Before I get into actually discussing the hardware I just need to say that while I usually love buying things at the Apple store, with the free roaming sales people who can check you out right then and there, it doesn’t work that well for new product releases. A salesman was trying to make a list of people, but you could also try to corral anyone in a blue shirt and get them to help you. Getting on a list and then having to find a salesman anyway made the experience chaotic and frustrating.

Initial experience

Since I got to the Apple store before the new machines were on sale, there weren’t any out on the floor to look at so the first time I actually saw the computer was when I got it home and opened the box. The first impression was striking, the top looks sculpted. Apple has the knack of taking last years hot shit and making it look antiquated instantly. The new MacBook is no exception. I’m upgrading from the last model of the MacBook Pro, and even though the design was aging, it still looked modern in the context of other laptops. Not anymore. Even though the new design is evolutionary over the last one, it leaves it in the dust. The curves on the case are much more refined and the black keyboard and screen bezel just looks classy. The case itself is the most solid I’ve ever felt on a laptop. It’s completely rigid with no creakiness at the seams. There’s no flex whatsoever when picking up the laptop. The following image compares the two side-by-side while I was using the (excellent) Migration Assistant to move my data across.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to after working on the older MBP. The keys there are larger and right next to each other. The keys on the new one are smaller and your typing has to be a little more precise. It’s an easy adjustment that only takes a couple of hours to get used to. The overall tactile response is very good, not as clicky as I’d like but responsive enough. The backlighting on the new keyboard is very good. The black keys contrast really well and I’d almost describe the overall effect as “glowing.”

The new trackpad is really interesting. There have been some concerns about the fact that it doesn’t have a button, but the whole trackpad itself clicks. Really the best advice I can give is to just treat it like a regular trackpad with a button until you get used to it. I actually find it hilarious that, after the years of bitching about apple not providing a second mouse button, they’ve taken away the first one. And to good effect. You can get a right click effect by setting up the trackpad so that a click in the lower right corner brings up the context menu.

Gestures are something new for me. So far it’s working really well, but the four finger gestures seem almost kitchy and just using the corners of the screen to bring up expose works much better. I’d like to see what other applications can do with these though. Working with gestures on photos is really neat, you can pinch and zoom just like an iPhone.

Screen

The new black bezel around the screen makes everything look brighter. The screen itself is insanely bright. Seriously, I think it’s only a couple of lumens away from achieving that effect in crappy movies where text is projected on the hacker’s face. Colors are crisp with great contrast and the LED backlighting gives the screen a really cool temperature feel.

The new screen is glossy, which is unfortunate. You can make up for most glare by cranking the brightness all the way up, but you’ll still have to adjust your viewing angle. Fortunately the new case design fixes one of my main complaints with the old design in that the screen has a much greater range of motion. I could never seem to tip the old screen back far enough when it was balanced on my lap before. Now there’s plenty of motion. One minor complaint I have is that the glass front on the new screen makes it slightly heavier so that it’s more likely to bend on its own as you move the laptop around.

Conclusion

With the new MacBook, Apple has taken their old design and updated it. It’s not a revolutionary change, but it is significant and better in almost every way. I have some minor complaints about the screen moving on its own, the edge of the palmrest is slightly sharper and it digs into my forearms a little bit, but overall the improvements more than make up for any quibbles I have. I’m also amazed by how cool the new MacBook runs. I’ve been sitting with it on my lap for over an hour now and there’s virtually no temperature increase when my old one would have been cooking my lap by now. Overall, I’m really pleased with the upgrade.

I could never get too into the iTunes Music Store. I hated the proprietary format, the DRM involved and being bound to iTunes, which, until the Remote App for the iPhone and Genius playlist generator was utter garbage. Even the new features barely make it tolerable.

Aaaanywho, the Amazon MP3 store is amazing. Just about everything I want is available in MP3 format, sans DRM, tagged appropriately, and in a high bitrate. Sure, you need a proprietary app to do the initial download of the mp3s, but once that’s installed, you can buy and listen to an album in under 5 minutes. It’s everything the consumer in me has been lusting after and my bank account has been fearing.

