Continuing on from last night, we’re now in serious CAM (Computer Acquisition Mode).

So should it be a Mac? Or a PC?

He’s looking at the MacBook with the SuperDrive, student price $1199.

Dell’s comparable laptop (with a bigger screen - 14.1″) is $1,204 with student pricing.

He also wants to upgrade his version of Sibelius from 3 to 5. It’s a dual edition, so it doesn’t matter which flavor of notebook he has. The real question is which computer will last the longest, handle his music creation and transcriptions, and still have general purpose uses for school and fun.

Cast your vote in the comments.. I haven’t figured out how to integrate polls into this theme quite yet, but I’d love to hear your opinion…convince me (and him) one way or the other.

Technorati Tags: mac, pc, Sibelius, macbook, dell, dell 1420

DG Honors Update:

She was placed back into the Honors classes today. I received an email informing me that there was room after they placed all the GATE-qualified students first. I did my best to ignore the implication that it was somehow a gift, given that she has met the Honors criteria every year since she was tested for the GATE program. The outcome was the right one for DG, so it’s all good. I just wish we hadn’t had to go through a week of angst and drama to get there.

Sticks is looking more collegiate by the day:

Sticks did his first round-trip commute in the new car today…and is now beginning to understand the love affair Californians have with their cars. We’re trying to give him incentives to keep riding the train, but he has such a weird schedule — classes end around 12pm T/Th and the first train back doesn’t leave till 5 — that he’s lobbying for driving 3 of 5 days per week. We’re pushing for driving 2 of 5 days, with train commutes on the days where he doesn’t have late rehearsals to 9pm. Today he spent 4 hours in the practice room…always a good thing.

College has been an adjustment for him, musically. His first jolt was when he didn’t pole-vault into the top bands on the first round of auditions, and I’m glad to say that he has handled it with grace. (My personal reaction was relief…it’s about time he had a challenge to rise to instead of hitting the big time on the first round…) He was a little bit bitter about one placement, but not that bad, and he freely admits that the top drummer dogs in the jazz department are awesome musicians that he can learn a lot from. Good for him for being humble instead of arrogant…I remember a time where it wouldn’t have gone that way.

So now it’s computer purchase time. The dilemma: Mac or PC? Honestly, the PCs I’ve seen don’t impress…it’s been nearly 2 years since I bought this laptop and I’m not seeing much that makes me sit up and want another PC. Macs, however, are another story. They are definitely looking good to me and also to Sticks, particularly since Parallels allows for a Windows XP installation and the ability to run software we already own.

The dilemma is that if he buys a MacBook, he won’t have enough $$$ left to get the new version of Sibelius, even at the student license rates, which he would have if he bought a PC. On the other hand, the machine of choice on this campus (especially in the music department) is a Mac. Decisions, decisions….

Technorati Tags: back to school, mac or pc

Julie Amero’s case is not unique. It happens far too often. I’ve been focused on the Julie case because it was one of the most blatant misunderstandings of malware I’d ever seen. Until today. I thought I’d seen it all, but the case of a child persecuted in the name of protecting the children has to be one of the most audacious, frustrating and sad that I’ve ever heard. Matt Bandy is a victim, as sure as Julie Amero.

I have been fortunate enough to participate in a private discussion list around the Amero case. One goal of the group on this list has been to expand what we’ve learned into something that reaches beyond Julie and toward others. TheJulieGroup blog is the beginning of that endeavor — a collaborative effort to identify unjust prosecutions of innocent citizens who are the victims of malware.

I hope you’ll visit, subscribe, and tell your friends about it. I’ll be contributing to it when I have a contribution to make, so if you know of anyone who finds themselves at risk of losing their job, family or liberty because they were victims of malware, let me know.

Technorati Tags: thejuliegroup, malware, injustice, legal, safe children

I was really half-kidding when I wrote my “Dear Microsoft” post this afternoon, but even as I inserted my tongue in cheek, I was shaking my head.

Sending out laptops to people to playtest and review is a great idea, but Microsoft missed the boat with this one. First, they put together a laptop that very few “real people” will buy, loaded with the top of the line version of Vista. Then they sent it to geeks.

The majority of Microsoft’s PC customers are not geeks. They’re people like my mom who get their laptop bundled with the latest operating system, who use their computers for photos, email, the Internet, Ebay, and other popular applications, and most importantly, who don’t read geek blogs.

If Microsoft really wanted some buzz, they’d have been better off packaging a mid-range, average user laptop and shipping it out to people who reach that audience. They’d have sent it to knitters, food bloggers, mommy bloggers, teachers, and other folks who have a much wider audience of non-geeky folks. Along with that, they’d have sent it to a few hard-core Mac users willing to test it and write an honest comparison, if not an endorsement.

I consider myself to be in the geek sphere, and if I were contemplating a move to Vista, I would not be looking at an Acer Ferrari laptop. I’d be looking at a nice, fast laptop with a pretty display and good reliability track record. I would search for bloggers who were using Vista and liked it, and see what their specific reasons were for liking it.

