citizen of the planet

Yesterday, I was watching that UPS tracking page like a hawk.  I mean, when I made my order for the laptop the online store provided me with a tracking number and every day I clicked on the link looking for some good news.  While I was at work, I’m sure I was getting a little neurotic about hitting the refresh button every hour or so.  See, I made the mistake of having the order delivered to my home address instead of work.  So, I was hoping to keep an eye on the status to see when the package was on the truck.  That way I could hustle over back home and be ready to receive it.  At the end of the work day there was no update to the page except for the bit saying that it was at the last station before going out.  I thought there would be no worries, and that I could just work from home and receive it.  Well, when I got home I saw a notice on the door indicating that the UPS people came by but no one was available to receive it.  Curses!  What the hell was that?  Of course, it really didn’t change anything in terms of receiving the package on the next available day.  However, I was frustrated knowing that I could have had it a day earlier.  It’s not my fault though: they didn’t update that damn status page.

Anyway, the UPS site says that for residential locations deliveries can happy any time between the period of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.  Hold up…step back for a moment.  Look at that time range.  That’s a 10 hour window!  What the hell is that?  I’m lucky in that I’m able to work from home, but what about other people?  Seems somewhat unreasonable to me, you know?  So, I was up and plugging away at work from my couch from 9 a.m.  It’s wasn’t a bad thing.  I reckon I got a large amount of work done.  Still, by 4 p.m., without any news of an imminent delivery I was starting to get antsy.  I had a scheduled run this evening and I was questioning whether I was going to make it or not.  Well, finally at 5:30 I got a call from the front door to my cell.  The UPS guy finally made it in.  Yeah, I’ll be honest, it was all I could do to just remain calm and under control.  Upon opening the box I felt like I was a kid at Christmas.  I was disciplined enough though to know that it needed a good charge before usage.  So, I plugged it in and went for my run.  And since my return I’ve been playing around with it and setting things up.  This blog entry is actually my first from the MBP.  Hopefully there will be at least a thousand more from here.

Remember the other day how I was saying that Apple stuff hardly ever goes on sale? Well, guess what went on sale today? Ha! I used this as an opportunity to order the MacBook Pro like I had wanted last Sunday. The discounts weren’t what I had originally expected. Yesterday, a colleague told me that he was anticipating maybe $200 off of some laptops. No, when I went online this morning I found that the discounts where more like $100 or so. Sure, it wasn’t as big as the potential $200 off that I would have gotten if I went to that Best Buy sale a lot earlier, but it was enough to encourage me to make the purchase this morning.

I don’t think I’m considering myself a convert, per se. I did say in the other entry that I wanted to see for myself how big of a difference there is between using a PC and a Mac. I’m no longer in university, so the need to use a lot of the technical apps specific to PC is a lot less. These days I’m only doing average and mundane everyday stuff. As such, why not go for a system that has a little bit more polish? As much as it frustrates me at time, I’m not going to be chucking my laptop right away. My plan is to have both systems on hand, slowly making the transition to make the MBP my daily system. We’ll see how it goes. I have a lot of questions, but I have enough Mac-minded friends to guide me through my first steps. It’s going to be a fun and interesting time.

A couple of days ago I got a notice in my inbox telling me about a Best Buy Reward Zone event taking place at a handful of stores.  The email said that there would be a sale at these locations lasting for two hours.  I wasn’t terribly interested up until they sent another email giving a preview of the various price cuts.  See, the particular deal that got my attention was the part that said that all laptops priced between $1000 and $1500 would have be cut by $200.  I figured that it would be the perfect time to get my hands on the new 13″ MacBook Pro.

