The not-so-trusty PowerBook G4 just got back this afternoon, from trip #4 to the AppleCare hospital in Houston for the same funky display issue. Trip #3 was a simple trip on an airplane: “could not reproduce, so we didn’t do anything”. Trip #4 looks like it’s actually fixed, but then again, so did trips #1 and #2. Again, props to Apple for speedy turnaround on it; I took it into the store over lunch on Tuesday, and it came back to the house via DHL this morning.

I have some faith that it might actually be fixed this time, because the “Genius” at the Apple store said he knew exactly what it was (and his guess was one of the two things that I think it could be, too). But that might just be my Charlie Brown nature, thinking, yes, maybe Apple will really let me kick the football this time.

PS: I put quotes around the “genius” because I think it’s a dumb name, but every single person working at the Genius Bar that I’ve encountered has been excellent. I also don’t see how Apple could possibly make their job harder by having such a crappy system that does nothing but make already-irritated customers even madder, which is something that warrants a whole post on its own someday.

The very small slice of my readership who cares about this sort of thing– and even a lot of you who think you don’t– should read Nicholas Carr’s recent long piece on the environmental and business benefits of greener data centers.

The fragmentation of computing has led, by necessity, to woefully low levels of capacity utilization – 10% to 30% seems to be the norm in modern data centers. Compare that to the 90% capacity utilization rates routinely achieved by mainframes, and you get a good sense of how much waste is built into business computing today. The majority of computing capacity—and the electricity required to keep it running—is squandered.

Prickett Morgan calculates that, including secondary air-conditioning costs, the world’s PCs and servers eat up 2.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, amounts to “$250 billion in hard, cold cash a year. Assuming that a server or PC is only used to do real work about 15 percent of the time, that means about $213 billion of that was absolutely wasted. If you were fair and added in the cost of coal mining, nuclear power plant maintenance and disposal of nuclear wastes, and pollution caused by electricity generation, these numbers would explode further.”

I am coming around to the line of thinking that someday in the future, people will pay a premium to be disconnected and offline. I heard it first articulated in Brian Eno’s 2003 seminar at the Long Now foundation (audio & pdf available here):

Q: David Battino: 50 years from now when we all have broadband
receivers embedded in our skulls, will we be paying for silence instead of
music?

BE: Yes absolutely right.
I’ve done my best actually in that respect in making music that has less
and less sound in it. I’m getting there. Actually in the 1950s I heard
there used to be jukeboxes in America that had one silent disc, so if you
wanted a bit of peace, then you put your dime in and you dialled that
number and you got three minutes of silence. I’d love to get a collection
of those records wouldn’t that be fantastic! A jukebox where that’s all
you had on, different varieties of silence.

I’ve been thinking about it this evening because of this column by Shalom Auslander I saw mentioned in the Bookslut blog:

I wonder if the one who came up with the term “Information Age” was being sarcastic, as the information it has come to refer to is not simply a burden and a chore—though that would be bad enough—but a lie, a distraction. This information that leads to knowledge, it is not information about the nature of man, new theories of existence, fascinating insights into our own tortured human ways that will allow us to become a deeper, more whole species. It’s about mudslides in India, bombs in Sri Lanka, diseases in Africa, child molesters in Florida. Jack drinks heavily, and doesn’t want to talk about it; he maintains destructive relationships with family members who hate him, and doesn’t want to talk about it; he knows which issues were discussed at the G8, and is closely monitoring the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Those things he wants to talk about. He is not the exception. Most people would rather look outward than inward, but it seems to me this Information Age bullshit has cloaked avoidance in virtue and made the distraction an obligation. I went cold turkey five years ago. No news—no television, no magazines, no newspapers, no blogs, no op-eds, not even, sadly, The Onion. I’ve never been happier. This is the headline I hope to see on the Drudge Report one day, the day before the blessed end of the Age of Pseudo-Information, just below Matt’s Flashing Red Light Of Pseudo-Importance: GO ON WITH YOUR LIVES! STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE TRAINWRECK IN BANGLADESH—YOU’RE THE TRAINWRECK… YOUR WIFE IS HAVING AN AFFAIR AND YOUR SON HATES YOU… THERE ARE NO ANSWERS HERE… DEVELOPING…

Biting the hand that feeds, I know.

