Midnight Cheese

I don’t point out other websites too often, but perspctv has put together a well designed mash-up of election related stats and articles. I’m a sucker for graphs, and perspctv has them. Great use of the Google Charts API.

It happened. I waited in line for about 45 minutes at the Apple Store in Green Hills on Saturday. (Three weeks after launch.) So far, the only thing I miss about my old A900 was hacking it to tether to my laptop through Bluetooth. Sprint’s EVDO network is rather speedy.

I feel weary giving my money to AT&T, but we’ll see how it goes.

My contract for cell service with Sprint has been up since May. Perfect timing for a July iPhone launch, but I’m still undecided.

The iPhone is an excellent device, but is it worth the potential pain of signing up with AT&T?

A buddy of mine was telling me about the ordeal with his iPhone purchase. He’s been an AT&T customer prior to Cingular when they were AT&T once before. So apparently he had a nice credit due to him the next time he bought a new phone. Long story short, the credit was good for anything but an iPhone. Five conversations with five AT&T customer service supervisors wouldn’t get him the credit. He wondered why new AT&T customers should be able to pay $200 for a new iPhone while faithful, long-standing AT&T customers should have to pay more.

Seems a valid enough concern.

(In this situation an Apple Store employee stepped up, providing the credit, putting his job at risk for doing so.)

Feels more and more that most behemoth companies like AT&T tend to place little value on existing customers. We see similar stories with Comcast.

Is the fact that there are so many customers of a single company mean these stories are just bound to happen? Are the vast majority of customers happy and content?

I’ve been a Sprint customer since 2002. I never had an issue except for a $40 activation fee that showed up 5 months after activation. I called and spoke to 2 different people about it. They refused to do anything. What could I do? It would be a $150 fee if I decided to no longer do business with them. I know it could always be worse.

Regardless, they seem to win no matter what.

So what is one to do? You want the nice device, but how can you avoid the undesirable service provider? How can you send a message? Wait 4 more years when Apple will be out from under their contract with AT&T? As if both companies won’t have already made the pile of cash they expect?

How many people would have to boycott a company as large as AT&T before things changed? What should change? Do people have the willpower to carry out something that massive, especially against a product like the iPhone?

Such is the AT&T dilemma.

It’s about that time to do the ol’ OS reinstall on my work machine. This is something I truly dread. Backing up and restoring files is fine, but reinstalling applications and getting all my settings and prefs straight is the tough part.

I could backup and restore all my pref files, but then you run the risk of the same issues continuing with the new install.

The two major issues requiring reinstall involve Adobe apps, naturally. Every day I turn on my computer Adobe wants to update Acrobat (which will let me print through the Adobe PDF printer). Well, the installer quits halfway through every time.

I’ve tried reinstalling Acrobat but the installer won’t complete because I installed Fireworks CS4 Beta some time ago and it’s looking for the Fireworks CS4 disk, which I don’t have. (Fireworks CS4 crashed upon every launch so I never even got to use the software!)

This is truly retarded.

And finally, Safari refuses to update to Flash Player 9. Safari is my default browser, but every time I come to a site that requires Flash 9 I have to open up FireFox.

So this may be an Adobe issue or it may be an Apple issue, but with Adobe’s track record, I blame Adobe. All I can do is reinstall the whole thing.

While unpacking some boxes I recently came across a clipping from the Miami Herald ~1995 with a list of sites with good weather information.

At noon on Saturday, the day after the iPhone 3G release, the Apple store at Lenox Square in Atlanta still had a line of what looked to be somewhere between 50-100 people waiting to get in.

The AT&T store across the street had no iPhones in stock.

I’m selling the original RAM sticks from my MacBook Pro on eBay. Two 512MB sticks.

Here’s the auction link.