Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just dumb, or don’t speak English correctly, or have a short attention span. Whatever the case, I can’t make heads or tails of the Baltimore County Land Records website. All I want to do is get a better copy of the plat for our property, so that I might begin the process of understanding exactly where the fuck my lawn ends and where the neighbors’ begins. The copy of a fax of a copy I have shows a trapezoid with vague and blobby notations of distance, but no point of triangulatory reference for anything except the west corner of our road frontage. Which means our garage could be in someone else’s yard. And there’s no mention of actual distance from the pavement to the beginning of our property, just a smudgy line which could be our hedgerow. Apparently I will need to hire a surveyor, at the approximate cost of one months’ salary, just to nail a ribbon on a tree and say “It’s here”. Before I can do that, I have to get the plat, and in order to do that (as far as I can tell from this suck-ass website) I have to make an appointment, with… somebody. There are names and numbers listed, but none of them say “I’m the guy who will help you get that thing you need”. Searching on their website for the obvious stuff, like “copy of plat” returns a “Google Custom Search Result”, which is quickly becoming Internet shorthand for “we don’t give a rat’s ass about you, and we’re too cheap to catalog anything properly.”
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In the meantime, I’m shopping for a new laptop. Idiot Central, the 17″ MacBook Pro I’ve had for four years, has only sported half a usable screen for the last month or so, and I’m tired of not being able to use it without an external monitor. I’m also really sick and tired of opening my bag to find that it mysteriously woke from sleep and cooked itself like a Hot Pocket. The trackpad button has been sticking in the down position, which means it’s always wanting to select something. It’s still a good, fast machine, so it’ll likely end up as a production unit on my desk, but its days as a primary computer are done. I use a laptop mainly as a travel rig these days, so I’m looking at a 13″ MacBook Pro as a replacement. It’s portable, small, and fast, and I don’t have the extra $500 to pony up for a 15″.
Update: It gets better. Remember how I was talking about the trackpad sticking? I did a little poking around this evening. The trackpad sits directly under the battery compartment.
See that bulge? That means the battery is fooked. It’s been swelling in the center and putting direct pressure on the trackpad above. I guess it bulged to the point where it finally disabled the trackpad completely. The funny thing is, my boss at work, who also has a 17″ MBP of similar vintage, just had his battery replaced today at the Apple Store due to the exact same issue. I have to see if he got it replaced under warranty or not, because I think we may be heading to the Columbia location this weekend, and we may be walking out with a new iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a replacement battery.
Finn sat on the potty, looking intently at me with her big blue eyes. She had asked to use the potty three times in a half an hour, which on one hand is awesome, but on the other hand is a little tiring for Jen and I. We knew she was working up to something but it wasn’t happening, and usually the trick in that situation—much as it is for the rest of us—is to distract her from thinking too much about things and find her inner peace.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, and tapped the YouTube icon. Doing a search for “Sesame Street” returned a list of clips I knew she’d like, and we started out with a classic Cookie Monster bit. I flipped it over, the picture re-oriented itself, and she smiled while Cookie started explaining numbers. Almost immediately, there were prodigious results, and we watched a few more clips while things sorted themselves out.
There are many excellent reasons to have one of these things beyond a potty training aid. (For the record, we prefer books). Friday night after Jen drifted off to sleep, I stayed awake streaming a Ghost In The Shell movie from Netflix until 1:30 in the morning, something that was inadvisable considering I was on baby duty early the next morning. (Review: The movie was middling to poor, but it was good enough to get me sucked in. The Netflix app has a lousy UI but streams movies very well). I’ve tagged and labeled photos, updated my Mint account, written forum posts, looked for recipes, and checked the weather. It’s so much easier to deal with for certain things than a laptop would be, even with a screen-based keyboard, and it’s much easier to carry around.
Compared to a first-gen iPhone, it’s slicker and faster than a politician at a county fair; everything is immediate and smooth. It makes my 4-year-old MacBook Pro feel like a Mac Classic. I spent two hours watching the movie with a full charge and when it was over, the battery was still at 90%. Even better: the back was cool to the touch, unlike my MBP, which gets blazing hot. The browser is fast and responsive, scrolling and redraw is immediate (unlike my iPhone), and as a pretty heavy-duty internet user, I’ve only stumbled across one or two sites with video I couldn’t watch.
I’d like to say I’m writing this post on the iPad, but because it’s owned by my company I’m keeping my personal login details off the machine. There is a WordPress app available, and many of the things I use our backup laptop for are accomplished easily on the iPad. One thing that looks a little sketchy right now is printing from the iPad, but there are some solutions available and it looks like Apple may be working on something as well. I do find myself wanting to do certain things with it that I can’t (hook up a camera and download pictures, for one) but overall I see this as a no-brainer for our near-term future. I think we will wait, however, for when they put a camera in the next generation—shortly, I’m guessing, given the advent of FaceTime.
Here’s a link to Engadget’s iPhone 4 guide, including preview, pricing, and availability. Both Jen and I are eligible for the “$18 upgrade” with a 2-year contract. I’d prefer not to give AT&T another two years of my money, but they’re still the only game in town. And I’m not paying $20/mo. extra for the “privilege” of tethering.
From the It’s about Freakin Time Department: a Netflix app for the iPhone is coming, according to the current WWDC stream.
File this under “horrendous timesuck”: Steam for Mac goes live. I will eventually sign up for this, when they release the Half-Life Yellow Box.
Steve Jobs wrote a love letter to Adobe today, and predictably, the internet is losing its mind. It seems like people land on one side of this argument or the other: Flash is a security hazard/resource pig/aging dinosaur, and Apple is closed/proprietary so this is the pot calling the kettle black. Personally, I’m agnostic about Flash either way, but I do know that it slows my Mac to a crawl (when it doesn’t crash my browser) and chews up battery power like a pothead in a convenience store. Adobe’s claims to the contrary are pitiful.
I’d really, really be happy if I could find a reason for why my MacBook Pro decides to wake itself from sleep at some point on my way into work every morning. I’m annoyed because sometimes I won’t know about it for a half an hour, after which I pull it from my bag and find that it’s been cooking itself to dangerous temperatures without going back to sleep—something which exacerbates the issues I’ve been having with the display. I’ve found some mentions of the problem here and there, but a year’s worth of sleuthing has turned up nothing conclusive.
At this point, I’d really just like to have a new laptop.
This is getting funny. Police Seize Jason Chen’s Computers. To recap: this guy is an editor at Gizmodo, which bought a prototype iPhone that someone mistakenly left at a bar, from the original finder, who never really meant to did a piss-poor job of attempting to locate the original owner. These guys (Gizmodo) bitching about “invalid police procedure” is just humorous.
My friend J. just stopped in my office with a beautiful new iPad and let me monkey around with it for ten minutes or so. It is as amazing as you may have heard. It’s so amazing, in fact, that I want one desperately, although I can’t afford it and don’t really need it. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I was doing a lot of traveling. Apple is going to sell a million of these things.
At some point I’ll need to buy one so that I can design for it. Right now, there are other important things to spend money on.
Here’s a pretty slick way of streaming video from a desktop to an iPhone: Air Video, which is actually two downloads: an iPhone app and a streaming app. I don’t have a whole lot of personal need for this, but it’s pretty cool.