Panther (10.3) which I had also purchased separately.

I now run 2 MacBook Pros, a 17 and a 15 both with Snow Leopard (10.6) and a Dell Mini running Leopard (10.5). I bought 10.5 for the Dell (Family version) and tried to install it on the G4 PPC and that was a no go for processors under 866MHz and Snow is Intel only. It took the Intel version of the Mac (and OSX) before I was able to lose Microsoft completely. Whatever the mixture of technologies came together, that’s the case for me. The iMac didn’t get me there in 2004, it took the MacBook Pro in 2008, 4 and a half years later.

I don’t run any emulation software to run MS-Windows virtually, and I don’t utilize BootCamp. There is absolutely nothing Microsoft on my Macs at all. It’s wonderful. The 15″ came with Microsoft Office and I figured I would check it out. When I loaded Word, it said it wanted to update and I said sure. The words “Running Microsoft Update” came up on my screen and I freaked, I blew away the HD and installed my purchased Leopard from DVD. I wanted no remnant of a Microsoft product on my Mac.

So! Once you go Mac, you never go back. I think this is the case for anyone that seriously uses a computer for computing and not just web browsing and email. What do you think?

Snow Leopard Black Screen Fixed?

I ordered Snow Leopard from Amazon.Com and waited patiently for it to arrive. I read up on some sites about things to watch for when I upgraded, etc., but nothing can prepare you for when you actually go and do it.

I opted to run Carbon Copy Cloner as suggested by one site found by Google to make a complete backup of the hard drive inside my MacBook Pro 17. I tested by booting from the USB hard drive (hold down ALT at power up) to make sure I could “go back” if I had to by reversing the Carbon Copy Cloner step.

All of the FUD on the Internet was crap. Everything just worked. Until …

I had been working on my MacBook Pro 15 and the Snow Leopard blanked out (as my MBP17 normally does after about 20-30 minutes). Working on another MacBook Pro is a suggested method for passing the time. Yes, I suggest you have more than one Mac (if you’re cool enough). As I do sometimes, I swipe my finger across the trackpad to bring back whatever is on the screen. When I did this, the keyboard illuminated, but nothing shown on the screens (I have a 24″ external). The screen was black! I thought maybe the brightness went out of range and pressed the “f2″ key to bring it up. I see the dialog for the brightness level, but there’s nothing on the screen. I see the backlight getting brighter, but the screen is black … nothing there. I try the volume and that shows on the 24” (which is set as the main display). I Google on the MBP15 and find that people close their cover and open to a working Mac. After I wake from sleep, moving the mouse I see it as the spinning beach ball that it is. I hold down the power button to power off the Mac, there is no other choice.

Turn the MacBook Pro 17 on again and I have a working Snow Leopard. All the things that “they” said didn’t work work for me. I installed the 10.6.1 update and iTunes 9. So everything is up to date. It happens again, same symptoms. Black screens, can see volume and brightness dialogs when keys are hit, no mouse until after I sleep and wake to spinning beach ball mouse with black screens.

Google searching brings up black screen during the install, and some similar to my problem, but not all the same. Some blame just on the install blanking and they can see images on their screen with no backlight. I guess they’re fine after they upgrade cause I see no follow ups. I see more and more people blaming things having to do with the video or their video card. Some it’s playing games and some it’s running VLC … So I decided, mine “hangs” when the computer screen sleeps (that’s SCREEN, my MacBook Pro never sleeps), so I think *screen saver!*

While the computer is running, I click on the Apple, go to System Preferences… into Desktop & Screen Saver. Immediately, spinning beach ball. Aha! I can Force Quit System Preferences until I can get in there and click on the first screen saver I can click on to change it. What was selected when it hung was a directory “Screen Savers” … I don’t know where it came from – only thing I can think of was a shareware copy of that Aqua Marine fish tank-like screen saver that I never ended up buying. I’ve been using Flurry forever (and that was my first thought when I thought it might be OpenGL or something, which never worked on my KDE installs on cheap PC hardware) and thought that might have been hanging the computer’s video card or something.

