Well, the Googleplex was nothing short of awesome. But I don’t really want to take the time to type out how cool it was. So the first thing you can do is take a look at the photoset on Flickr of all the photos that I was allowed to take (and a few that I wasn’t allowed to take). Then, stay tuned for PreviewCast #031 where I will cover the trip in detail, and then maybe a few additional pieces on Webmacster87.info about the trip. Nevertheless, stay tuned!

A googolplex is a googol googols, also known as a googol to the googolth power (a googol being a number with a hundred zeros). But a Googleplex, or the Googleplex, as I am referring to in this blog post, is the Mountain View, CA headquarters of Google (Google being that online search engine thing-a-ma-bob). Right?

Okay, enough with the boring computer-science/internet/arithmetic lesson. Everyone already knew all of the above to be true, so why should I waste a post to restate that? Because tomorrow, instead of counting to a googolplex, I get to visit the Googleplex.
That’s right! Tomorrow, myself and a number of students from the tech student group over at Aragon will get to visit the Googleplex (instead of class!), tour the Googleplex, and get this…eat at the Googleplex! That’s right, Google is cooking for us! I guess that means we won’t be having pizza, but oh well, it’ll still be cool.

So stay tuned for photos (if they don’t take my camera) and other cool coverage of the trip! I’m feeling lucky…

Sorry about the downtime. For whatever reason, my admin login/pass got auto-reset (which means that I couldn’t get to cPanel or FTP and the site couldn’t connect to the database). Anyway, the site is now back up, and so as soon as I’ve caught up to everything, there will be some coverage of my new MacBook coming on here! Stay tuned…

I’ve loved my iBook. Despite it being 6-7 years old, despite it having only a 366 MHz G3 chip, 320 MB RAM, and a 12″ screen with a max resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, I have really liked my iBook. Things like its “stand out” design, or it’s nice “snap-back” handle (why did Apple get rid of handles on their laptops?) have made me fall in love with it. Oh, and it’s portability. Before we got the Mac mini, I used that iBook all the time despite there being two newer comps in the house. Since we got the Mac mini almost a year ago, I’ve still used the iBook quite frequently. Why? For one, I still need to have my stuff portable quite often. Furthermore, I don’t have to negotiate computer usage on the iBook like I do on the Mac mini. When Scott’s on the Mac mini, I can go on my iBook. And there’s still that undying love thing.

Unfortunately, all technology does essentially quack up, and my iBook has. For the last two weeks or so, my iBook has decided to stop charging. Heck, I would be using it while it was plugged in, and the battery would continue to lose charge while it was charging. I haven’t seen the battery indicator go above 0% since. I tried looking for solutions on Apple’s Support site, including resetting the Power Management Unit. No dice.

So I took it into the Genius Bar yesterday, and I essentially introduced the problem that it was either the power adapter, the battery, or the computer itself. The computer may be 6-7 years old, but the battery was purchased brand new in June 2005, and the power adapter was a $150 universal AC/Car/Air adapter with support for like six dozen computers purchased in July 2005. The Genius said that the fact that the computer would still work while it was plugged in meant that nothing was wrong with the adapter. He pulled out the Genius Bar’s battery, tried plugging it in, and it did the same thing. It never charged. So, he declared that it was a complete failure with the power management unit, or perhaps even some sort of logic board failure. I, uh, didn’t bother to ask about the cost of fixing it.
So I now effectively have a 6-7 year old lightweight computer that has to be plugged in all the time. The problem with that is I already have the Mac mini, which is also a lightweight computer that has to be plugged in all the time. And I still need to have my stuff go mobile. I’m going to a convention in two and a half weeks and I’m going to need a reliable laptop with a charged battery almost all the time down there. Not to mention some other things that I’m going to be doing next year (more on these soon when they are finalized) where having a laptop is going to be essential. Furthermore, now that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed to October, my original idea of not getting a new laptop until summer now carries no water.

