Midnight Cheese

Ever since I can remember I’ve always had a fascination with the form-factor of the old Macintosh SE/30 computers. Perfectly concise in their construction, although they did weigh a ton.

These things were powerhouses in their day. They ran the original programs that started the digital printing and publishing revolution. People published books on these machines with precise typographical accuracy. Looking back at 16mhz and 4MB of RAM, that sounds impossible.

So I started buying these machines up on eBay trying to put together a functioning machine. They have a terrible tendency to continuously restart themselves or start-up with a black and white zebra pattern as they age. Some type of video component going bad.

At one point I had a well working SE/30 with A/UX installed. A/UX is Apple’s original iteration of Unix well before NeXTstep and OS X were even thought of. This version of Unix was true Unix with version 7 of Finder running on top.

This was a lot of fun. SSH and Apache worked and worked well.

Eventually this machine started to age and become unusable.

And now it ends up back on eBay where hopefully someone else will be able to take pieces from it and create another working machine at least long enough to squeeze a little bit more fun out of it.

I wanted to post some basic impressions regarding my first two months of my 24 month iPhone/AT&T contract.

The bottom line being, it’s pretty much not worth the cost and AT&T could give a damn about their customers.

AT&T
Compared to Sprint, AT&T reception is terrible at my house. Even though I’m in ‘Good’ coverage on the map, I’m lucky to get 1 bar. Sometimes I have no service. I have to go outside to make important phone calls.

AT&T prorates your first bill and charges you for the upcoming month of service you haven’t yet used. Two weeks into using my new carrier I received a bill for $143. Charges included two weeks of service, a $36 activation fee (total BS), ~$10 of state taxes and about $18 of federal taxes, plus the fee for the next month of service that I haven’t yet used. I’m on the $70/mo. plan.

I know technically and legally they can do it, but what a way to stick it right into your new customer’s ass right from the start. When I cancel my contract in 22 months, will I get money back for the month I’ve already paid ahead? I’ll be surprised.

So, AT&T gets zero points for service, both product-wise and customer-wise.

Apple
It’s pretty amazing that this device can do what it does, but I won’t go into all that because you can read that elsewhere. With that said, I’ve never had a cellphone that can’t keep time, but this one sure can’t. I don’t know if it’s an Apple issue or an AT&T issue, but this thing is off. And I mean randomly off. 46 minutes, 8 hours and 13 minutes… you name it. Random.

The G1
With the release of Google’s G1 on the T-Mobile network today, I’m disappointed in myself for giving AT&T my money.

The T-Mobile folks got up at the unveiling today and went on and on about opening up this platform. The whole thing is Open Source. That’s really something special.

Apple puts out excellent software and hardware, and there are excellent apps available through their system, but there’s still a good amount of freedom missing in that system.

Another thing that impressed me was when the T-Mobile rep said they would offer existing customers a benefit. (I don’t remember the exact benefit, maybe an earlier release.) But that shows that they’re at least actively thinking of their customers in a way that isn’t just a moneygrab.

I think Android will turn out to be an excellent platform. I’m not big on the HTC phone, but more devices will come.

I hope in 22 months I’ll be able to either move my iPhone over to the T-Mobile network, and if I’m lucky, have the option to put Android on my iPhone as well.

I’ve been playing with our new scanner at work and wanted to post a couple sample scans. These scans are at 1200 DPI. The magazine cover scan really gets into the half-tone detail of the print process while the paper and pen scan shows great detail.

The scanner comes with a negative scanner adapter that I hope to test out tomorrow.

Click on the images above for large details. (Huge PNGs ~6.8MB)

I recently got to play with a Nikon D700. The light sensitivity with this camera is amazing. You can get well into 3200 ISO without hardly a hint of graininess.

ISO aside, the large screen and menu system is apt. With the megapixel count, the detail this camera captures is amazing. Here are some detail samples below. You can see the full size photos on my Flickr page.