So far so good, I will update if the longer the screen sleep gives different results. Here’s hoping this helped someone.

October Macworld Mac Virus FUD

As part of the package of the purchase of my new Mac, I was offered a subscription to Macworld. I agreed to the subscription and then offered to extend it at a very low price, so I did …

Each month I browse through the issue quickly. Sometimes I find things that help me with my daily Mac computing or software that I may have otherwise not been aware existed. There is also iPhone stuff periodically and reviews of peripheral hardware.

The Mac vs. PC controversy exists. No matter what. There’s the John Hodgman & Justin Long commercials and Microsoft’s commercials saving money buying a PC stuff. I’ve gone through the Linux vs. Microsoft stuff too, just so happens I choose FreeBSD (why I like the Mac so much). There should be a distinction that we’re talking about a PC running MS-Windows. A PC running FreeBSD is solid as a rock.

BUT! Macworld … keep it real … There’s no reason to start spreading FUD about the Mac and viruses. In two articles (in an issue that targets saving money utilizing your Mac as well as after the purchase of your Mac), Jason Snell and Dan Frakes mention the expense of viruses and it’s simply not true. It’s not an added expense to the PC, nor the Mac.

I’ve been computing since 1984, and I’ve never spent money on virus software. The BBS I started in 1990 used McAffe’s virus protection, and it was always free to use and download for BBS Sysops, and I think it was free to end users as well (I may still have an old copy on an old machine and I can look that up). Anyway, through the early years running PC-DOS and MS-DOS, I simply didn’t run stuff I didn’t know where it came from, and there was always some form of a free piece of Virus Software, now being called Anti-Virus software.

Regardless, I just wanted to post this since it’s simply not true, there is no expense in the Anti-Virus market (or just about any other) if you take the time and know where to look. These softwares offer free daily updates to virus signatures as well, so no subscription to pay for. They’re normally much more up to date than any of the pay subscriptions as well.

FREE MS-Windows Anti-Virus Software called AVG.

FREE Mac (and all others) Anti-Virus software called ClamAV.

It’s already a fact that any PC sucks if it has some version of MS-Windows on it, you don’t have to make stuff up.

Verizon Sucks

I see I have a lot of Verizon visitors and I figured I would express my displeasure with Verizon just for you. You should be flattered.

#1 reason why Verizon sucks? I can’t send “verizon.net” people email from my mail server. I spent an entire day trying to communicate this to Verizon support and I got absolutely nowhere. The people with the accents kept asking for my Verizon email address or my DSL phone number no matter how many times I told them I wasn’t a Verizon customer. I asked for the phone number for their NOC who handled their mail server. Confusion.

Their web interface doesn’t work either. I am not using my mail server to browse web sites and use their white-listing page. My mail server is in a dark server room dutifully sending and receiving email 24 hours a day. Fighting SPAM and Viruses and doing a damn good job of it, but Verizon won’t accept my email. I receive the email from the nice web interface telling me that everything is okay, and when I reply to that email, my email is returned 7 days later never being able to make an SMTP connection with Verizon.Net’s servers.

I resorted to opening a ticket with my upstream provider, and they had no luck in helping me. They suggested I reach out to Verizon customers and have them complain that they can’t receive email from me. Can’t say as I know any Verizon.Net customers, nor could I email them asking them such a favor. They were able to telnet to Verizon’s listed MX and issue simple telnet commands, so they assume that any of their IPs would be able to do the same. Well I try from my mail server and other machines, and all I do is time out. I just sent anther letter to my provider, but it’s Verizon that needs to provide me support.

Anyone from Verizon, please respond to this post and help me deliver mail to your customers from my customers. Thanks.

#2 reason why Verizon sucks? They advertise FIOS constantly on my TV, but it isn’t available in my area. Comcast dominates the Philadelphia area and Verizon finally won against the powers that be to start installing FIOS in the Philadelphia area. Where do they start? In the suburbs. If I could get FIOS to my location, my connection speed will increase 100 times and I will pay absolutely no more money per month for my connection. That’s substantial for me.