After the Windows ME disaster a few years back, I was a very slow XP adopter. I had to overcome my distrust of Microsoft’s buggy releases enough to take the plunge to XP, and I did that after hearing people I trust tell me that it was more stable, more powerful, and was compatible with applications that I used every day. The same is true of Vista. I will give more weight to the person who works the way I do, with a wide variety of applications covering everything from video to spreadsheets. It is likely that my move to Vista will be with the purchase of a new laptop which will likely be a Toshiba or possibly a Dell. That is, if I don’t make the move to a Mac, which is something I’ve been considering when we’re ready for the next upgrade go-round in a year or so.

Back to Microsoft’s current PR efforts, after sending them out with much fanfare and ado, they’re asking for them to be returned or given away, which is an overreaction to the flurry of blog posts over the suggestion that no blogger who received such a machine could possibly give an objective review. What crap. This is the same argument that is made over and over about PayPerPost — that being paid somehow implies a positive reaction.

Memo to MS and their PR Machine: Next time, choose a midrange machine that’s affordable to me, my mom, and the couple down the street who like to IM their grandkids and send digital photos. Hold a lottery or come up with a promotional giveaway with the sole agreement that the person receiving the machine use it for a specified period of time and then write an honest review, whether positive, negative or neutral.

Have enough faith in your product to place it in the hands of the people who will be using and recommending it as a whole, instead of an elite group who write for a much smaller subset of the whole.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, laptop, PR, Acer, buzz marketing

I want one of these. I promise to be honest and disclose and give a thorough review, but I really, really want one just like Scott Beale’s. Even though Christmas is over, can I please, pretty please, have one?

Technorati Tags: ferrari laptop, microsoft, vista, hardware reviews

It’s geek night here. Actually it’s been geek week.

First it was the decision-making process for my cell phone upgrade. Do I go with a Blackberry, Treo, Smartphone, or stay with the more traditional Razr? Given that I’m married to Cingular for another year until the kids’ contracts run out, changing services wasn’t really an option, but I was less than thrilled with their phone selection. Ultimately I went with the Razr, figuring that I didn’t need to be enslaved to my email and computer any more than I already was. It’s nice, but the video is really wimpy if I want to send it in MMS messages on up to YouTube. Oh well, on to the next decision….

I’m trying to figure out what to do about my office computer, which is very long in the tooth (c. 2001) and mostly just a slug. The truth is, when a new computer comes into my life that’s faster, cooler and sleeker, I begin to hate the old computer…and hate it and hate it. I’m a speed whore. I realized that I am spending more time at my home desk than my office desk because that’s where the horsepower is, which doesn’t really work very well for me and my clients. I tried to resurrect my Dell laptop as a processor/hard drive hooked to an external monitor but it didn’t work…I couldn’t trick the Dell into believing that I just wanted the monitor on and not the dead laptop screen. Besides, the Dell hard drive is 30GB which is just not beefy enough anymore. I’m a space whore, too.

The final undoing of the office computer was when I had to uninstall Google Desktop because it just slugged the machine to almost a halt (2006 technology just isn’t meant for 2001 processors). I guess I’m a search whore on top of everything else.

So do I get a new computer or do I just haul the laptop between home and office? It’s a pretty hefty laptop — the 17″ screen makes it less than immediately portable. Or does it? I have a flat screen monitor in the office so I could have my 2-screen setup at home and at work, and it’s no big deal to have an extra mouse and power supply in the office. An external hard drive would take care of keeping the office file clutter in one place and apart from the personal file clutter I keep on my home external hard drive — I fill up the 100GB internal hard drive on the Toshiba regularly because I shoot my pictures in such high resolution format, so I store them all on an external drive. Besides, it’s an automatic backup to the DVDs I burn with the RAW files on them.

My decision was made when I found a 200GB Maxtor external USB drive at Staples for $98.00. To have the same machine at home and work with external backups for each is just too delicious for the low, low price of $98.00. Oh and I did buy a neoprene laptop sleeve for $49 for transport, since I walk to and from the office.

So what does this have to do with Google v. Microsoft?

I was reading Scoble’s blog post tonight about bloggers having a double standard when it comes to Google and Microsoft and it got me to thinking about whether he was right or not.

Until last year, I was a devout Microsoft junkie. I was an Office 2003 beta tester and wanted to test Office Live, but never received an invitation from Microsoft despite sending them requests many times. In that same time frame (October 2005 or so), I decided to give GMail a whirl, and I’ve never turned back, even after the nasty business in July with my account lockdown. (I have a fail-safe in place for that now, so it should no longer pose a problem…)

I use Google Desktop, Google Calendar (but not as my main calendar…30Boxes still works really well for me) and GMail. Google Desktop incorporates kickass search for my local files, and GMail does the same thing with my email. No more guessing about where that email string from 2003 is — it’s all indexed on my hard drive or my mailbox, with no synching or other stupid software installations that chew into my available memory.

Robert Scoble lists some reasons for bloggers’ loyalty to Google and bias against Microsoft, but none of them really apply to me except possibly the web-centric Google approach. MY reasons for preferring Google over Microsoft have to do with the leanness of the applications, the speed with which they operate, the utility of what they do, and efficiency with which they do it.

