New Cows

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Entries tagged “apple”

Apple fanboy?

written by jw, on 1/16/10 4:52 PM.

There was a time when I loathed Apple, and Macs in particular. I thought they were slow and unstable and way to expensive and frankly, Apple users would speak of other systems with dédain. At least that's how I perceived it.

This was about ten, fifteen years ago (dang - makes you feel old).

At that time I was happily using Window 95, Windows 98 and quite loved Windows 98 SE. That was then.

At some point, it must've been arround 1998, 1999, I got introduced to the wonderful world of *nix. A very good friend had already been playing around with Linux then, but though intrigued I never quite made the jump. But at my first job it was of mix of Windows, Mac and SGI and there I started fooling around with Irix.

Not long after that I got hooked by the *nix love and became very much fed up with Windows. So at home I threw it away, installed RedHat and never quite looked back. Soon after RedHat I switched to Debian, which I like(d) better.

Anyway, when I started working for Infrae I also bought a laptop. At that time Apple somehow started to attract me more and more. OS X became mainstream and its *nix underpinnings looked much much better to me than the old Mac OSs. So, I still do not know exactly how and why, I bought a Powerbook G4 Titanium. A lovely machine!

Even though it momentarily ran Gentoo, I quickly switched back a much smoother ride on OS X: suspend just worked, powersavings just worked, wifi just worked, sound just worked, attaching beamers just worked, burning a CD just worked.

It. Just. Worked.

For my desktop machines and the few servers I managed I was still using Debian, and, from its first public releases on, Ubuntu. For software development I'm actually still mainly using Ubuntu. But now on a virtual machine running on my Macbook Pro.

Why this writeup?

Today I decided to replace our wireless router. It has been the second router in two, three years that behaved erratically and basically annoyed the hell out of me. It was slow and constanly loosing connection, and whatever I tried, I couldn't get it to work reliably. I decided to replace it with an Airport Extreme.

It is not cheap of course. It is actually rather expensive. But there's a thing that makes up for it:

It. Just. Works.

So, I'm an Apple Fanboy now? Having multiple Macbooks in the house, the Mac mini, the iPhone, using iTunes, and now the Airport Extreme? Indulging the unboxing of the Apple gear, enjoying the attention to detail, like the Airport having the exact same dimensions as the Mini so they stack up nicely? Enjoy chatting with my collegues about all the cool new stuff, feeling lucky my current workplace is virtually Windows free?

I guess so.

I'd happily admit it :-)

It is here!

written by jw, on 6/22/09 11:49 PM.

Today it arrived..! My new Macbook Pro 15″.

So cool.

Just so cool…

Paymentreentry.FullDollarFailure - WTF?

written by jw, on 6/12/09 8:57 PM.

We tried to order a new Macbook Pro (yah!) from the Apple Store. However, both attempts failed at the moment of credit card verification.

The reported error was PaymentReentry.FullDollarFailure.

WTF. What's that supposed to mean?

Today I called the store. After explaining that somehow the credit card transaction failed, the guy immediately asked "You got the dollar failure, sir?" Sounds like a common situation.

Turns out that our order was exceeding the per-transaction limit on the card. Makes sense in a way, so I suggested the guy to get the error reporting improved. "Can't do that sir, for privacy reasons".

Huh? Why can you tell me the reason for the error over the phone, but not in the online store?