I just got Comcast Internet installed at a new location and it blows away my high priced connection. It is an eye opener, but Verizon has been teasing me for so long. I need new copper run for my local loop, but an insider told me that they won’t run new copper, they want to install FIOS – well it’s not available in my area, and I have to deal with outages and bounces … That makes Verizon suck!

Bottom line, hey – Verizon, install me some FIOS and let me deliver email to your mail server, and we’re golden! Thanks again …

Two out of Three ain’t bad; 10.5.7 Mac OS X Update Failed

Out of the MBP17, MBP15 and the Dell Mini 9, the MBP15 wins with no issue, but I’ll tell you about the others.

By the way, if you didn’t know, “MBP” is short for MacBook Pro. I have the silvers w/matte displays. Bring back the matte and firewire Apple! =)

Let’s start off with a complaint, cause that’s what I do. I use MenuMeters for the Mac. I was made aware of its existence by it being on one of the OSX386 Project distributions. Anyway, because I’m running it, I see activity on my Mac that others are oblivious to … I like to know why something is taking so long, or if there might be a problem. So the complaint is, it takes me a while to figure out that the Mac is downloading updates. 10.5.7 was a kinda big one, and when the Mac is downloading that long and I didn’t initiate it, I’d kinda like to know about it. I think Apple should notify you it’s doing so, that’s all.

Pictured is the 3 About This Mac windows after I was all done. They all made it without any serious perspiration. I started on the MBP17. After the update, the 17″ screen remained gray. It did automatically boot twice, but after the second boot went nowhere. I waited an ample amount of time while I saw nothing happening. You know, I’m used to having to wait when I don’t have my meters. So then I started Googling on the Mini 9 while it downloaded its update. After reading a bunch of the obvious posts from people that shouldn’t be allowed access to computers, I decided to unplug everything from the MBP17. External screen, external hard drives, external keyboard and mouse. Lo and behold, MBP17 solved, and the screen hopped right over when I plugged the 24″ back in.

I let the Mini 9 run its own update and it did a fine job, although on the final boot, the graphics were horrible. The screen could not be seen at all. So, I fired up the MBP15 so it could download its update and I could Google what was up with the Mini 9. I was expecting something might have happened to it since I read what the update did and there was something in there for video. I just figured I would boot via CD and reinstall the kext files, etc, but I skipped Google entirely and went straight to the MyDellMini.Com Forums … There was a forum about the 10.5.7 update and apparently it’s been out for a while. I just got it this morning, weird … One thing in the forum was the noticing that although we were all there discussing something that shouldn’t work anyway, regular Mac users all over the place were having 10.5.7 update problems … same as I described above with the MBP17. There’s articles from Macworld and Computerworld out there about using the Mac as a firewire device, etc. Work arounds for the update problems. Anyway, I digress.

Fix for Mini 9 was what I expected and even easier than I had thought it would be … I went to the trouble of hooking up the external CD/DVD drive, etc, but all I needed to do was start in Safe Mode and rerun the Dell EFI proggy … I got the latest (1.2a5 I think), popped it on a USB stick and shoved it into the Mini 9. Let Finder unzip it, ran the program and off to the races. Mini 9 is fine, and that rhymes three times. Whoops! Four.

Leaving the MBP15 for last, it gave no problems what-so-ever … Nothing external about it, and nothing weird going on with it …

From what I heard (read) while surfing around, this is the last release before Snow Leopard. How anyone would know that, I don’t have a clue.

So there you have it, Meatloaf would be proud. “Baby we can talk all night, but that ain’t gettin’ us nowhere.” (or maybe Utopia would be proud, the band on Bat Out of Hell, Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell, Wee Willie Wilcox). I always say Bat Out of Hell is Utopia with Meatloaf fronting. Good luck on your own 10.5.7 update!