My current Toshiba Satellite is about 4.5 years old; it’s showing signs of wear.  The right side USB ports are a bit loose.  If I plug my mouse in there it wouldn’t be uncommon for the power to be intermittent, making me bang the mouse a couple of times in an attempt to get it going again.  The battery is pretty bad now.  It can only hold a charge for about half an hour before giving up.  The sensor in the taskbar tends to lie to me about how much power it has left when unplugged.  When it says 45 minutes, I know that that’s a lie.  As a result, this thing is always plugged in now.  I can’t imagine taking this thing anywhere anymore without the plug.  I didn’t think the unit as a whole was too heavy, especially in comparison to the bricks that my classmates had, but after lugging it around and dragging it through Japan every pound seems to make a difference.  At about 6 lbs. this laptop is kind of heavy.  Lastly, everything seems to take so long to run now.  It should not take 2 minutes to start up Firefox or iTunes.  Perhaps all the system needs is a good defragmentation.  I don’t know.  Ultimately, given the age of the system I figured that it was time to look for something new.  This computer has served me really well over the years.  It’s just time.

So, why in the world did I start considering getting a Mac?  Well, I think it was spurred on via a lot of discussion from colleagues.  A couple of them have been drooling over the new MacBook Pro redesign that happened this summer.  My former team lead put together a Hackintosh and has been raving over Snow Leopard and how everything seems to be so much easier than it ever was with Windows XP.  I mentioned Apple to my project manager and she basically told me how she was happy with her MacBook Pro.  So yeah, many people have been nudging me in that direction.  As well, I’ve got a couple of friends that are experienced Mac users, and without hesitation they always seem to talk about how great they are.  As much as the difference is a few hundred dollars for a Mac, I’m willing to give it a shot.  I want to judge for myself whether the difference is huge.

So, back to the Best Buy thing.  I was over at my parents’ place setting up my old Desktop system for them to use.  I told them about my planned purchase, and they urged me to head out early.  They told me that there might be a line.  I didn’t believe there would be one.  I mean, how many people would pay attention to an email campaign?  I figured that I could arrive there at the start of the sale, line up for a few minutes, get in, and get out with what I wanted.  Besides, who wanted to wait out there for an hour, right?  Well, I drove up to Markham, and as I got closer to the mall I saw a long line up of cars waiting to turn into the complex.  That was my first hint that I might have been dead wrong.  I parked a long distance away from the store and started walking to the entrance.  As I did, I began to notice the length of the line up.  I started heading to the back of the line, and it was only then that I saw just how far it went.  The queue went around the corner with a couple more bends to accommodate everyone.  I think there were a couple of hundred people there–probably closer to a thousand.  I don’t know, I’m a bad judge of number at this type of thing.

Being so far back in the line, it was easy to joke about how there would be nothing left by the time we’d get in.  Actually, a couple of people in front of me left the line after deeming the wait to not be worth it.  A couple behind me were talking about how they didn’t want to leave and then wonder if they’d get a deal or not.  I turned around and offered a summary: “No regrets, right?”  They agreed.  I really wasn’t sure if I’d get anything, but hey, I didn’t want to wonder.  The line moved in chunks.  The people at the door only let in small batches of people at a time.  Around the corner, we could only see a handful of people walking out with things in hand.  It kind of gave me hope that I might have a bit of luck.  After about an hour, I finally rounded the last corner before the entrance.  Form there, I saw many many more people walking out with prizes in hand.  Some of them had wide smiles on their face.  I suppose I don’t blame them.  I know I counted 3 or 4 smiling people with small boxes of MacBook Pros in hand.  With each one my hopes faded more and more.  At the door a staff member was clapping and cheering at us for having made it in.  I laughed at the cheesiness of it all.  As soon as I got in, I rushed over to the back to where the Macs were displayed.  The one that I wanted no longer had a price tag displayed beside it.  I had a feeling I knew what it meant, but I asked a staff member anyway.  He confirmed that they were sold out.

