This morning, I tweeted: “So takethislollipop.com would have been more impressive if done in HTML5 #BoycottingFlashOnMyMBA” and was accosted by a follower thus: “@fyrfli boycotting flash is like boycotting windows; you love to hate it but its popular because it works.  Boycott  itunes.“.  And it reminded me again how people just love to jump on a band wagon and ride it until its wheels fall off.

There was no discourse on why I chose to boycott flash (“OnMyMBA”, note) and no discussion as to it’s merits or downfalls – just a random attack on my choice to do so. When I subsequently tried to be witty with the well-known mantra “#DareToBeDifferent”, I was again told that it is common place, used, works, known … etc. yet still no asking after my reasons.

I have a long time love-hate relationship with all Adobe products. A lot of it is irrational I will freely admit. I simply have not chosen to educate myself fully on the matter. Frankly, I believe that the larger issue here (the stability of Flash as a platform) is above my pay grade. And this is possibly another irrational judgement call, but there it is.

The fact is that in my experience, Adobe products (Reader, AIR, Flash) have given me more headaches than I care to remember. In fact, just about every single experience I have had with Adobe has been painful and forgettable. But this is my experience … no one else’s. That it coincides with the general view out there of the products is telling. I’ve seen a great number of people lament that Flash could perform better, that it’s implementation is buggy, that it doesn’t play well with others, etc. The problem is that up until now, Flash has been the only option and so people embrace it, love it, defend it and … continue to patronize it.

One of the things that I am telling myself these days is that I need to really live my life out loud and stop being afraid of being decried or debunked. My life is the sum of my experiences – I own them and they have taught me things that I don’t know that anyone else can claim to have learnt. My choices and my opinions are based on my experiences and I make judgement calls based on that and that alone.

I have never been one to conform to the crowd just because everyone else was doing it, or because it’s the one thing that works or because it’s the only known solid solution. Just because everyone is using Flash – to develop or to publish – doesn’t make my choice to NOT install it on my laptop a bad decision. Nor does it make it an uninformed decision. If at any time in the future I find that my daily duties are hampered because I do not have Flash installed, I will certainly swallow hard and do the deed because at the end of the day, my choices are never the kind to “cut off my nose to spite my face”.

Until then I shall continue to #BoycotFlashOnMyMBA because I LOVE how that snappy, happy, speedy feel and would hate to bog it down with more crap than is absolutely necessary.   #JustSayin’

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So I am sitting here, working on my iMac on the 25th of June. I had only JUST migrated all my work stuff back from the Macbook to the iMac since it is a much better machine to work on when I can. I was just getting back into the groove of working with a desktop instead of on a laptop perched on my knees. I was trying to figure out the best way to keep info sync’d between them both and was working on a plan when “poof” the iMac display just froze.

No application was responding, I couldn’t get the activity monitor open to see what was hogging resources, I couldn’t force quit anything … in fact, I could do absolutely nothing. Which reminded me of the early lockups I used to have when I first got the iMac … you remember those days, don’t you?

So, with a sigh, I turned the iMac off at the power button, waited a minute and fired it up again. While I waited, I booted my work stuff up on the Macbook to at least let my boss know I was not suddenly gone out of rudeness, but that I had a bonafide tech emergency on my hands. While I am typing to him, I hear the iMac making some funny sounds, and I turn to see this icon show up in the middle of the grey boot screen:

Thanks for the image, UrbanTornado – hope you don’t mind that i borrowed it.

While my own monitor isn’t that large, the question sign in all it’s stark horror was just as memorable. Oh how I cried and gnashed my teeth. Then I thought of what my good friend DJ would have told me “load up your disk utilities from your install disk”.

That exercise told me what I already knew – hard drive, well and truly trashed. It gave me some hope by telling me that while the disk wasn’t repairable or recoverable, that a reinstall and restore would probably fix the problem

I was jubilant and proceeded to do as advised.

Ha! What a load of BS! The install stalled (heh) after about 2 minutes in to tell me that OS X could not be installed on the chosen volume because it was irreparable damaged. Ok, ok – so it didn’t quite put it that way, but that was the end result. My hard disk was well and truly DONE.

I panicked first … then while I sat looking at the iMac I had added to my shopping cart at store.apple.com and wondering how I was going to finance this purchase, the panic drained away and I remembered what else my friend DJ and I had been talking about quite recently – a hard drive replacement for the iMac. At the time, the idea was to get a bigger drive to facilitate not only my too-large photo collection, but to also be able to bootcamp with a sizeable enough partition to make Windows gaming a possibility.

So off to ifixit.com I went.

The idea was to find a 500GB or so drive. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, the smallest drive I could get for my iMac off ifixit.com was a 1TB.

Tears gone, panic departed, exuberance ensued … until I found out that it was going to take at BEST a week for this new drive to get to me.

To cut this already too-long story short, even when the drive arrived, I couldn’t put it in because I didn’t have the right tools. Apple uses some very odd screws to fasten their stuff in so I had to order those and wait another couple of days. Fortuitously, the tools arrived on Saturday and I was able to take apart my iMac, replace the hard drive, reinstall the OS and restore my stuff to just about the point at which I lost it on the 25th …

It took me about an hour with the guide off ifixit.com – which was quite good considering it isn’t the correct guide for my model.

I even got it right the first time around. Which is especially gratifying for me being that this is the first time I’ve been inside a machine with the intent to replace stuff in about … ooo – 4 years?

