Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Yesterday, I traded in “Fighterjet.”

I feel pretty raw about signing away the title for my 1998 Subaru Legacy GT 2.5 Limited. (Frankly, I’ll never remember the correct order “GT,” “2.5,” and “Limited” are supposed to go in, even after 10 years — 3273 days, to be exact — of car ownership.) Looking back, I took delivery on July 1, 1998.

What do you say about a car you owned for 122 months? A vehicle that was there to transport you through the highs and lows of life?

Well, the brochure for our new car says, “Few things connect to your life at more points than your car.” Amen. I’ll take a stab at a few notes in haphazard arrangement, below.

This will all seem melodramatic, and it is. There are, I’m sure, people who don’t get attached to their cars. My wife and I are not those people. However, I am beginning to realize that you can only really get attached to one car, and thereafter you realize you simply can’t do that again. This is my struggle this morning, and my usual tendencies to hang on are amplified by how long I had that Subaru.

Fighterjet was the first car I ever picked out and bought myself. The two cars before it dropped into my lap, by the generosity of my family, and being young, I did my level best to destroy them quickly. The Subaru had 40-some miles on it when I bought it, partly because I drove it a few times and partly because the test drive area around the dealership was so large.

Every girlfriend I had in my adult life rode in Fighterjet. One of them helped me choose it. The car outlasted all but one of them.

My wife and our first son rode in Fighterjet. In fact, it was the car that Aaron and I had to rescue from the snowy parking lot at work — its door had been jammed open by ice so the alarm was sounding — so that I could collect the bags we’d left at home and return to the hospital with them. The baby was born a day later, and perhaps we’ll be more prepared in the future.

Fighterjet didn’t have LATCH anchors. Oops.

When I bought Fighterjet, I didn’t have any music in MP3 format. Having an iPod connection was unheard of, because the iPod wouldn’t ship for years yet. But it had a CD player and a tape player, not to mention weather band radio. (Weather band radio is really dull.)

Luckily, I had obtained my first digital camera nine months before Fighterjet, so I was able to document the car pretty well.

The month I brought Fighterjet home, I went to Macworld Expo in New York City. It was the first of five such expos in New York (and that was a particularly whirlwind trip), but it was even more memorable for a big product introduction: the original bondi blue iMac. Fighterjet, meanwhile, was “Rio red.”

Hearing about the color of my car, Kristi laughed and said, “Oh, it’s pull-me-over red!” I got exactly one ticket with Fighterjet.

The Sabres had only been to the Stanley Cup Finals once in their history when I started driving Fighterjet. Now, they’ve been there twice. And had a few conference finals appearances, too. (Did Aaron and I drive Fighterjet to that playoff game with Philly? The one that created the wall of sound in the atrium of HSBC Arena? Correction: Aaron says it was this game against Ottawa.)

I drove to a lot of Ultimate games in Fighterjet. Cleaning it out, I had a regulation Frisbee in the trunk. Along with a wiffle bat and some wiffle balls — you never know when an impromptu game would break out.

I spent one long day in Fighterjet, stuck on the New York State Thruway (I-90) for about 15 hours, one winter. There was a big snowstorm. Some of you lived through it with me, and others have probably heard me talk about it, so I don’t think I need to say more. At least that time, I was prepared.

That incident taught me that if you can’t tell your car from other snow-covered cars in the vicinity, you should probably stay home.

Fighterjet drove through a lot of snow, and barely broke a sweat over it. There were a few close calls, though. Once, I hydroplaned through the turn from 96 onto 332 — no wheels gripped, they only slipped. There was one Christmas morning, driving to Cuba, where we spun 180 degrees together; thank goodness the next car was so far behind us. Another morning, going to work and sliding slowly, sideways, into and kissing a (thankfully) snow-packed guardrail.

I didn’t have a cell phone when I bought Fighterjet.

Baxter was in Fighterjet when I hit my second deer with the car, and, as a dog, he was pretty freaked out by the sudden ordeal. I really thought that was the end of the line, but the insurance didn’t total the car. I haven’t taken Baxter with me to get take out since, as I recall.