Web 2.0 and oh, nice to see you …

Web 2.0: Gaetan sent an invite to my email address to follow him on twitter, so I signed up finally. Honestly, I had actually been meaning to sign up with twitter and facebook … My older brother is terrified of facebook, he thinks Rupert Murdoch is after him … I’m particular in the information I share but let’s be honest, if someone like Rupert Murdoch wanted the goods on you, guess what? He’s going to get you …

There are so many times that I think of something to blog, but I never get around to it. I think of the situation, the story and everything, but then I don’t get to it. Or, maybe the paranoia of what I would be posting and the opinion that may come of it, or too much information shared … Blah, tough living in this day and age, isn’t it? The age of immediate consequences from something you may post online. The Internet is everywhere and immediate. Anyway, here are the current events:

Hosting: There have been several instances in the hosting area that have devastated me. One, I had a disk crash on a machine that I never thought the disk would crash. Like, I had it in my mind that that was a pristine machine and I didn’t have to worry about it. It’s where all my stuff was and where I could just ssh in or sit at its console and update code on the fly … No backups. Gone. Now I have everything important on RAID5 and my personal machines have Time Machine running.

Verizon is a huge thorn in my side. My last mile is Verizon. Verizon is copper. Verizon wants to run FIOS (fiber) in Philadelphia. Comcast rules the video market in Philadelphia. Seems contacting politicians is the only way Verizon FIOS will come to Philadelphia. There is nothing more than I want right now is FIOS to be in Philadelphia because my connection speed would greatly increase immediately. How this affects me now is that Verizon doesn’t want to run any new copper, they only want to run FIOS. I have had a terrible time as of late with my connection and this is the problem. It happened the first time in May and was dormant until Christmas Eve, from then on it was daily bouncing until the last copper pair change. Verizon has been on site over 3 times. It’s too late, the customers that this affected the worst have already found other solutions. Not cool Verizon, not cool at all.

Octane: Sound for Octane continues, but with almost every venue having house sound installed, I can’t rememer the last time I needed my PA. For that matter, the last time I had the PA in the trailer, the trailer was burglarized for one bass bin and one monitor. They took nothing else although much was in there as well as all the band’s gear that was strewn to just the outside of the trailer. Makes absolutely no sense. I still haven’t been able to sell the truck since replacing it with the van and trailer. I should try that on eBay again. While Octane remains booked fairly steady for a band in their position, there are weekend nights that I am sitting home.

Fosterchild: I have mixed Fosterchild a couple times since the lineup change and circumstances warranted it. It was a welcome change from the norm. Apparently we’re going on tour soon!

Out On the Town: I have started working with the paper again. This time I am doing the layout on the computer. Another reason for my Mac purchase. (Still steamed about that one [previous entry], but I will survive. I have rationalized some things away.) Hopefully this will help with the ultimate goal of sitting on my ass the rest of my life.

Windows: I found out that MS Access doesn’t scale, or self sustain. Don’t know how to put it, but left to its devices, a web site utilizing an MS Access database will cause ASP to hang on a Windows Server. The database needs to be regularly reorganized. I can tell you for a fact that this will not happen on any other platform. Thanks again Windows! Way to mess up everyone’s life on your server cause you can’t handle something and don’t report on it either.

Health: My health is getting better. I had my last cigarette September 27th, 2008 at 10:45pm. This was right before Octane’s first set (acoustic) outside at The Whiskey Tango. During the set, pressure mounted in the center of me chest and by the end of the set I was getting sharp pains. I didn’t go out for a smoke after the set, I took it easy but sharp pains came and went and I generally didn’t feel right. I was getting scared and I decided that I thought I should go to the hospital. I spent the weekend in the hospital while they did all sorts of fun tests. All tests were okay. I then went back to have a camera shoved down my throat and that turned up acid damage in my esophagus, stomach and duodenum. I was told to take 4 Prilosec daily. The anesthetic for the tube test was wild, like snapping your fingers, test done and two and a half hours went by. I haven’t smoked since and have started dieting and exercising. I may get a Brazilian and wear a bikini or thong to the beach this summer? … and everyone knows how I love the beach.

The Whiskey Tango: I went back to work at The Whiskey Tango May 20th 2008 to fill in the open nights with Octane and to do the off nights. Ronnie quit to go work for Spellcaster down the shore for the summer with more nights. Since then The Whiskey Tango changed ownership and management and those off nights aren’t happening anymore. Status there is up in the air right now.