I grabbed two new albums tonight right after discovering the artists (instant gratification FTW). The first is an EP from Laura Barrett called Earth Sciences. Laura Barrett is a classically trained pianist from Toronto, but for her solo work she plays a Kalimba. The only way to describe her music is haunting. Apparently her song Robot Ponies went through the blogosphere a while back and I completely missed it. Here it is if you’re curious:

Laura Barrett – Robot Ponies

I discovered the second group through the excellent Aurgasm blog. Bitter:Sweet is a downtempo electronic duo from LA. The singer has an amazing voice and they’re much more informed by jazz than most trip-hop that I’ve heard. Their music has a swing to it that I’ve found lacking in other music in the genre. Here’s the title track off of their new album, Drama.

Bitter Sweet – Drama

Last Thursday night I had just finished nursing a red wine hangover and I was thinking about them again so I got up from my desk and walked the 3 blocks to Church of Steel. I knew from a recent modblog(nws) post that they did them there and the shop has a decent name so I figured why not.

I talked to one of the piercers, Evan, and asked for three microdermals in my wrist. (Since I sleep like a Vietnam vet with PTSD I figured that the wrist would be the least likely place for them to get knocked around.) The interesting thing about the bodymod community is how fast things move. A year ago these things were still mostly experimental and to a certain extent they still are, and the idea that I can just walk down the street and get something like this is astounding to me.

Anyway, after doing all the paperwork I sat in the piercing room while Evan prepped my wrist and lined everything else up. The basic procedure is that the insertion hole is first punched with a small dermal punch, a regular piercing needle it used to elevate the skin and create the pocket and the jewelry, held with hemostats, is coaxed into place.

To be honest the only real painful part of the whole experience is the brief sting of the dermal punch, everything else is a walk in the park. There were a couple of odd sensations as the jewelry was maneuvered into place but nothing I’d really classify as pain. The last 48 hours has been completely uneventful too. There was a small amount of blood the following morning, that got cleaned up with a quick saline soak but other than that there’s been no pain, so swelling, no discomfort, no anything, just three steel disks sticking out of my wrist. The only time I’ve even really noticed them were when I smacked one of them while getting my mail last night and that was a brief 30 seconds of pain and an “oh shit” feeling but no noticeable lasting damage. I’m actually amazed at how much my wrist doesn’t hurt.

After 4 weeks or so I can switch out the ends on them to something a bit more elegant, and I’m really interested to see how the skin has grown around the shaft that sticks up out of my skin at that point. For now though I’m really happy with them and I think healing is going to be completely uneventful.

• Just because a table has two dimensions doesn’t mean it’s ok to put 4 chairs at it. This especially pisses me off in Japanese restaurants where you typically get a bunch of small dishes that fill up a standard two person table quickly. If it’s already a small table, get rid of any centerpieces or flowers. Damn it.
• My soup bowl is empty. I don’t care how quickly I ate it, or if the kitchen is backed up. Get rid of it. I don’t need to stare at an empty dish for 10 minutes. Make sure my drinks are full in the interim.
• No food other than ice cream should be served ice cold. This goes for salads, cold appetizers, anything. There’s a certain temperature that food needs to hit to actually taste like anything. My sashimi shouldn’t taste like it just came out of a deep freeze. If I have to wait 10 minutes for food to heat to a proper temperature, you’ve failed
• This especially goes for butter. It’s for spreading, not for carving.
• I’m done with my meal. All the dishes are gone. I can’t possibly be drinking anything because I don’t have a glass. Bring me my check. Bring it to me now. Just. bring. it. to. me.
• Know what you’re out of. If there’s a beer that you don’t have on tap, tell me about it when I order it, don’t check with the bartender. Know what soups you have, there will be a quiz.

Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

Of course the JDL as an organization resembles PETA and godhatesfags.com in that they believe any press is good press so they issue a press release which says, in part:

Smith’s comments are ignorant, detestable and offensive. They spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought so valiantly to save the world from those aspirations of Adolf Hitler. Smith’s comments also cast the perpetrators of the Holocaust as misguided fellows rather than the repulsive villains of history they truly were.

