mattw.fn_blog()

Continuing my trip through flatland, I’m in The Windy City, and it definitely is. Tomorrow, I’ll be checking out the sights and will most likely head to Applied Interactives on Sunday to check out their VR Portal. It looks like I won’t be able to see the virgin mary overpass because it (and the defacement) have been painted over, but if a picture of a freshly painted wall shows up on iMob, you can probably guess at what it is.

I’ve got some time tomorrow, and will be in the South Loop neighborhood. If there’s something that I should check out, let me know.

Today’s MobiHoc day consisted of some panicked preparation for tomorrow’s panel, watching Sascha trudge through his crazy todo list, eating an excellent lunch (and drinking an entire pot of coffee) with David Young at the bar under the OJC/CUWiN office and hanging out in a dimly lit alley drinking lambic on tap with Sascha and FCC guy Ken Carter where we talked about many subjects that may or may not have included the relaxation of part 15 and type acceptance, open source, intellectual property, wardrobe malfunctions, disney toys with no FCC IDs, japanese vending machines of questionable authenticity and Indiana Jones style warehouses full of statistical data.

Back at the actual conference, there was tasty Vanilla Flan, some very un-adhoc queuing and some introductions to friends I hadn’t met yet. Tomorrow morning’s Panel looks to be extremely interesting, and I am getting more and more sure that I am the token crank.

We finished off the night crashing a going away party for a local college professor, and ended up talking politics and wireless with some very nice African women.

Flatland isn’t really what I expected, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single stalk of corn.

I’m pretty sure nothing of any interest happened yesterday, but I did start up a couple of imob topics, flatland and mobihoc, and hopefully I won’t be the only person contributing to the pile.

After a day of travel, I’m in Urbana, IL. Home of cuwireless, and host to MobiHoc 2005. I’ll be speaking on a panel titled ‘Openness’ and the Public Airwaves thursday as an open source / free software type wireless nerd, and I imagine, starting many an ad-hoc conversation with the rest of the attendees. Checking out the schedule, it looks to be a pretty fun time, and since it’s been moved to the Seibel, I’ll get a first-hand look at The World’s Smartest Building

Sascha has been kind enough to show me a little bit of Champaign and Urbana, including the old Urbana post office, which is now the de-facto “global headquarters” for Indymedia

In Laptop News, my iBook showed up at the house while I was sitting at Seatac this morning. Hopefully when I get back next week, it won’t need to be sent back. Lucky for me, my Thinkpad240 I abandoned when I got my first Mac still runs like a champ. I did some drive juggling (no CDROM on my 240) on Saturday and installed ubuntu linux, a distro that I’ve been meaning to try out for some time now, and for the most part, I’m pleased. It’s got all the makings of a nice distribution, including a slick package manager. I still haven’t worked out all the kinks in my Bluetooth/GPRS setup yet, but I was able to ping the phone and do a basic file transfer late Sunday night.

Since I knew I was going to need to do some heavy wireless action, and Atheros is really a must, I gutted out my modem jack (with wire cutters!) and dropped in a CM9 with a U.FL->RP-TNC bulkhead. Probably not the smartest thing to do on the eve of leaving, but it works like a charm, and I won’t have to worry about snapping pigtails or bad signal strength ever again.

Last Night’s HackNight included a sticker giveaway (stickerguy makes nice stickers, thankyouverymuch), a bit of NANOG info, and the usual nerd-herd activities. Richard is now armed with a 16db directional and will be attempting to connect to one of the LakeUnion Nodes, the Bay Area folks (here for the nog) are all lusting after the Zipit Messenger, and we have all agreed that wilson dresses like a garbage man when he rides his motorcycle. Thanks to Casey, iMob is working with Sprint phones again, and video preview images are coming soon. Until then, here’s a video of a cat eating corn on the cob. For those blosxom-usin phonecammers, Rob just ripped up phonecam.sh to make it post pics to blosxom rather than in a maybe-not-so-helpful 16photos format.

For those of you interested in my ongoing Apple drama, DHL just showed up and handed me an empty box today. My laptop is, of course, already at the repair center.

OK. This just sucks. My machine’s backlight went out April 28. Today will be my machine’s third time back to Memphis since this began. It came back on Monday of this week from it’s first trip, but as the Apple repair method seems to be replace-guts-ship-blind (they replaced the logic board and the reed switch to fix the backlight), when it got to me, the bluetooth didn’t work. As I’ll be travelling to MobiHoc and will likely need GPRS, I spent 3 hours on the phone and sent the machine back Tuesday. Today, it arrived again and lo and behold, it would not boot. After about 2 hours on the phone, we concluded that the logic board is dead. Ya think?

This is the sixth bad logic board that I’ve gotten from apple out of my 3 mac laptops.

• My G3 iBook that I bought from Cliff has the busted screen problem (it lookslike fruit stripe gum) that they ended up recalling. Since the case has been pretty much destroyed by Cliff and I, there’s no way it’s covered anymore. (1)
• My Powerbook had a bad logic board and had to go back after it would intermittently die. Since it has come back, it has problems counting up RAM. There is a dent in the case, so I have been told by a ‘genius’ that it is no longer a warranty issue. Since it is not reliable as a laptop, it is now hooked up to my TV as a media-center type thing. (2)
• This iBook escapade has so far brought three bad logic boards into my house. (If the bluetooth module was not ‘forgotten’ but just non-functional). I check my mail on the road with my Zipit.

Someone at Apple needs firing.

After messing with Backlights on zipits and finally getting in my sheet of red EL, my new iBook has just left the building in a DHL box due to a dead backlight. While I was adjusting my lid-angle (damn these nice days), my backlight just blinked out of existence. I called Apple, and after the standard hold-this-key-down *cough* troubleshooting, we agreed that a month old computer should probably not just up and break. This is my second new laptop from Apple that has required a return within the first 2 months. Both times I’ve had to call them, they’ve tried to upsell me with AppleCare. The benefits of the $250 AppleCare plan they say, is up to 3 years of Hardware and Software support.

According to the plan’s Terms and Conditions,

e. Limitations.The Plan does not cover:

(ii) Damage to the Covered Equipment caused by accident, abuse, neglect, misuse (including faulty installation, repair, or
maintenance by anyone other than Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider), unauthorized modification, extreme
environment (including extreme temperature or humidity), extreme physical or electrical stress or interference, fluctuation
or surges of electrical power, lightning, static electricity, fire, acts of God or other external causes;

Sorry, I think I’ll pass on the Extended Warranty here. It seems like a lousy bet that anything that breaks after the standard one-year is going to be a factory defect, and it looks like they can pretty much deny you for any reason (static?!?). Laptop Insurance on the other hand, looks pretty promising.

A quick quote at safeware.com (not an endorsement, just googling) shows a laptop plan that is not only cheaper than AppleCare, but provides comprehensive coverage, including:

• Accidental Damage
• Theft
• Power surge and lightning regardless of source
• Vandalism
• Water damage
• Natural disasters
• Complete repair or replacement of computer system with no deduction for depreciation
• Optional deductibles
• Coverage at home, in the office or in transit
• Replaces preinstalled software

I am not really interested in either, but as I’ve told this story to other Mac people out there, almost every one has asked me if I had AppleCare. I think Apple’s upsell at the store (and on every phone call) must be driving all these people into believing that it’s a good deal, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s only a good deal if Apple makes such lousy computers that they constantly break (through no fault of your own) several times over a span of years or you rely on phone support rather than the Internet.

If you are worried about your Laptop, get insurance. It’s a much better bet that you’re going to drop it, step on it, or it will be stolen. Insurance even covers Apple’s lack of Quality Control. For less.