Fuck.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I wandered around the store for a few minutes, trying to see if there was anything that I wanted.  I think I was just in no mood, so after having waited outside for an hour I just left the store empty handed, and probably looking defeated.  I figured that this is kind of what it’s like to do the whole Boxing Day thing.  It only strengthened my resolve to not give in to the madness on December 26.  It’s silly!  I gave my parents a call afterwards and told them that I’d been foiled.  After a deserved “told you so,” mom asked how much the laptop would have been and what the discount was.  After telling her, she giggled: “$200?  Chicken feed!”  That made me feel better.  As I drove home I knew that I’d have something to write about.

So that’s what happened.  Where do I go from here?  Well, I still plan on getting the MBP at some point.  It’s now just a matter when I want to go for it.  This week, before the end of November, perhaps?  Maybe I can consider this to be a late birthday gift.  Soon enough, soon enough.

Sometime earlier in the decade, while I was studying in Waterloo I had told my parents that they needed to get a computer for themselves.  I mean, I figured that it would have given them an opportunity to burn CDs or do online banking without me having to get involved.  I was fully prepared to actually help them out by assembling a system.  I had some experience doing so from having put together my own computer.  As long as you get the right parts that go together, the actual act of assembling the system is then a matter of plugging things into the right spots.  Easy enough, right?  Well, one day I got a call from my father telling me that they’d gone ahead and purchased a computer on their own.

For a brief moment I was kind of happy for them to have had the courage to go ahead and make the purchase.  Then I remembered that they had no idea what they were purchasing.  So, with dread I started asking them details.  He honestly had no idea, other than the fact that they’d asked the sales guy whether it was the best that they could get.  At that point I just knew that no good came of that.  They’re not gamers…why the hell do they need the fastest computer?  They don’t.  For a few days after the call I couldn’t concentrate at school.  All I could think about was their new computer.  When I got home I immediately started checking things out.  Well…it didn’t seem so bad at first.  Although, it was clearly something that was slapped together.  Then I heard how much they paid for the whole thing.  I was dumbfounded.  They paid maybe 2.5 times what it would have cost if I had done it.  Looking back now, it makes me want to gag.  I suggested that they return it, but my father was insistent that we keep it.  His reasons varied from “well it’s already there” and “we were told it’s the best!”  Riiiight.

Well, I suppose I could have let it all go if it worked perfectly.  Thing is, the damn thing always had issues.  Sometimes when mom would turn it on it would just get stuck on the BIOS screen.  No amount of rebooting used to let it get past.  Often I’d have to reach behind, unplug the whole thing for a minute, return the plug and only then would it go forward.  Other times, network connectivity just wouldn’t come up leading to frantic calls of “Jay!  The Internet isn’t working again!“  Mom would call me sometimes telling me that the thing is so slow.  She’d try starting a browser but it would take minutes before it would come up.  After some digging I found that the box only had 512MB of RAM.  What in blazes?!  Seriously.  No wonder it took so long.  It’s not that mom’s completely impatient; the system just really sucks.

Anyway, the other day I decided that I didn’t want to make them put up with such a system anymore, so I bought 2GB of RAM for their computer.  I went over today to swap the DIMMs out.  I made the switch and reconnected everything.  When mom switched it on…nothing came up on the monitor.  In fact, the motherboard started beeping like mad.  After a good half hour of swapping the memory again and diagnosing anything obvious that I could think of, nothing was bringing it back to life.  I just laughed and declared the computer dead: I think the motherboard is fried.  I looked at my mom and we both laughed.  Despite losing the box, I think we were both happy to see that piece of shit box kick the bucket.  Actually, I’m sure there’s a fix for it, but I don’t think it’s worth it.  Instead I offered to give them the desktop box that’s just sitting in my room unused.  Heck, why not?  My box had a slower processor than theirs, but at least the damn thing worked.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to.  I need to spend an hour or two “cleaning up” the system before I hand it over.  I also need to set it up just enough to get my mom ready to do all the stuff she used to do with the other system.  I’m willing to part ways with the box.  Eventually, I’m pretty sure I’ll get it back; they might move on to something like a Mac.  In any case, I’ll have a little piece of mind, for sure.