The car got its name from the view I got sitting in the driver’s seat, looking back through my regular and oddball lane-changer mirrors. It reminded me of the rearview cameras you see in fighter jet films on TV, looking back on the tail of the plane. Dumb, yes, but I couldn’t think of a better name.

I can’t remember how many sets of tires I put on the thing. The first one involved a lot of anxiety while reading reviews on the Tire Rack Web site. The Dunlop Sport SP2s, later, were utter flops.

Fighterjet helped me move between apartments and houses. Thrice. And, I think it helped move Lloyd’s family once, and maybe others. I forget.

I drove it to Pittsburgh and the Adirondacks and other places, but I also think of destinations I never went.

After giving up this car, I wonder how many cars I have left in me. How many more will I own? My sense of mortality is briefly heightened.

I miss Fighterjet, but it was time to move on. I feel like I’ve abandoned a friend — but that’s silly. Hopefully that feeling will fade, because, after all … it was just a car.

Yes, I forgot to renew my domain. Yes, that became a real pain very quickly when I realized what the repercussions were.

For future generations, I suggest not having to deal with this when:

• you want to switch domain registrars
• you want to switch DNS hosting providers
• your goal is to save money
• you have never switched either registrars or DNS hosts for any domain before
• your domain’s WHOIS records are severely out-of-date (mostly because, through a comedy of errors, your host won’t let you update them)
• most of your administrative e-mail goes to a now-defunct mail address whose inbox you cannot access (I’m looking at you, .Mac, with your costs that went from $0 to $99/year in one year, and your vexing lack of forwarding)
• the rest of your administrative e-mail goes to an address in your expired domain (“because that’s the one e-mail address I’ll always have control over! Not like that .Mac account, no!”)
• you forgot that the reason why you didn’t switch domain and DNS providers earlier was because of the WHOIS hassle, and you just blithely plunged ahead with it
• you’ve waited until the day the current domain hosting provider has cut off your service (“hey, why can’t I connect to anything in my domain today? Er … ah … hm … oops. Maybe I should Twitter about this.”)
• you have to converse with the support organizations of at least two companies, and one of them is losing business
• you have better things to do with your life.

Lesson learned.

Anyway, it looks as if the long electronic nightmare of jaharmi.com being offline for Web and e-mail purposes has now ended. I can see this site. I can send and receive e-mail.

Good day.

The price of a barrel of oil closed today at $100.01. The number, by itself and not adjusted for inflation, is historic. I like history. So I’m writing this post about it. And now I’m done.

I told Mike, via Curtis: “MacBook Air: It’s what left in your pocket if you buy one.”

I don’t like this price, $1799. Although it may sell, I don’t see the value proposition. At a different price, maybe.

I’m sure it’s really cool in person and a status symbol type of product … but we’ve had one of those in the Mac lineup already recently, and it was called the Power Macintosh G4 Cube. (I was there at the keynote when it was introduced. I have the “actual size” poster. I’ve got a Post-I™ on the poster which adds “Actual product lifespan: 11 months.”)

Maybe Apple’s recent history of defying sense and logic with its increasing sales will continue with this notebook. They sell more Macs than ever before, after doing very little to update the lineup since before the Intel Macs debuted. I don’t get it.

I want Apple’s system prices to go down, rather than up, but they’ve gone up lately. In 2008, we’ve seen a thin $1799 laptop, and an eight-core Mac Pro that costs $300 more than it did last year.

The MacBook Air also has an interesting set of compromises: no FireWire, one USB 2.0 port, no built-in Ethernet (although with a USB Ethernet adapter optional), no accessible components, and integrated battery. It’s almost a sys admin’s nightmare, unless I’m missing something.

Oh, and boo on the new acronym: “MBA.”

I spent some time with an agent on the online sales chat in the Apple Store last night. I had a few questions about the new Mac Pro models, and I got some interesting answers quickly. I’d recommend using the online sales chat if you have questions about your Mac purchase.

First, I wanted to know if both the Radeon HD 2600 XT and the GeForce 8800 GT had display rotation support. This is more useful to me now that I have a display that can rotate. As it turns out, both cards do support this.

