SeeMySites Blog

As mentioned previously, I have had some serious problems with my Apple Macbook Pro battery. I have finally come to the conclusion, though it took me a while to get it replaced. There is a local store called MacDoc’s, which is located in Salt Lake City. I first took it into there yesterday, where there was a fairly “green” looking representative and another. The green one was the one helping me, though he got all of the answers to my questions from the other. What they basically told me was this: that I would have to leave my laptop there until they had the time to look at it, which was probably going to be around two days. Then, it was going to be an additional four days (or more) while they ordered the new battery after they looked at it. I was incensed, not only at the amount of time that it was going to take, but also at the fact that they refused to let me keep my laptop for the two days that it was going to just sit on their shelves anyway. I hate it when people use the phrase “I understand” without taking at least a minute to truly understand. I have to have my laptop for work, as it has my entire production environment loaded (Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails, along with all my development apps), and I really cannot wait a week or two for them to get around to replacing a defective battery. When I asked them if there were any other options, they asked me: “Did you purchase it from this store?” I told them no - that I had ordered it online. With that information, they said, sorry, there was nothing else they could do except purchase a new battery. So I left - saying a curt “thank you” as I did so - and vowed that I would never purchase anything from them again.
Next came the call to Apple’s support line. (more…)

I short while ago, I had downloaded coconutBattery to track the battery’s life in my Macbook Pro. I had read two things from Apple’s site and various other sites: that keeping your Macbook plugged in all the time is hard on your battery, and that regularly running the battery down to nothing (once a month) and then letting it “rest” was good for enhancing battery performance. I don’t know how others are faring with these instructions, but now that I have a way of measuring them I am starting to take issue with these instructions.

I installed CB on the 15th. At the time my capacity was 4907 mAh out of 5500, a percentage of 89%. (more…)

For those of you who are not familiar with the story, you can read a rather messed up version here: Bomb scare story. It got quite a few hits on Digg.com, and I am seriously left scratching my head on this one.

There are several issues with this story, so many that I regret there is no way that I could possibly ever list them all in this article. The first issue, which is foremost here, is that these “dangerous” blinking light devices were on the streets for three weeks before anyone called them in. Did you get that? Three weeks! Other problems are that these devices did not resemble an explosive device, did not have any of the components of an explosive device, and apparently were not capable of going off as they had sat on the streets for three weeks (have I made that point clear?). Apparently Boston was not the only city “targeted” for this ad campaign, as they were placed in cities all over the country. Boston was the only one that had a scare. For as many institutions there are in Boston which claim to be elite, Boston got a chance to flaunt their stupidity and they sure took advantage of it.

Instead of apologizing and admitting that they did something stupid, the local authorities are going after the people that placed the devices on the street, treating them like as if they purposefully meant to place a “bomb-like” device on the streets and incite a scare. (more…)

Some may complain about the fact that IE 7 is only available for Windows XP, but the truth is that Microsoft has been developing two different versions of Internet Explorer 6 for a long time. One was for XP, the other was for earlier versions of Windows. Developers will want to keep this in mind when doing web pages for version 6. You will need to test both on Windows 2000 or earlier and XP. On a side note, I think it rather stupid that the entry level versions of Vista cannot be legally run in emulation (such as Parallels) according to the TOS. Does Microsoft not think us developers are paying them enough money by having to purchase three different licenses just to test their buggy products? Apparently they do not think we are paying them enough no matter how much we give them.