Coding: I recently updated some old ASP pages I did way back in the day for the Bigg Romeo site. That was fun. I am progressing on new web development projects and I am very excited about that. Also thinking of ways to further promote the hosting through a better interface. The new trickles in slowly anymore and Verizon isn’t helping with the departed. Here’s hoping FIOS comes through. They are sure to support that endeavor more than they’ve helped me now, right?

OH! and the biggest thing about all of this is that anything new will be in a new location! All the servers, routers, switches, computers, etc. will be moved to a brand new location. We will be moving but still don’t know when yet. I am hoping for A.S.A.P., but that’s me.

That’s all I can think of right now. Any questions?

Apple, on its way to crap.

Of course it’s only my opinion, but to me, that’s all that matters. Self centered? Maybe. But I think I am the person to determine what I find acceptable to me. What follows is my short assessment of what I have observed in the recent months about the cute company called Apple.

An eon ago, I bought the lamp shaped iMac. At the time I was interested in any and all operating systems and alternatives to Microsoft at all costs. I found the iMac on eBay for $1200. I found no use for the machine other than using it to logon to chat networks and utilize the machine that way. I didn’t like the way the text editors worked in that their keystrokes were completely foreign to what I am familiar. All that aside, I didn’t use it all that much. One day, the hard drive was gone – I replaced it with an IDE drive I had and got the machine working again. Had to use those “star” tools to get in there and such, but I was able to get everything working as it should. Sorry for this tangent, but I wanted to explain that I am not new to Apple, I just tried it out and didn’t get “into it” at the time.

I don’t know how, but over the course of time I became more and more accepting of the Mac and was getting used to seeing many of the examples of the things I was getting into done on the Mac. Mostly web development and programming stuff. I also do graphics and video stuff, and the Mac is heavily used there as well. YouTube came popular and the Mac became popular on there as well as many people started making their movies obviously on a Mac. So I decided to give it another try with the latest and greatest Macs.

I was shopping a particular web job and I was thinking of getting back into the publishing of a local paper here in Philly and I thought that I should move toward the Mac. I especially liked some text editors that were now available for the Mac so I researched it up and decided on the Black Mac. It had everything I thought would be satisfactory when it came to development, portability and enjoyment from one machine.

So I start tweaking out the machine and then I determine that the built in iSight camera makes an 8k whistle while recording a video. The microphone itself is fine after testing in GarageBand, just in iMovie when making a movie and it is determined that the auto brightness of the camera affects the squeal. I made a movie about it and posted it on YouTube. For me this is a deal breaker as I had planned to use the machine to make videos for YouTube. I haven’t yet, but I am leaving the option open. I had noticed this squeal/whistle on YouTube members videos, but thought it was something that they must have done to cause it. Either leaving the speakers on while recording or some such option that they wouldn’t have noticed that I surely would have. No, it’s just a faulty piece of hardware, so I took it back and complained.

I first called Apple and went through their tech support. That took a long time and eventually I went to level 2 support. While it wasn’t resolved, I figured it was the problem and made the YouTube video and from the responses in forums et al., it didn’t seem there was any relief. Because of other issues, I decided to return the Black Mac and get a McBook Pro. The tech support guy from Apple was supposed to call me on Thursday (what the wait was, I don’t know) and mentioning Thursday to you without telling what day it was that I called doesn’t matter, cause Thursday is as arbitrary a day as there is from whatever day I was calling originally. It has never been resolved.

So after calling ahead to the Apple store, they said they had in stock the MacBook Pro 17″ with the high res screen upgrade. While this is the case, it was not. The high res screen upgrade was $100 on the web site. The one the Apple Store had in stock was the one with the upgraded screen, hard drive and CPU making it the most expensive iMac sold (and I venture to say EVER sold) but they’re much cheaper now and you get more. I wanted to up to 4G RAM, but I would have to pick up the machine the next day. I obviously wanted to leave with the thing. I also got the Apple Care, an extra keyboard and mouse (both wired) for when I put the big screen dual monitor setup into play. That works out well by the way.