Therefore, I’m going to abandon my old MacBook Pro lust and now aim to get myself a white MacBook 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo through deficit spending. After my dad’s teacher discount and then 8.25% sales tax, the total cost is $1297.92. I’m going to be doing my best to scrape every penny I have to make a down payment on that to help out my parents, and then pay them back incrementally while I’m able to over the rest of the year.

More on this will be coming soon…

Today Apple announced that because of allocating resources to the iPhone, they have had to delay Mac OS X Leopard to October. This really makes me mad, one because I’ve been holding out on a new laptop until Leopard ships pre-installed.

But what I really think is going on is that Apple is completely betraying the Mac, and is going to be spending all of its time on the iPod, and now the iPhone. How many major Mac announcements have we seen this year? Only the 8-core Mac Pro, and only really super-high-end businesses are going to have any use for that. It costs so much, and very few applications are going to honestly have enough processor load to honestly be able to fill up 8 cores. All the rest of us have had zero Mac announcements this year.

Even at Macworld, Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the Mac for more than 5 minutes? He spent over an hour on the iPhone, a product that wouldn’t even ship until June (and one which I think is WAAAAAAAAY overpriced, not to mention how stupid I think the idea is). There was no iLife announcement, no iWork announcement, no Mac OS X Leopard update, not even any kind of small Mac revision.

This makes me furious to find out that Apple took team members away from Mac OS X and put them to work on the iPhone. Mac OS X Tiger was released two years ago this month, and this new delay now results in us going two and a half years with no major OS update. (Anyone want to start looking out for Mac OS 10.4.10?) All of us Mac users are looking for something to slam into Vista’s face, and now we have to wait longer.

Furthermore, this delay is bad marketing. AppleInsider just recently posted survey results showing that about half of those surveyed are holding off on buying a Mac until after Leopard ships or until a hardware upgrade. It’s been 3 and a half months, and we haven’t even gotten so much as a rumor about timelines for either of these. And what about iLife/iWork? We have had no further rumors/suggestions about these since January, the latest rumor that was still holding up was that they might be bundled with the new Leopard. If they’re delaying that to October too, they’re out of their minds. The shiny new features that premiered in iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06 now have a good layer of dust on them, and they sorely need to be updated.

The iPhone is a new product, and Apple would have had it certified even if they would have had to slightly delay it. It’s a new product and people expect that. The Mac is not a new product; Mac users represent Apple’s most loyal fan base. You won’t see a typical Mac user dissing Apple the way I see many kids at my school doing it while they’re listening to their iPods in their ears. Apple owes a lot of things to us Mac users, and they seem to be deserting us for a new, questionable market which I honestly think will go down in failure right along with the Newton and the G4 Cube.

Shame on you, Apple. Shame on you.

A fairly good list of what Apple is behind on and what it is that they need to get off their bottoms and start releasing. Better Apple TV, better iPod, better OS X interface, cheaper Macs, and maybe make .Mac free? Sounds good to me. Oh, and where are iLife/iWork ‘07?

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Found this video of a dog howling to the Colbert Report theme. Really cute!

It probably seems like an insignificant milestone, but I like to celebrate these insignificant milestones. Hope you had a good daily centennial.
Deep-fried pickle hearts for everyone!

Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.

I think this sounds very good, although I still need to try it. I might try it this week and maybe review it soon, but who knows…

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I’ve now completed a new website for my phpBB MODs. The Fountain of Apples phpBB MODs website (creative name, eh?) is currently essentially a directory of all of my active phpBB MODs, however in the next few months I hope to be able to expand the site a bit.

And yes, this now brings my total domains count to four.
I’m taking a break away from my WordPressiness to have the new FOA MODs site be powered by Drupal. I’ve heard about Drupal from a lot of people (and I really like the new version’s customizable layout), so I’ll get to play around with it with this new website.

So anyway, enjoy the new site for my MODs!