Got the full thrust of Mac woe this afternoon as I wrestled with the inability of our four Mac Minis to perform the way a 21st century computer should.

1. Dog slow. Safari, especially, takes too long to open, and when it does there is an embarrassing stall while it does...something...before releasing control to the user and letting them type. Logging in...start-up items just bounce and bounce and bounce...beachball just spins and spins and spins. Interface elements just take their sweet time to open and close. Maybe it's supposed to symbolize "gracefulness" but after using Windows all day you realize it's just "slowness." Always has been.

2. Won't read a simple CD-R consistently. Some Minis read it, other don't. No scary message about being unable to recognize the CD. Just nothing. No mounting, nothing.

3. Dog slow. Now that Macs use Intel processors, we can compare apples to Apples. Why should I buy a 2.1 gHz iMac for $300 more than a 2.8 gHz Dell, including 20" monitor? And 12 USB ports between the machine and monitor? Apple used to be able to (partially) justify its higher cost by saying it really was faster, you just had to use "new math" to see it. No longer. Now, it's just more expensive to get a slower machine.

4. Constantly forgets the printers are installed. Embarrassing when you have students innocently trying to print their papers and they have to come get me to reinstall printers. Again. Stupid students. Should just use Windows -- no problems.

5. Not really designed for a lab, managed environment, without a lot of holes and a lot of extra work, especially if you can't work with AD because your IT division won't loosen their policy.

Yay!
 

 

In other news today, Romulans and Klingons will be arriving shortly...  

Click on the image to get a larger view of where Pete almost died (his path is marked in red). He went in search of the exact border between CA, NV, and OR using a fancy GPS unit he decided to buy on the way up there. As you can see, it's quite rugged and Pete had to drive on dirt roads and trespass to even get close. He got about as far as the hill side just below the "R,N" characters. Scrambling along the face of that hillside, he reached for a hand-hold on a largish rock and ended up pulling the weak rock apart, nearly tumbling backward down the steep wall. It was at that point he decided that maybe this was a bit much.

So, Pete then proceeded up the hill, trying not to slide all the way down in the loose gravel and shale rock that surrounded him. Every climbing step up the hill resulted in at least a half-step slide back down the hill.

Suddenly, a strange flapping/rattling sound started. For a split second he thought "a grasshopper, nothing more. They stop when you come near out of self-preservation." When the sound didn't stop...Oh crap. Rattlesnake three feet from your head and you don't have any solid footing from which to spring up and run away. As if you could run UP the mountainside anyway.

Somehow Pete managed to survive that encounter and continue his slow inexorable climb up the mountain. In the blazing sun (it was June). With little water. Suddenly, he heard another rattlesnake nearby and actual "holy crap, this is really it, I'm actually going to die on this mountainside. I'm not going to make it." thoughts crept ever so slightly into his brain. But then the rattler must have moved on, because the rattling stopped and Pete's climb continued.

At last, the ridge was achieved (it's the darker vegetation above the white letters in the image) and Pete couldn't believe he'd made it. He still had a mile hike uphill back to the car, but that felt more like a denouement and as the yards ticked by things turned out ok.

Despite the "challenges," far northeastern California remains one of Pete's favorite places in California. The morning drive to the tri-border, over the Warner mountains and down into the Alkalai Lake area, is beautifully desolate and it was a perfect early summer day. The drive up CA 299 to Alturas is easy and scenic (and includes the industrial art pictured above), and the remoteness is alluring in a strange way. While perhaps not ready to try the exact border again, Pete is certainly looking forward to returning in a more general way.
 

The Wagon Wheel Motel in Alturas. $36 for the funkiest 70s-era room you'll ever see (irony not included at all).


Upper Alkalai Lake in the early morning sun.


Looking off to the north, deeper into Oregon.


From out of nowhere, this fascinating old house appears. Pete stopped and bothered the owner of the property on which it sits to ask questions. Built in 1870s, lived in until the 1950s, still in the family, trying to get loan to turn it into an elegant restaurant/gathering place. Would be soooo cool if she's successful.


See you on the road! 

So, today at the library, R3P encountered a student printing out 237 pages from 4 different books. He was tying up the printing queue, and was going to be late to work himself, thanks to the pace at which the printer deigns to print PDF documents.

While waiting for the pages to print, they had a chance to chat about what he was printing, and why. The student was amazed that people used to actually purchase course readers from the campus bookstore or copy shop. Definitely an old-fashioned way to do things.

He was also surprised that there could be a legal limitation on the number of chapters that he could print out of a book that was available to him through a course website. Imagine!

During the printing process, the printer jammed twice, making him later than ever. With a few keystrokes, R3P was able to find a copy of one of the books in the library, and two more for reasonable prices through used booksellers at Pete's favorite online bookstore.

The student could save a lot of effort printing, hole-punching, and filing all those one-sided copies just by buying the books. Compared to all the time & energy (and identical letter-size pages), the books would be an actual bargain. 

Fancy that -- the nice 5-disc DVD player died abruptly. Probably due to being on Pause for over a week (couldn't squeeze in any S:SG-1) and the laser tracking blew. Since it's rarely economical to repair these sorts of things, Pete decided to buy something new and was taken by Best Buy's arrangement of fancy DVD recorders. We bought the cheapest one and it's not too bad. Makes watching TV a little harder because the antenna signal isn't as strong as when it was going through the VCR and then to the TV. But it's a compact unit and very easy to operate.

A colleague of Pete guffawed when he (Pete) mentioned he didn't have Tivo, yet was paid as a "multimedia specialist" at his place of employment. Pete cried.