Second, I asked about the AirPort Extreme card, which is a BTO option, because I wanted to know if it could be added later as a customer installable part. (Some items are not installable in Apple computers by customers, unless you want to void the warranty. The list of items varies by model and you can never assume that even commodity parts like RAM and hard disks are CIP. To my knowledge, there’s no Apple Web page that collects this information.) The Wi-Fi card can only be added at build time, or by an Apple authorized service center later. On the plus side, I noted in the specs that it supports 802.11n as well as the a, b, and g standards.

As for the increased cost of the Mac Pro’s only off-the-shelf configuration, the agent did bring up that the minimum RAM had been increased to 2 GB, the default hard disk had grown from 250 to 320 GB, and the processor had jumped from a dual 2.66 to a quad 2.8 GHz CPU. These are all fine and good, but the model that was for sale on Monday was the same model that went on sale in August 2006. Due to the relentless march of technological advancement I’d expect something better in January 2008, and not necessarily with this price increase.

I’m still going to wait to see what comes out at Macworld Expo next week. The price increase on the Mac Pro makes me wonder whether room was being made for something new between the professional tower and the Mac mini / iMac models. I’m still one of those people who remember with fondness that at one point, Power Mac G4 towers were reasonable options for home computers, with a starting price around $1199. Ever since the Power Mac G5, this economical option for an expandable system has been lost.

Got unexpected news today: the Mac Pro portion of an order we recently made is delayed. No big deal.

However, I looked at the date when we were told to the shipment of the towers: December 4. That’s a Tuesday.

Yeah, that’s not suspicious at all.

It could just be that the ATI X1900 GPU or some other component is constrained. That happens, but that ship date sure makes me suspicious. Especially given the model age of the entire Mac Pro lineup.

One point of concern: we bought third-party RAM for these Mac Pro towers. The memory is not the invoice from Apple.

I’ve used Provantage.com in the past for a few purchases. For example, they tended to have the lowest price I’ve found on .Mac (“dot Mac”) renewal kits when I cared about renewing my .Mac account.

Provantage continues to have good prices on many objects of technology desire, so I created a LaunchBar search template for the store. It took me a while to sort out because they hide their query URLs as soon as the results appear. So, I came up with a Search Template which looks like this:

http://www.provantage.com/scripts/search.dll?QUERY=*&Submit.x=0&Submit.y=0

Reading the Macalope's ACME Pundit Saws post — wherein he skewers David Berlind about his ZDnet post, Is Apple getting dragged (kicking, screaming, or suing?) into licensing OS X? — I haven't written down my own thoughts regarding the sale of Mac OS X to regular PC owners.

I think this is a situation where Apple could get in front of the market. Even though their sales are booming, Apple has taken a few risks that might have eroded their position. There was a quote where the company's CEO said that if someone were to make their products obsolete, it should be them. I think this is telling — to get on top, you make risky moves like replacing a successful iPod mini with the iPod nano, or the iPod nano with a wildly different model. Living where I do, I can't help but contrast this to a company like Kodak that practically begged everyone to take its core business away by not reinventing itself and its products. A cash cow product like film photography can go out to pasture more quickly than you think.

I'm not sure Apple has made this kind of move for the Mac, at least not yet. In fact, ever since the Intel transition, they've mostly sat on their Mac lineup. The MacBook was brand new, but derivative, and has seen several updates. The MacBook Pro is very close on the outside to the PowerBook G4, and has also seen several updates. The iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac mini have been quite static.

To get back to licensing, one area where Apple could do the unexpected would be to sell Mac OS X for generic PCs. I think to offset the potential for considerable support costs, it could be a separate edition of the operating system that sells for a higher price — maybe on the order of the current Mac OS X Family Pack or Windows Vista Ultimate at retail. This extra cost might also cover some aspects of software piracy, even to the extent of a system to attempt to lock the OS to a specific PC, similar to Windows activation.

The benefit, I think, of having Mac OS X on more generic hardware is that this might create a larger Mac community. I don't think it would create a majority, by any means, but it would tap users who wouldn't have run Mac OS X otherwise. And, it would allow those people who kitbash computers together some leeway in building their own systems.