Contrary to what The Onion says, Pittsburgh has been overdue for its first zombie attack.

(For those who haven’t seen this, similar public zombie spectacles originated in San Francisco and spread to Vancouver, Madison, Toronto, New Orleans and here in Somerville/Cambridge (where anti-zombie protesters held signs saying, brilliantly, “Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Gggblaaaagh“)).

While some of these cities may have a greater tradition of public spectacle, none can match Pittsburgh for its rich zombie history (except for New Orleans, which handily beats all comers in both categories). The modern conception of the zombie was born there, in fact, when George Romero, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate, filmed Night of the Living Dead in Western Pennsylvania with a crew and production facilities based in Pittsburgh. Night of the Living Dead, both the 1968 and 1990 versions, also featured WPXI fixture “Chilly Billy” Cardille, most famous for hosting Chiller Theater, a local horror show in the 60’s (and into the 70’s?). (By the time my childhood rolled around, he was hosting (I’m not kidding) a 7pm televised bingo show.)

Bringing things full circle, the walk was organized by It’s Alive, a Pittsburgh television show which has taken on Chiller Theater’s late-night horror movie mantle. This, according to my cousin (and frequent RFB commenter) Margaret, whom you see in Zombie form pictured above. It’s actually her flickr photos that tipped me off to the event.

The ol’ PowerBook is dead again. It worked OK for about three weeks since it came back from AppleCare, then one day, the whole screen-fuzzing-over thing started again, periodically, with increasing frequency, until about two weeks ago, when the display just completely stopped working ever.
So, yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes on hold waiting for someone at AppleCare, listening to four of the world’s worst songs over and over, before I had to give up (to head to The Somerville Open).

Today, I had fewer committments, so I stayed on hold longer, until I finally got someone, who stuck to the script (reboot, reboot from CD, reset the power unit, blah blah), though I knew it was going to end up with my having to send it back.

While things could be worse, the mere fact that I have to send it back again means I do have to rescind my earlier positivity about AppleCare.

explodingdog.com is a longtime favorite of the Terri and Ezra show; here’s a Bostonist Interview.

I seem to have a lot of baseball lovin’ knitters in my life (Editrix and Turnip and Margaret), so this one’s for yunz guys (sorry, watching the All-Star Game in the ‘burgh made me say it).

[via MAKE Blog]

I enjoy reading the Xooglers blog; it’s like readingMicroserfs in installments written by the actual (former) serfs instead of Douglas Coupland who, in addition to other faults, just doesn’t get software. Today’s piece is a great crash course in the absurd world of trademark enforcement.

Aside: every year there’s always all this talk about all the new words that get put into the dictionary, but I think it would be just as interesting to acknowledge and memorialize the words that are getting retired.

OK, I have this little Pentax camera that takes great pictures and AVI format movies. I have a couple of these movies that I want to edit together for web distribution. Seems like I should be able to edit these on the handy video-editing software that came with my Mac. I know Quicktime doesn’t really play AVI, but I figured I’d be able to find some kind of importer or converter. Nope. Or some free converter for my Windows, so that I can turn them into
.mov files there. Nope again.

Anybody know a good way to turn .avi files into .mov files? I’ll settle for .mpeg.

I can’t get anywhere with a Google search on this, because all the video software I can find is mostly hideously bad shareware that leaves some kind of watermark until you suck it up and pay $30 (which, i guess is an option, but I can’t quite bring myself to do this yet, because I’m still resentful that both Apple and Microsoft have made this so hard; especially Apple for making me think the Japanese girl would just talk to me).

Maybe this interests no-one but me, but these are the top terms for 2006 that people have used to come to the blog from search engines. (I’m not sure why Google Analytics can’t figure out how to decode the plus sign). I have no idea why #1 is #1, and it makes me vaguely queasy that so many people are searching for it. More disturbing is #25. But otherwise, it seems about right.

(PS: It’s an image so that the words don’t get indexed, skewing future search results)