If people do not understand how idiotic and insensitive it was to make such a comment, it is like a Jew saying that James Earl Ray, the assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, was basically a good person who did a “bad thing.”

The Jewish Defense League is calling on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to repudiate the comments made by Smith, his friend and supporter.

Now, I ask you, what’s a better teaching device: The idea that Hitler is almost supernaturally evil, almost transcending humanity, or the idea that Hitler was a deeply flawed hateful human being that managed to get other people to follow him, who was partially insane and partially a product of his environment?

Which one is scarier? Which idea can we learn more from? Which idea allows us to study psychopathic behavior and maybe actually learn something to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Nobody ever said Hitler was good, you pricks. It was said that he was misguided and his own flawed perception of “good” may have been different than everyone else’s. There are a lot of people (Fred Phelps for one) that could probably commit the same kind of atrocities, given the proper time, place, and audience. The same thing has happened in Africa and the Balkans on a smaller scale. A despot decides he doesn’t like a certain ethnic group, gets a group of followers, and things go to shit. Hitler just happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a shitload of damage. The lesson to be learned about Hitler lies in studying his humanity, not in the supernatural evil that he represents.

The construction is amazingly sturdy, almost too sturdy. There were several points where I felt like I was forcing the chassis to do something it wasn’t meant to do, when it was just putting up resistance because of how well manufactured it was. Twisting the screen to put it into tablet mode took more force than I’m comfortable using on most electronic devices. It felt like I was going to break something just while opening the thing up.

It’s slow. Not painfully slow, but slow. If anyone remembers the icons bouncing in the dock on OSX.0, it’s about that bad, and the icons even bounce in the same manner. The browser takes 10-15 seconds to start, the whole machine takes a while to start up, longer than it should with the solid state disk in there. Once an application is actually up and running though, things are pretty quick.

The keyboard is impossible to touch type on but still awesome. Considering the keys are covered in a rubber sheet, I was scared that it’d feel like some kind of early 80s speak and spell with regard to the tactile feedback and force needed to type. Fortunately it responds to a normal amount of force so kids using these things aren’t going to end up with tendinitis. There’s also a very positive tactile response to keystrokes. The only thing making touch typing impossible for adults is the actual size of the keyboard.

The touchpad, while it functions, well is kind of odd to use. There is one continuous area on the bottom of the keyboard where the touchpad is, the problem is that it appears that only the middle 1/3 of the touchpad is actually usable. On normal laptops you’re used to a tactile feel when you come up against the edge of the touchpad and hit the case. That’s not the case here: hit the far left of the touchpad and your finger just keeps going while the cursor stays. It’s really hard to get used to. You almost have to actually look at the keyboard to see where your finger is. I didn’t play with all of the applications so I’m not sure if the contiguous touchpad area has a use in any of them.

The screen is amazingly clear for its size. Colors are crisp, and there’s no ghosting.

The user interface is interesting, but it takes a little getting used to. The way things are done in the UI makes a lot of sense but it’s not like using any other computer. I found myself with multiple application instances open fairly often until I got used to how it operated. Hovering over an icon on the “home” screen brings up a context menu for resume and close. The system icons, accessible my mousing to a corner of the screen, have labels when you hover over them, but the labels don’t appear to be clickable, which I found nonintuitive.

Overall it’s a pretty neat machine, definitely useful for its intended purpose and I wouldn’t mind having one for personal use. I can see it being useful in classrooms anywhere, not just in third world countries.

Behold, The Discovery of the Neutron and the Hydrogen Atom (click the images for a pdf):

The striking thing about walking through my neighborhood is the perverse sense of normalcy. All the restaurants are open. There are even some people in them, and even a few intrepid Californians who insist on dining al fresco. They don’t appear to notice that the sky is a yellowish grey, that the ash is not only floating through the air, being blown out to shore by the Santa Ana winds, but is also resting on every flat surface available to it, including the diners themselves. The barista at Starbucks greeted me as she always does, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I’m one of 3 customers in the place during what would normally be the lunch rush.