Because GMail is such a lean client, I can read my email from my run-of-the-mill Razr when I’m not near my computer if I want. Yahoo! Mail requires installation of a Java client to the phone. Microsoft has that silly MSN Mobile which was AWFUL. They may have something better in mind with Windows Live, but it doesn’t do me any good right now. I aggregate all but two of my email addresses into GMail, and am able to read and respond just about instantly. One of the non-aggregated addresses is a corporate behind-the-firewall address; the other is my backup address known only to me where GMail forwards everything I send or receive so that I always have online access if I’m locked out again for some weird reason.

My reasons are web-centric because the web has become what Microsoft envisioned YEARS ago — an extension of my desktop. Unfortunately, Microsoft faltered when it approached that extension as a part of the operating system and then had the lawsuits and PR that came with trying to make the Internet a Microsoft-driven environment instead of using open-source established foundations for their development.

However, still having vestiges of the Microsoft early-adopter junkie in me, I went ahead and downloaded Windows Live Writer. I was completely bummed when it insisted on installing .NET apps and an Internet Explorer-only toolbar! For this Firefox user, it’s pretty much a non-starter. I’d rather use Flock to blog. (I have tried Writely but am unimpressed with it)

This is what Microsoft doesn’t seem to get but Google does: Make your apps work across all platforms. Let me stretch across the divide from home to office EASILY and SEAMLESSLY using open source apps and code that isn’t all bloated with extra stuff. Let me choose my extra stuff with plug-ins if I want.

Like I said, I’m a speed whore, a space whore and a search whore. For the moment, Google is pimping for me, for free. If Microsoft comes up with free stuff that’s useful, doesn’t require a bunch of downloaded crap to be added to my computer and allows me to cross platforms where I wish (I really want a Mac someday in the future…), then I’ll be their whore too.

I may be cheap, but I’m not easy.

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, mobile Internet, cross-platform compatibility

After spending hours upon hours tracking through the home and office networks, I’ve come to the conclusion that neither network was breached, and that one of two things has happened:

1) One of Google’s authentication servers has had a major hiccup. This is supported by the numerous reports of similar issues, reports from people I know having sporadic difficulties logging in and out, and reports that Google is possibly beta-testing new features (though I hold those reports mostly at bay…) I’ve seen similar things happen on other sites — One day you login fine; the next you can’t get in at all, and when it finally happens to enough people the host sits up and pays attention. It’s certainly a possibility.

However, the problem with this is that there is no way for the people having the problem to get to a person in an effort to fix it.

2) The account was hacked on their end or records somehow munged, resulting in a loss of my secondary email address and leaving me without any recourse but to wait 5 days for the password reset opportunity. Why 5 days? Because Google doesn’t have a way to access my password and just send it to me. I have to wait 5 days with no account activity and then try to log in, at which point I will have the opportunity to access the security question and answer it to get a new password at my current secondary address.

Today I tried the gmail-lockdown@google.com address. I received an automated response saying that if I’d been locked out for excessive activity or violations of TOS, I would be readmitted after some unspecified period of time. It also asked for specifics of my situation, which I sent to them along with attached screenshots. So far, no reply to THAT email, but I did receive an automated response to my complaint sent to mail-support@google.com, giving me a URL to visit with a form to complete reporting abuse. I’ve already done that with no response, but did it again in the hopes that perhaps this one would yield a reply.

A friend also sent me some contact info for people inside Google, which I will also use if I can’t go through the usual remedies. I am waiting because I want to try and exhaust the normal remedies first and blog it, if for no other reason than to have a series of steps on the blog for anyone else who might have this happen to them. I’m keeping screenshots and copies of my email so that I can create a complete record of what happened and when.

In the meantime, I just deactivated my forwards from my “real” email addresses and fired up Outlook, so I’m not completely screwed. I am missing any email that was sent to me between Sunday at about 11pm through Monday at 10AM when I discovered the problem. It’s been a huge time-waster when I don’t have time for it…

Dealing with the question of whether the network has been compromised has been the biggest pain. This is a situation where I could say with 95% certainty that the problem wasn’t on my end, but there’s always that 5% margin of doubt..that niggling question…”Did I really lock it down as well as I thought I did?” So you go through all the tracing steps, do all the extra virus scans, pull all the logs and check ‘em. It all takes time. As an added measure of caution, I decided it was time to upgrade some of the wireless security measures and lock down the kids’ laptops just a bit tighter. All time, but I’m hoping time well spent.

It annoys me to no end that it’s time well-spent because of what someone with malicious intent and too much time on their hands feels free to do. After all, I’m not Microsoft or some big mega-company…I’m a sole proprietor with a second job who relies on the Internet, email and technology to get the job done. Problem is, hackers don’t care. They just like doing it because they can…and until we figure out how to make it so they can’t, they’ll continue to try to have big fun at our expense. Literally.

Technorati Tags: google, gmail, hack

Just to put them on notice — all activity WAS logged by the host and has been reported to the proper authorities.

Technorati Tags: hack, hacker