Obama’s Two minute Ad on the Economy
Posted on September 18th, 2008
(via Jon Taplin, one of the best political and economics bloggers out there)
(via Jon Taplin, one of the best political and economics bloggers out there)
Thomas Frank’s The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death at the Wall Street Journal lays bare Sarah Palin and her fake populism:
“If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.
And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those ‘reporters and commentators’ with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?
No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town’s mortal enemies.”
(Via The Wall Street Journal.)
Mushroom at Jordan Lake
Took this while apparently also picking up dozens of small nymph stage deer ticks near the ruins of old Ebeneezer church at Jordan Lake.
Three Small Fish in a Small Pond
My replacement refurb Macbook Pro was shipped to me by Apple and arrived at my doorstep on July 29th. For those new to the story, this replaced a previous refurbed Macbook Pro (2008 model, 2.5Ghz, 512mb VRAM) that was purchased at the Apple Store online. I had this laptop for about two weeks before the video started to go to crap just about every time I was running on battery. The video problems I described following my first of three visits to local Apple Genius Bar and then further after the 2nd and 3rd visits and the follow-up call with Apple.
Although, I’ve had this system for about a week and a half I’ve really only tested it out for about four days of that. The wireless Airport card didn’t fully function and only allowed periodic and very slow wireless connections. I took it to get fixed under warranty at a local certified Apple repair vendor (the two nearby Apple Store Genius Bars were all booked up) but this was a slow process. I probably could’ve (and maybe should’ve) just insisted Apple send me another laptop as this one clearly failed out of the box, but as the video seemed to work I thought it better not to press my luck.
However, I was disturbed with how long it took to get resolution of the wireless problem both on the phone and at the repair place. Apple makes some decent tools (like Network Utility) for troubleshooting this stuff and there are a lot of other third party tools that will let you analyze your wireless signal strength. But I was never asked to try any of these. Even though I made it clear that my other wireless clients were working fine, both sets of people I talked to wanted to blame it on the router (an Apple Time Capsule) or some sort of interference. A quick look at the output from Ping while on wireless about 5ft from the router would’ve showed that there was a problem, especially when compared to an example from a working system in the same location.
— 10.0.1.1 ping statistics —
20 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 65% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.582/435.349/2004.191/727.535 ms
The 65% packet loss and 2000 millisecond return trips would’ve been a big indicator that there was an issue with my particular system, especially as my wife’s crappy and ancient Toshiba had no packet loss and less than 2ms replies from the same spot. Of course, I only thought of this after I’d already spent an hour and a half on the phone with Apple and then taken 3 trips to the repair place. In the end they replaced the Airport card and behold the problem was fixed.
So now I am a happy yet somewhat apprehensive Macbook Pro user. The video updating issues I had seen with Webkit and list views have not reared their ugly head again so far. Scrolling in iTunes no longer looks like this (thankfully). But, though I am hopeful, I know that my problems took a couple of weeks of usage before they surfaced…
I also know that there are still lots of other users plagued with these problems. More information is continuing to come out about the NVIDIA chipset flaw that may or may not be related. For a good recent example see APC’s recent (August 1st) post NVIDIA DISASTER: thousands of GPUs faulty (to which NVIDIA responded) and also check out the post at Macrumours in their page 2 discussions and all the comments.
There is also increasing traffic at the Apple support forums for the Macbook Pro display. Some of these seem to be started by people not seeing any errors but just freaking out over the NVIDIA news, but many others are from people with real problems. The failure modes being reported are not uniform in all of the complaints but many are similar to what I have seen. And many have not been able to get any resolution so far (see the comments on my 3rd post for a couple of examples).
So now we wait. I wait to see if the display glitches come back (and I begin cursing my favorite computer maker again). Many others are still waiting for a fix to the problems with their Macbook Pro. And all of us will undoubtedly wait (and wait, and wait) to see if Apple (and maybe NVIDIA) will actually give us some in-depth information about what they plan to do about all this…
If there’s any lesson to be taken away from my experiences, it’s that buying a refurbished Macbook Pro is a bad bet right now. I gotta wonder a bit whether it’s ever a good bet with any of the Apple refurbs given my failed wireless card. I’m willing to cut them some slack on that, and if it had just been the wireless card I doubt I’d be all that concerned about them. But the display problems are another issue. Of course, these seem to be an issue with the brand new non-refurbished models as well, but I have to suspect that there may be more of these that were not fully diagnosed and fixed in their refurb stock. If Apple still has it’s head in the sand regarding this problem (and there’s no external evidence that they don’t), some of these refurbs might be returns like mine that have not been properly diagnosed with the display issues and thus not really repaired and proven free of them.
Gatorland #4
Quick update on Macbook Pro. I got the wireless fixed (finally) yesterday and am now up and running regularly again. So far no signs of the display corruption and redraw problems on the replacement system, though I really haven’t used it extensively yet. I will put it through it’s paces and update by the weekend with the results…
I got a replacement Macbook Pro from Apple late yesterday afternoon. I shipped the last one back on Friday and had a new (refurb) system on Tues. Not bad turnaround.