To be downtown today you’d never know that 10 miles away 250,000 people have been evacuated and that Qualcomm stadium has been set up as an evacuation site. It’s an odd feeling. Even when you’re this close to something there’s still always the feeling that “it’s over there.” If a coworker hadn’t had to help his mother evacuate this morning, if I could have gone to work as I’d planned to instead of staying home due to freeway closures, if there weren’t any soot and ash in the air, if it didn’t hurt to breathe, I could just as easily pretend that this was as far removed from me as the tsunami a few years ago. And as much as I’m wondering about other people carrying on like everything’s normal, I’m sitting here on my lunchbreak, writing this, drinking my venti passion tea lemonade (unsweetened, tyvm), about to go back to work. Tonight I assume my dinner plans are still on, assuming the restaurant I’m planning on going to will be open and I too, will carry on like today is any other day.

What does Big Bear have in common with Germany? As near as I can figure: pine trees.

For some reason I think this sounds like a fun idea, since hey, I didn’t have anything planned right now anyway except for playing with my camera (taking like 100 pictures of a fucking seagull, with different aperture settings, seeing what happens, hoping that one might come out ok so I don’t feel like a total waste as a photographer (even though I am a total failure as a photographer and my total knowledge of photography(despite having owned an SLR for close to a year now) entails the following: smaller aperture settings for a blurry background, the 1/3 rule, and a polarizing filter helps get rid of haze and reflections)). So I figure, I like Big Bear, I like beer, let’s do this.

In my rush to get up to Riverside to meet up with my friends I don’t go to an ATM so I can get money out, figuring hey, they’ll have an ATM there. I also don’t bother getting a jacket since, hey, it’s still October, which is one of the warmer months in California so the temperature will be fine at 6700 feet, since we’re closer to the sun if nothing else. I also don’t bother to grab anything for lunch because hey, we’re going to Oktoberfest, there will be food there!

We arrive in Big Bear, stand in line to buy our tickets to get into the place, then stand in line to have our tickets taken to actually enter the place. (As an aside, there were vendors at Oktoberfest selling Navajo blankets and dream catchers. I wasn’t expecting anything authentic, per se, but sweet Jesus, this guy was right at the entrance) At this point I’m hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a beer. And having the sum total of 25 dollars on my person I go to stand in line for an (the(!) as it turns out) ATM. After an interminable wait for the ATM, the person two people ahead of me manages to drain it of its funds. So with the remainder of the money I have on me I go to get food.

Now for some reason they don’t take cash at this event directly. All beer and food sales are done through tickets of various denominations. And there’s really nothing explaining how the ticket system works. So you have to ask the attendant how the (fucking (at this point I just want a drink and a bratwurst)) ticketing system works. She spends a minute explaining it. And has to repeat this explanation for everyone in line. I get to the front of the (fucking) line and look at the prices. Large beer, 11 dollars. “Dinner”, 9.50. Well, fuck. And they don’t take credit. “Miiiiiiiickey”, I call to my friend. “Can I borrow some moneeeeeeey.” Fortunately he has cash on him (which surprises me because he usually doesn’t) So I manage to borrow enough to buy my (fucking) tickets and go to the (fucking) beer (fucking) line.

“What can I get for you?”
“Whatever has the highest alcohol content”

After this, I’m off to the dinner line. Dinner is a bratwurst, some sauerkraut, some german potato salad(which is inexplicably served cold), and a piece of rye bread. I feel like I’m in prison. This I manage to consume in 30 seconds and then go foraging. As it turns out there’s a place outside that sells bratwurst (or at least a simulacrum thereof) for 6 bucks. And they take cash! (Which is still a problem, but not that huge of one since I’ve managed to borrow another 20 dollars). I down the bratwurst (which is approximately the size of 1(one) vienna sausage, and has been roasted to within an inch of its life) and I’m starting to feel a bit better since my blood sugar has stabilized and there’s still the nagging problem of the altitude headache, and now it’s fucking cold. Apparently the temperature is in the high 40s and I don’t have a jacket (actually, t.b.h., I don’t even OWN a jacket at present because the mean temperature of San Diego varies between 69-75 degrees during the year). Well, fuck again. Jaeger shots. I hate Jaegermeister, but fuck it, I’m cold and it’s the quickest way to get alcohol into me. So now I’m cold, running low on beer, I have the fucking awful taste of licorice in my mouth and I’m still somewhat hungry.

