T M T

I started to use the Kindle Fire for reading and other media consumption recently. I noticed the ebook reader is better than the software version on iPad for mainly two reasons: 1. the hardware on Kindle Fire is probably optimized for reading, the pixel count seems to be higher so that the font looks a lot sharper than that of iPad; 2. Amazon gives more features to its own reader such as type-face adjustment than that of the iOS Kindle app.

The first one can only be corrected by a new retina display based iPad next year. The second one will depend on the market competition between Amazon and Apple. May the best product/service win!

I started to use Mac for work for a couple of reasons: I had good experience using Macs at home; it allows me to seamlessly work in the Unix world.

However, I quickly discovered while Mac is wildly successful recent years in the consumer world, it is not designed for office use particularly. Here are several examples:

1. Software: The office software package on Mac sucks. Yes it is made by Microsoft. I’m sure they tried their best as this is not the first Office for Mac version. But it just isn’t quite as productive as the Windows version. Overall Windows 7 is much more corporate friendly OS. But the laggard office is sometimes the killer app in both positive and negative senses.

2. Hardware: no docking station! The staple of office environment, docking station saves 30 seconds every time you need to plug and unplug the myriads of cables and devices when you need to go to a meeting with the laptop and come back and plug down into your home desk. No matter how cool Macbooks are, no docking station from Apple natively is a big obstacle for corporate adoption. I wonder how people at such hip places full of Macs (Apple, Facebook) work around such an obvious issue. Perhaps everything wireless?

3. While not a design flaw, it is still notorious for Apple to charge $40 for each $5 worth display cable they sell. And since Macs don’t support the old fashioned VGA, DVI ports anymore, you do need a host of these cables to make presentations or connecting to monitors. When would corporate greed end? Never.

First of all, I have to admit that my work life relies on Outlook  calendar. So therefore small things really tick me off. Of course I can always print the day out and pin it up like some people do. But, what’s the fun in that?

Now we have put things into perspective, two things annoy me the most are:

1. Don’t remind me of past events. If the events have already occurred, there’s no point in re-re-remind me of that. It is either I’ve completed it already, or I have completely missed it already. Either way, I hate to hear about it again.

2. Do always remind me of upcoming events. So what if the meeting organizer didn’t check the “reminder/alert” box. Isn’t the whole point of calendar event in the Alert! So POP it up 5 minutes before, or POP it up 1 second before. I don’t care, just POP up an alert for me.

Now that the magic of Apple has fallen to the normal level, I also found out that my 24-inch aluminum iMac has accumulated some bad jojo over the last 3 years. Ahh, the good old ritual of reinstall Windows every a couple years. Come to think about it, Microsoft is really the progenitor of so many current high-tech successors. Sooner or later, they find in their gene map bits of bad code granddaddy put in. First it is Yahoo, then Apple, and pretty soon Google too.

Now back to the current task at hand. The problem is that my Snow Leopard keeps dropping internet connections and gets really sluggish compared to the Windows 7 laptop sitting next to it. Since it is a slow progression, it can only be attributed to aging but not any particular incident. Searching online yielded no quick fixes but the clean install options popped up a few times. So I thought it is show-time for a real test of Time Machine.

First attempt: boldly wiping out hard disk and have a clean install of Snow Leopard. It detected the attached Time Machine hard drive and asked whether I wanted to import from it. Sure, give it go. Everything restored beautifully – all the applications including 3rd-party ones, all my iPhoto files (100+GB of them!) and everything else. However, so does the internet slowness. Well, I should have thought about that – the time machine is so faithful it essentially gives me the exact same machine back.

Second attempt: same steps of clean install but declined the time machine option. Now I’m opting a manual restore by carefully choosing what I restore. Nothing from the system folders please. New users, fresh software re-install. So far so good. It did give me some permission problems as Mac thinks the new Me is somehow different from the Me created those Time Machine backups. Certain folder works when I override with admin password, some folder is less lenient. Thank goodness the gigantic iPhoto and iTune folders are fine – I really don’t want to copy 100,000 files by hand.

So far so good. We will see in a few days whether the internet connection problem comes back or not. Stay tuned, if you are interested.

Please read my recent column on ClickZ:

http://www.clickz.com/3640574

“These two important differences lead to the very reason why a technology like real-time bidding can potentially create tremendous value for buyers and sellers simultaneously…