So, this was two trips ever in my life to the Apple store. First time to purchase the Black MacBook and second time to return it and upgrade to the MacBook Pro. Both times I hooked up quickly with someone and was taken care of, it seemed like a normal store-like experience although an Apple store is nothing normal. They waived the “restocking fee” on the Black Mac due to the faulty camera whistle squeal thing. A defective MacBook. It took a while for me to convince the “expert” that there was in fact an 8k whistle (I RTA’d it).

The MacBook Pro has performed as a champ. Lots of nifty features to it and it’s blazing fast. The screen is incredible. Using split screen works wonderfully. I’ve developed several web sites on it as well as produced the publication on it twice thus far. My only complaint as of this date is the lack of keys. There are many keys I would like to use for when I am SSH’d into a machine where use of the F keys would be nice without having to alter my MacBook Pro keys but I have had to do that. The Page Up/Down situation where most times the Fn option works, but many times it does not and some files online tend to be a bit large so it’s a time waster. So that’s it really, is the keys … they could have added another row or something I think. I think it would make a lot of people happy.

Okay, maybe I have more than one complaint. My second complaint is my biggest. About a month later, all the Macs were upgraded. Doesn’t matter that I spent all this money on this particular machine. It’s past 14 days. Sorry. The new MacBook Pro comes with 4G of RAM now. Sigh. To me, it’s bullshit that I wasnt’ notified that this was the case before I spent this much money on something. I can’t even sell it to buy the new one as people can get the new one themselves. I would feel guilty duping someone. I can’t believe Apple doesn’t give a crap that they basically ripped me off. Thank you, please give us more money.

Money aside, I was happy with the nifty bells and whistles that Apple has with their ease of use and their commercials, etc., and was into the iPhone and couldn’t wait until I could renew my contract to get one. That’s 18 months between AT&T renewals. I was getting farther and farther awat from Microsoft and their horrible ways, their monopoly and their power over me to use particular hardware and software to accomplish various things. Blah!

So boom! I get the iPhone and immediately after another iPhone user checks it out he says the Home button is messed up. So I check it out and mess with it and once again, who wants to take something back that they just got. I try to justify that it works fine for me even though once and a while it doesn’t work. Maybe it needs to be worn in? More rationalization. Reality; it’s not working properly, return it. I take the iPhone back to AT&T the very next day. After signing in and waiting, AT&T will swap it but I will have to pay a 10% restocking fee. (On a defective iPhone that I got 24 hours ago). So instead of paying that, I drove to the Apple store to save the 10% restocking fee. On the way over, I used the iPhone to call Apple and verify that AT&T couldn’t swap my phone and that the Apple store wouldn’t have a problem. Yeah, they would take care of it. AT&T doesn’t hold as high a standard in excellence or some crap like that was why it was explained that I would have had to pay a restocking fee with AT&T.

I get to the Apple store and I don’t have a “reservation” so I am going to go “standby” to wait for a “technician” … Uhm, what? My phone broke – give me new one – I say bye bye. Nope. Not even close. I stood there for over an hour. Yeah, I browsed a little bit first, but for being such a huge store, there isn’t a lot there. Remeber I told you it was a weird store? Let me explain.

In an Apple Store, there’s nothing higher than your waist. The entire store is tables. You can see corner to corner nothing blocking your view in the entire store. There is merchandise hanging on the walls closer to the back wall which is lined with their customer service-ish type counter. There is a table with iMacs on it where kids can mess with them. You sit on rubber balls if you’re so inclined. And the tables further towards the back have shelves with the keyboards and mice on them.

The counter is where I paid for both MacBooks and where I stood to finally talk to Eric about my iPhone. I had already decided while waiting that I wasn’t going to buy an accessory for the iPhone. I was upset with this incredible wait. I even had a guy come up to me and ask if I needed help and I said that the girl took my name, etc. and he said oh, okay. So, he had nothing to do, but I was still standing there. At one point, there was about 6 Apple employees standing in and around the iMac that they used to “book” people and some were just BSing and another was texting on his iPhone (I bet his Home button worked). That sort of broke up after some time, then I saw the girl who took my name leave with her coat on taking her break.