We all sit around a table being miserable for a while until Carrie tells us there’s a log sawing competition going on inside. Inside is crowded, but approximately 40 degrees warmer and we manage to find seating on the floor so we can watch people risk life and limb for a 10 dollar gift certificate to Big Lots. Surprisingly this was actually entertaining to watch. The people competing in this seemed to fall into two categories: a) Those people from the mountains who have actually USED a saw before and thus know exactly how not to bind the things. and b) The people who were up from out of town who have probably only seen a saw on TV and were, thus, hopeless. I don’t know how some of these people managed to avoid cutting their own legs off but they did it. Most entertaining was the “Hansel and Gretal” competition where some hapless husband and his wife got on stage, he inevitably doubling her weight, she inevitably having a lousy choice of footwear(with a frighteningly low μ-coefficient), and attempted to cut through a log. This resulted in the female hanging on for dear life as the husband pulled not only the saw, but his wife back and forth the saw binding and unbinding as it slowly worked its way through the log.

At the conclusion of this event the chicken dance was played for approximately the 400th time of the night and we figured it was probably a good time to make an escape, considering it was cold outside, crowded inside, the ATM was still busted and we were out of money.

This is where the night actually starts getting pretty good. Carrie knows a bar in Big Bear called, simply, The Pub which is actually one of the better bars I’ve been to. Good beer, a good bar menu (get the crabcakes and avoid the potato skins(olives on potato skins? What the fuck), a not too loud band and a decent atmosphere. There also an actual fireplace where a couple in funny sweaters that looked like they were straight out of a Newhart rerun were sitting and drinking brandy.

After a few beers and some scotch I decide it’d be a good idea to call my coworker, Ryan, who was supposed to be at Oktoberfest and see if it wanted to meet up at the bar. Upon reaching his voicemail I decide to do this in the persona of a gay german named Hans, who “vants to share [his] crabcakes or maybe just crabs mit him”. I leave approximately 5 of these voicemails for him including one where Hans “vanted to put [his] strudel in zee kugel”.

We didn’t hear from Ryan for a couple of hours by which time we’d left the bar and were on our way down the hill. He pretended he couldn’t understand what Hans was saying and that he’d give us a call “later”. Inexplicably, we didn’t hear from Ryan after that. Lame.

So yeah. Fuck Oktoberfest in Big Bear, but it’s worth the trip up for the bar.

• No iChat seems like a pretty serious oversight. Fortunately I can host an IM application on my own server, but this is still an application that’s common on just about every phone currently out there.
• I hope I can hide the “Stocks” widget which I’ll never use whenever iChat does come out
• Holy crap this thing is fast. Yeah, it’s still running over edge, but going from an MDA to this is like night and day. The whole thing is zippy and you get the feeling that it’s rendering as fast as it can download, unlike the MDA which has significant lag while it renders a page. Google Maps is usable on this.
• Two thumbed typing on the keypad is impossible. It works pretty well in Safari in landscape mode, but it’s utterly hopeless in regular mode and you’re better off just hunting and pecking.
• Since the landscape mode is actually useful for typing, why can’t I do it in the email application. Why the hell is Safari the only thing that gets the web browser in landscape mode
• For once the camera on a phone isn’t entirely godawful. I’m not shooting wedding pictures with it but at least this doesn’t fisheye everything to hell and back
• The user interface is really well thought out. There’s no lag moving anywhere, dragging and flicking has the right amount of inertia. Zooming is intuitive. Why haven’t we done this on phones before?
• I can actually see myself using this as an mp3 player on flights. It’s small enough that it’s not cumbersome. Actually the phone doesn’t feel bulky at all, nothing like the MDA.
• The YouTube integration is a nice novelty, but why this instead of a chat application.
• No todo/task list. Weird.
• Why can’t I flick to move between days on the Calendar?

Overall there are some look and feel inconsistencies but this thing is still lightyears ahead of everything else on the market. I’ll put up with missing apps and UI issues because even with all of its flaws, the iPhone is the way things should just be done. Everything about it is so obvious that you wonder why it’s never been done before.