Phil Manser

stupid lg

A friend of my wife’s recently asked me to look at her troubled ipod. It was an older, 2nd generation Nano, but she had only used it a few times when suddenly it ceased functioning. She first took it to the Apple Store where she was told that they weren’t sure what was wrong with it but they could replace it for $59. I was bit daunted that the Apple techs couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it, but I decided I would try some basic troubleshooting. I was even more alarmed when I found out that replacing the nano’s battery (which I figured might be the problem) was rated very difficult by ifixit.com.

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that after 45 minutes of charging, the ipod worked just fine. There was nothing actually wrong with it save for the fact that it was not charged. I suspect that the dock (a set of Bose speakers or something like that) my wife’s friend was placing the ipod on was failing to charge it and since then she’s switched over to using a stand alone charger.

How could this be missed? This should have been one of the first things that was checked. I’ve heard many people praise Apple’s support, but this makes me doubt them. When people complain about their PCs and I tell them to buy a Mac, one of the reasons I do so is because of the great (or so I thought) Apple support.

Is Apple losing it’s Care?

I forgot how good it feels to have pride in your work. Like the other day when I was flipping through a magazine and I stopped on a product that looked awfully familiar. It suddenly hit me that I was working on the website for the manufacturer of that product and it filled me with glee. (Silly, I know, but still very enjoyable.)

It’s incredible to think back just a few months, to a time when I was beginning to hate my job, regret my career path, and despise the asses people I worked for; to now, where I once again, enjoy my job, consider excitedly what the future holds, and genuinely appreciate the awesome people I work with.

I guess the lesson here is – don’t give up or give in.

I’m seriously getting old here. Right now I’m entering addresses into my address book from Christmas cards. Wow.

I’m just glad Apple’s Address Book is so easy to use.

I really hate how dependent I’m becoming on PHP. I find myself writing command line scripts in them and today, I find myself using it to directly process stuff. php -r may not be as cool as running interactive python or ruby, but it’s really handy.

And on another note, as fun as it may seem to pile a bunch of commands all on one line separated by semi-colons — don’t.