Finally the overly happy “concierge” as they call them, said that Eric would be happy to deal with me. Eric said that my Home button problem wasn’t as I described “defective”. I told him that anyone who held my iPhone agreed it was defective and every iPhone in the AT&T store and the Apple Store responded differently than the iPhone that I got yesterday. He said that may be the case, but the button worked. And I said not all the time. And he said that it wasn’t broken, that he could have a technician look at it. I said what is a tech gonna do? It’s defective and gave some examples about broken things and he finally gave in to granting my request for a replacement. It was far too much work, effort and emotion to reach the desired result that in my opinion was obvious.

So why my title to this anecdote? I stood in that Apple store watching the activity going on and had much time to think and observe. I saw many people come and go with problems. I saw people being schooled about using Macs, one an elderly woman. I don’t know, is that free? Maybe, or maybe you can purchase courses via their website? I don’t know, I wasn’t looking for a course. Anyway, I started hearing the silly problems. Then the trivial. I started thinking that more and more people are going to be buying the Macs due to the nifty bells and whistles and the commercials. Where Macs for the most part have been the choice of developers and high end graphics people, now elderly women are “learning” how to use Macs and the general population as whole are starting to buy Macs. They’re told that they’re much simpler, etc., but the fact remains that the gen pop as a whole ain’ta so smart when it comes to these technical thingamabobs. There will be more of the silly and trivial problems.

Then, with my problem is the quality. Eric kept telling me that the Home button worked and that there was no “spec” for it being deemed defective or not. I was like “spec?” are you kidding me. It’s not a spec, it’s obviously defective. Touch every iPhone in use on the planet and then touch mine. I’m sorry, I didn’t know when I bought it cause I never had one before and I wasn’t familiar enough about the Home button to know the difference. Now I’m a Home button expert. But the other ssues is that it’s proprietary. What’s plastic may be cool cause it’s all Apple baby, but it’s plastic and it does break. You can’t go to CircuitCity or Best Buy and fix it up, you have to go to Apple or you have to ship to Apple. What to do if there’s no “spec” on whether your Apple hardware is defective or not? Well, if Eric had his way and I would have accepted his answer, I would have been out a lot of money, again.

They got me on the MacBook Pro and they almost got me on the iPhone. How many people don’t put up a fight or know enough to know that they’re in the right? Having more and more people show up to Apple’s stores and not taking them in a list order or something or having a better mechanism to address people is going to seriously crush them. It’s soured me big time. If anyone knows anything about retail, you make the problems go away first. What would have happened if I had started to share my own opinion with those other Apple customers? What if I were to go down home negative and start pointing out the obvious? When that little ol’ lady says she’s just trying it out to see if she can do some things on the computer, maybe I can chime in that she could save a substantial amount of money if she went to Best Buy. Old people like saving money.

Finally, YES! This is just my opinion. These are certainly things I feel strongly about, but these are things I choose to live with … Because my result is favorable, I can rationalize and accept certain things, but the more the same thing happens, the more that I think that I might think differently in the future. Here’s hoping that Apple can change for the better and not keep screwing people like me.

Gas Prices

It’s one thing that gas prices change a lot, but the higher the gas prices go, the more they slow down the pumps. This annoys me. Much. It’s not like it’s my imagination. It takes much longer to pump expensive fuel than cheap fuel. This is certainly by design. Much as computers made the taxman ask people to come by the next day for their tax return even though it was done and printed 5 minutes after they left. The taxman couldn’t justify his fee given the time that the results were made available. When computers were originally placed at airline counters, a delay was built into the programming because of all of the reports from the staff that they didn’t trust the results since they were so immediate. Programmers had to build in the “think” time so that the results would be trusted. In this fast paced world, seems “the man” has to slow things down so there seems to be a value in it. It just makes me more impatient and fuels my impulse to announce this to the world.

Thank you, Don Imus

Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.

By JASON WHITLOCK – Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is – a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

**To reach Jason Whitlock, call (816) 234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com