Chris Heuer's Insytes

So U2 and Green Day performed an amazing original collaboration last night on Monday Night Football in the first game at the refurbushed Super Dome in New Orleans last night. This morning I went to download it, first checking iTunes – nope, not there. I then remembered the URL they were promoting during the game, http://www.musicrising.org/ to find out it was being distributed via Rhapsody, which does not run on Macs. When I tried to download the song and give them my $0.99, I got this message.

This is why standards and interoperability is important. How many tens of thousands of dollars did this worthy non-profit leave on the table by choosing a technology partner who was incapable of serving people like me. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did they leave on the table from people who would not download and install the software?

I had thought this sort of bait for proprietary systems had gone the way of the dodo, but I guess some people never learn…

[ESPN isn’t much better since they made it impossible to directly link to their coverage of this portion of the game, the closes link I could find is here, where you will need to click on the Music Rising link to get some video of what transpired.]

I won’t get into this too much, but let’s just say transitioning to the new MacBook has not been the most pleasant experience. Yes, it is screaming fast, and I am sure I will be loving it very soon, but so far it has been a lot of headaches. To wit

• Virtual PC won’t run on it, and my Win XP license is non-transferrable that works with Virtual PC, so the nearly $300 investment there is worthless. If I buy XP Pro now, I will need to buy Vista in several months which will ultimately mean nearly $900 invested to get a working version of Windowa on my latop! Ugggghhhh!
• The battery life has been much lower than expected. On the way over to London I went through all the power on 2 fully charged batteries in less than 5 hours – the amount of time a single battery is supposed to last.
• After buying a new UK to US power converter at a local shop, it did not work. Then I went to return it and got another one. This one worked for 5 minutes before it was blown out (presumably by my laptop power demands which is odd). Even when I got my 3rd power converter which worked ok, the power level remained at 2% while it was connected, never recharging.
• So then last night, the system performed a software update which included a MacBook Firmware update. Just before this, I posted on someone’s site about my woes. But wouldn’t you know it, after the firmware update, the battery was reading 99% charged. This is just an indescribable pain as the laptop just continued to die during the day thinking it was only 2% charged – this cost me valuable hours of productivity lost.
• The last straw came just an hour ago when I was working up a very long and detailed blog post about the XPRL meeting I attended yesterday using Ecto (my favorite Blog publishing tool). It seems I forgot to transfer the serial number and it was acting in limited/lite/crippled mode. You can guess what happened. Even though I had saved it several times to ensure it would not be lost, it actually was not saving the work – it was just pretending to save it! So now I am going to have to redo the entire post….

UGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

I am trying to find a silver lining, but there is none. Sometimes you just need to accept what is and move on, letting go of the attachment to painful experiences, even when the sense of loss is enough to nearly bring on a panic attack. Especially since one of my pet peeves is losing intellectual property (like lost documents) to the ether.

At least I know it will be eventually be ok, but I really was quite pleased with the post I had written and was ready to move on to the other blog post I owe Josh Hallet for Blog Orlando, which now won’t be done till tomorrow. Sorry Josh – I will make it up to you by coming up with something good…