Give customers one more reason to choose your system, because people who choose computers seem to be choosing Macs in increasing numbers. I don't see Apple winning the managed IT space where computers are selected for the users, but I do see Macs being chosen by more people for their own purchases.

As long as Apple provides some compatibility information on what is known to work, this could effective get Macs into form factors where Apple isn't. The mid-range headless desktop is one such place that the company fails to address, and yet I know many people who stress over the lack of hardware in the $900-1500 price range. In my observation, there is overlap between the people who don't use Mac OS X today, UNIX/Linux users, and people who build their own systems.

New hardware options might also spur developers — and the community of users that surround them — to create drivers for the hardware that currently lacks it and improve existing drivers for everyone. This may be especially true for open source drivers.

One way to limit sales while tapping this homebrew market would be to require even a free ADC subscription (and the concomitant NDA) in order to buy through that non-retail channel. You can already buy upgraded ADC accounts there — and discounted developer hardware, if you have that option on your account — so why not sell Mac OS X for regular PCs there? Give it a trial run and see what happens.

I have long hoped that Apple would someday embrace people who build their own systems — I wrote a position paper about this for a marketing class back in the 90's and my thoughts haven't changed much on that score since then. I believe that selling Mac OS X to at least a section of the PC market makes sense. Given Mac OS X's broadening appeal and its apparent reach into the power user and alpha geek markets, it may even cement Mac OS X as the operating system of choice.

I got together with some folks to stand in line for the Leopard release on Friday evening; we went camping in Victor outside the Apple Store Eastview. I wanted to jot down a few observations of the outing, and I’ll do so in no particular order.

It was fun, both for the event itself and to spend time outside the home with friends. (Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — Christen was stuck at home with Elijah.)

It’s perhaps not the best advertising in the world to have a line 200-some odd deep waiting to get into your store. It becomes a curiosity for others in the mall and a hassle for patrons who just wanted to saunter in but are turned away. Amplify this with a line that is predominantly composed of white males, aged 20 to 60 — and the store suddenly looks a lot less hip.

Those of you who’ve stood in lines for Apple conference or trade show keynote addresses know of what I speak. Though this crowd was less like WWDC’s and a little more eclectic like Macworld’s, it was still a turn-off for the teenage girl iPod demographic.

Speaking of which, some young girls walked up to others in the line behind us, asked what the line was for, and then rolled their eyes and stalked off in revulsion.

Unlike any other retailer I can think of in this situation — a captive audience of 200 people waiting to rush through your doors — Apple didn’t have any other promotions in force. Just a new operating system. They didn’t give anyone 5 or 10% off a new computer, or a discount on an iPod, or any other kind of bundling incentive, as far as I could tell.

Frankly, most of the people I saw walking in played with a computer for a few moments and walked out again with only their free t-shirts. And then a few jumped back at the end of the line for another t-shirt.

Did Apple even make any money on this, after staffing up, closing the store to prep, and then giving out the freebies? It looked like they wanted you to go in and out immediately … preferably with your copy of Leopard, sure, but they weren’t exactly encouraging anyone to get more than that.

The Eastview store has been totally reconfigured. I haven’t been there since its remodelling, but the Genius Bar is in the back now, where the checkout used to be. Now, there’s no obvious checkout so I assume they’ll be heavily using those hand scanners from now on. Overall, it was hard to get a feel for the changes since the Leopard checkout line was roped off through the center of the floor.

The iPod touch, which I saw in person for the first time, is really thin. The outer ring on its face is beveled in a black material, maybe metal, that appears similar in style to the sloping edges on the new iPod classics and nanos.

The store employee I chatted with about the Mac Pro didn’t have much help to offer me about the optional BTO RAID card. In fact, he was just looking up the details on the Apple Store Web site, thankyouverymuch. But, he was pleasant while he was performing that admirable service, and I’ll give him credit that he was genuinely trying to be helpful.

It looks like I’ll finally be making a camping trip to Victor today. I’ve never camped in line outside an Apple Store for anything, but I thought it would be fun to try it once. I missed doing it for the iPhone and I don’t need Leopard right away, but today, I’ll see what the line is like at the Apple Store Eastview.

Mostly, I just want to soak in the atmosphere.