I’d like to say I’d tested this one out and either did or did not see the same graphics display issue as on the previous system (preferrably did not see). However, I haven’t been able to get too far with this one. The Airport card seems to be hosed, with problems getting a reliable wireless connection. The signal and contact with the Time Capsule router is fluctuating wildly and dropping constantly (like every 10-20 seconds). So instead of getting work done, I’ve spent a substantial part of the day trying to get another expensive hunk of aluminum and silicon working right.
I spent a wonderful hour and 20 minutes on the phone with Apple during which time they disconnected me twice while trying to transfer me to others. I was somewhat unamused. In the end I agreed to take my laptop to local 3rd party certified Apple service technicians because the two local Apple Store’s Genius Bars were completely booked up for the next week. The theory from Apple support being that my Airport card is defective and needs to be replaced. So now I am without laptop again for at least another day or two. For this I am also unamused and am beginning to have some serious buyer’s remorse here…
There was some news on the graphics issue front. It appears Dell has released some BIOS patches that are supposed to limit damage from the NVIDIA flaw… Looks like HP is also acknowledging the same issue now. I wonder if Apple will do the same. I gotta say the shine is coming off of my geek love for them…
Display glitch in Mail.app's message list view
I went back the Apple Store’s Genius Bar for my third visit yesterday in an attempt to get resolution to the display glitches I’d been seeing (the first visit is described here with additional information on the issue in general, the second visit is noted here). The last visit resulted in a fresh install of Mac OS X and a promise to replace my laptop (now only just over a month old) if there was no resolution to the problem.
I left my first two visits feeling hopeful and appreciative of the helpful attention I’d been paid by the different techs I’d talked with. Although the solutions I’d been offered were pretty much what I’d expect from just about any tech support attempt, I at least felt that they understood the problem and sincerely wanted to fix it.
My third visit felt nothing like this. Instead I was left with the feeling that the tech I was speaking with had no comprehension of the issue and was also made to feel like I was kind of a dumbass for expecting so much.
Of course it didn’t help that I couldn’t reproduce the problem while sitting there, but I had come prepared with about 10 different screen captures showing it in action. And I’ve got to say the guy I talked to on my second visit was willing to promise a replacement system on just these screenshots.
Instead, I was made to feel first like this was something I was causing by scrolling web pages before full loaded (despite the screen shot showing the problem in a list view as well). I said that was not what was happening and also noted that it was a system-wide problem and that I’d seen the flashing of video symptoms as well. I’ve seen elements of this in Mail, Safari, Twitterific, iTunes, iPhoto and the Finder. Here’s a video of the glitch as it appears in iTunes (Quicktime;7mb). Quite annoying.
His fall back position was that it was probably a software problem and that there were a lot of bugs still in Leopard and Safari. Now, I’m willing to buy that it’s a bug, but I’m not convinced it’s in the OS and I know it’s not in Safari (too many other apps affected). Looks like a video HW problem or possibly an NVIDIA driver issue… About this time another Genius Bar employee walked by and commented that he saw someone else with the same problem just yesterday, mainly in Word (which I don’t have installed). Wish he’d stuck around so I could ask more but as usual the place was hectic and he went off to help someone else.
In the end my guy said he’d be willing to replace the logic board but he didn’t think this would fix it and again made me feel like this was a normal behavior I was seeing. I again called bullshit. This is not normal. My previous laptop (a 2005 12″ Powerbook also running Leopard) showed no signs of it, I’ve never seen anything like it on any computer I’ve used over the past 15 years of being a computer geek, and if it was normal the Mac press would be up in arms with complaints about it. No way this is normal. No way this normal for an expensive high-powered laptop with a high-end 512mb video processor. Uh-uh.
So I was given the options of letting them take my laptop for 2 weeks to replace the logic board or to try this guys other suggestion, which was to call Apple and call foul on this particular system, say it’s been a problem since I got it and get a replacement. He said he couldn’t do a swap in store because it was a refurb that I’d purchased from the online Apple Store, but he felt that if I called 1-800-MY-APPLE they might be able to take care of me more quickly than he could (turns out this was a very helpful suggestion).
I was willing to buy this and since I live just a few minutes from the store (and could easily come back for more abuse) I was also willing to go home and call Apple and see where that got me.
On getting home, I decided to first take another shot at trying to find and answer myself. I started digging into the console logs on the system. This only led down a short blind alley. Briefly I was hopeful that the issue I’d been seeing was somehow caused by the numerous kernel extensions that were installed by Parallels’ and VMWare’s demo software. Although removing all of these did result in a much quicker boot, within a few hours I saw the problem again.
So, with no resolution, I called Apple today to see what they had to say…
After a brief on hold wait, I got through to seemingly nice, friendly guy who took my name and serial number and looked me up. He immediately brought up my info from the Genius Bar visits took a look and said he’d like to put me on hold for a few minutes while he reviewed it. When he came back, he immediately said that it looks like I need to get a replacement computer shipped to me, put me on hold again and then came back a few minutes later with an additional person from the Apple Store customer support to arrange for the swap. Less than 20 minutes from the time I dialed, I had the procedure explained to me and they were sending me shipping labels for the return of this system.
Nice. No argument, no asking me to try stupid resets, nothing but immediate attention and promise to fix the issue. Even the guy at the store who I’d thought was being such a dick turned out to be offering good advice. Satisfied again, I await the replacement laptop (and hope like hell I never see this display issue in it!!!)…