Merlin::Blog

As much as I prefer to use my blog for most things - this should be great for festival international.

I'd like to start by stating that I've got a not-entirely-rare perspective of Apple.  When I was about 8, my dad managed an apple dealer in the early 80s.  I'm the only person born in the mid-70s that I know who has personally used a Lisa.  For 11 years, I had one of the first 200 original Macintosh computers as my primary computer.  We upgraded it to a Mac Plus with 8MB of RAM.  All of that is really just to state that I have followed Apple for a very long time.  There are plenty with a more intimate knowledge of Apple's history, but I feel that I have enough to theorize here

I saw this article today and decided to use it as an opportunity to try and post my theory.

To very briefly review Apple's history,  Apple and  Motorola had quite a happy relationship for decades.  Then Motorola deprioritized the processor lines that they were manufacturing for Apple.  The PowerPC processor was Apple's bread and butter, they had no product without it.  As Jobs began restoring Apple's brand, Motorola had trouble meeting demand, and with the decision of Motorola to concentrate on phones, they also had little reason to try.  I think that's when Apple first decided to begin work on the iPhone.  The first move was a full divorce from Motorola, the switch to Intel.  This was the same time that the Rockr was produced as a partnership with Motorola.  Motorola invested a lot in that phone, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple got a fair-sized license fee out of Motorola for the much-coveted access to iTunes, and it turned out to be a badly crippled phone.  Motorola lost more than money on the deal, they lost reputation.  Fast-forward a couple of years and now we have the iPhone, a product which makes Motorola's best phone look like a tin can.  

My main reasons for believing this really doesn't have so much to do with what happened as it does with Jobs.  I think the man's got a lot of vision and respect him greatly, but he doesn't invest like most people, and if he wanted to make an example of Motorola, I can definitely see him wanting something like this done. 

 I'm sure there are plenty who have posted the same theory.  But I felt like posting this anyhow. 

So it looks like I'm managing to squeeze enough time in for something to post on a (mostly) daily basis. Now I need to find a way to post something that's better than drivel.  Maybe I can find something that randomly pulls a popular news article or technology topic and squeeze some form of inspiration out of that.

So today was my son's 18-month checkup - it went well, he's still not talking or even using words - he gets almost all of what he wants by using his finger (the other one).  So today we have a new resolve to force him to use complete sentences by rule of The Queen' english in order to describe his needs first.   I don't see how that can't work quickly

Seems to be a time of actually getting things done for the past couple of days. I've gotten my tasks done on time for my 2 major projects at work and even managed to begin my mail migration to zimbra (1 domain down, at least 2 to go.) Hopefully I can keep it rolling.

In other news - there's been a lot of family activity lately. This is also keeping us busy, Sam most of all. Hopefully his sleep schedule will be back to normal within the next few days.

So here's my idea for a documentary that i might watch:

You know how that guy did the documentary about eating fast food for a month? (no, the other one)

Take that the other way - what would happen if you ate packaged foods (healthy or not) in the portions according to the actual serving size in the nutritional facts? Use that for 3 balanced meals per day - no more than one item that uses each food group. - if it doesn't fall into a food group, don't eat it.

There, now one of you out there needs to go make this movie and you owe me a cut of the millions :)

To be frank, I think the jury's still out on a lot of the aspects of global warming - from what I've seen, I don't see that there's enough data to definitively state that the primary factors in the current climate.

 

With that out of the way - I want to restate something from a conversation that I had earlier today:  I think that excellence in fuel economy should be an indicator of excellence in engineering.  To me, the hybrid-electric engine is a perfect example of this.  The hybrid engine uses energy that would normally be wasted.  The result of this may be cleaner air - but more directly it's lower cost and a sign of a thouroughly thought out engine.  It also stands to reason  that the same engine will last longer, and will provide a greater amount of power if modified properly.

Coming from software development - I'm constantly looking at my work product and trying to find places where I can save CPU cycles or memory - moreover I'm looking for places that I can save on man-hours (since those are most expensive).  Basically my point is that I don't think that we need to feel guilty in order to do enjoy the benefits of good engineering and 
design.

 

So that's my post for tonite - enjoy your granola. 

No trolls or spam, please (is that asking too much?)

So today - against my better financial judgement, I went to lunch with a buddy and his dad to Lloyd's in downtown Baton Rouge.  I really don't go there very much - but they wanted to go so I went along.  We chatted and ate our meal - it was delivered in a decent amount of time this go-round, so I was pretty happy.  Then my dad walks out of the bathroom.  He didn't belong there - he should have been at home in Lafayette - or at least driving around doing appraisals.  So we were both surprised to see each other - he was taking a lunch break from an appraiser's class that he had in the red stick and didn't realize that he was in the same part of town as me.

 So that's just weird.

So to give the basics on what happened with me and this fraud thing:

I had recently noticed a charge of $14.95 that I didn't recognize.  It was a particular surprise because we had stopped spending on that account for a few days in order to avoid overdraft.  So when the charge came through we knew something was wrong.  I looked through our records and noticed then that it had gone through on the same day every month for the past 13 months - and the same merchant (WC *Value Plus) had initially charged $1.  I called the 800# in the description of the charge but only got a recorded greeting to call back during normal business hours.

That was the beginning of my problem - more on the rest another night.

Hopefully my carpool will help reduce that a bit.

Best I can think of, I left it ontop of my trunk when switching cars for my carpool. That's the only thing that makes sense. I've checked everywhere and nothing was disturbed inside my car.

I've been fighting my bank by trying to undo some charges by a company called WC *Value Plus who has been charging my account for about a year unnoticed.  Disputing the charges with my bank was pointless, the bank refused to do anything at all because it had gone on for so long.  Today I verified that the money was refunded by WC *Value Plus, changed credit card numbers, and then filed a dispute for a very similar unauthorized charge from a separate company.  Hopefully this one won't be as much of a fight - my bank very nearly lost my business.

 

More on this tomorrow night (I think).

I think I'm going to add a daily post to my tasks like I did my daily photos. And maybe have new photos post to twitter.

I've been a Palm user for many years - it's been an interesting ride.  There have been many feature and flexibility issues, but my Treo 680 is the first Palm device with stability issues.  It crashes for nothing, sometimes entirely at random.  It also freezes for as long as 30 seconds before responding (SERIOUSLY annoying when trying to place a phone call - MORE annoying when trying to answer one.)  If I could right now I'd replace it with an iphone, but that'll probably wait until sometime next year.

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Date: 07/16/2008 Views: 3



Sammy at 15 months

Date: 06/23/2008 Views: 16

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