What’s even better is the fact that I am now bootcamp’d … with still too much space to fill on my OS X partition.

I am a happy camper again.

What would make me happier still?

A new camera to take picts to fill that space up with.

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(This post was begun on June 25th – the day the hard drive in the iMac crashed. Forgive the late post.)

June 24th was release day for the iPhone 4G. I got all caught up in the feeding frenzy, attempted to pre-order and made plans to drive to Austin to “pick up my new phone”. I knew it was going to be crowded. I knew I’d be miserable for a few hours while I struggled with my crowd-phobia. But I figured the new phone on the first day was enough of a reward to actually try and do it.

And maybe just the excitement of driving myself to Austin solo was an overriding motivator.

A week beforehand, on the day I pre-ordered, I got the Magellan out of the Jeep and programmed in the address at “The Domain” in Austin and planned my morning out – I’d do the basic necessities for work and then hit the road about 10ish with the idea that I’d be out there until 3 at the latest at which time I’d come home and put in a couple more hours of work afterwards.

I know I was fooling myself about the putting in work while the new iPhone sat waiting to be played with, but I comforted myself with the idea that I was being responsible.

The drive to Austin was uneventful. I did really well for someone who hasn’t done a lot of driving on her own in the States. I didn’t cause any major highway mishaps or brake lockups and I didn’t get lost either. In fact, I drove right to the front door as if I had been there before.

I was quite pleased with myself …… until I saw the line:

… and was told that this was GOOD because at 7:30 the line extended around the block!

Well, to my credit I stood in that line (sometimes sitting on the sidewalk) until I had travelled about 1/4 of the way to the front of the line at which time the heat and humidity (and pants that don’t do well in the heat) made me decide that pre-order or no, I wasn’t going to site there until 7pm that night only to get a claim ticket to have to drive another hour back to Austin to pick up my phone before end of business on Saturday.

Got back into the a/c cooled Jeep and drove my ass home … and promptly fired up the apple website and ordered my iPhone 4 to be delivered to my door whenever.

I may be a big apple fan, but fangirl I ain’t. ugh.

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I had to find the exact quote and use it.

By far, XT-002 Deconstructor is possibly one of WoW’s most annoying boss fights ever (“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” in a high-pitched voiced, kiddie-tantrum fashion complete with pounding his fists into the floor) … but right here and right now, his first statement is so very apt.

I’ve got a couple new toys! I promise I won’t break them this time!

Well, one of them hasn’t arrived yet and I am going to have to wait until next week before I’ll see it. That would be the iPhone 4.  I tried pre-ordering for delivery, but it failed every time and I got impatient. Besides, I figure it’ll be nice to take a road trip down to Austin and pick it up … hopefully, I won’t get squashed in the store. Wish me luck?

In any case, I have abused my iPhone 3G pretty badly – moreso than any other phone I’ve had and I wonder what the deal is with that … how is it that the fanatically cautious fyrfli has been so careless? I tell myself I will be more careful this time and I probably will … the 3G has dropped far less in these last few months than it did in the first few months. That might have something to do with not putting it in my back pocket whilst I climb out of the Jeep anymore.

But today … WordPress 3.0 was unleashed. As of this writing, they number of downloads are still under 20,000 as per the download counter page.

I’ve had multiple requests to report whether there are any breaks and so I figured this was as good a time as any to post something and see whether anything has really broken. I guess we’ll see once I press the button.

So pretty … so shiny … pets new WordPress install …

On a serious note, the upgrade went flawlessly, I pushed the button in the admin panel and was done in minutes. Nothing was broken when I first reloaded the page, my theme has remained sound and all my plugins seem to still work well. So I am going to say that this has been a very successful upgrade.

I guess time will tell if those little tiny niggling things are still working too … you know, the ones that make you look back and say “I should have waited before I said I like it.”

~~~

In other news, took a little trip out to the local lake here … got a couple picts … G said it doesn’t feel like my usual shots and she’s right … either I am rusty, or I just dislike Texas so much that it’s coming out in the pictures … or … maybe it’s time for me to try something else? You tell me …

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I’ve not posted for a LONG time, so lemme catch you all up:

• I’ve been working hard and long and I am mostly exhausted, except when I deny myself sleep and play my warlock again like I never stopped.
• We got a truck bed cover for the truck so that when we move, we’ll be able to pack stuff into the truck without fear of them blowing out, getting soaked or being exposed to eyes everywhere.
• Oh yea – we’re supposed to be moving … although there is no real way to know whether we are or not, so we wait.
• My WoW account got closed for a violation of Blizzard’s Terms of Service (TOS) but was actually an accident, or so Blizzard told me a week later. Go figure. I blame them for my re-addiction.
• Finally, iPhone 3.0 is out and this is what I wanna talk about today:

You see, I been waiting for it for MONTHS. Anxiously anticipating it’s arrival, was MAD when I had to go to work early today so I missed the actual release time … but now that I am home and have downloaded it and installed it, it feels anticlimatic. Why? I am still trying to figure it out. Probably because I haven’t yet had a chance to share it with anyone … or maybe it’s just that I STILL can’t zoom my camera for closeups … or maybe it’s because AT&T officially does not offer MMS until “the end of summer“… I see no difference in the “improved calendar” (maybe it’s because somehow I had those features before with third-party solutions) …  and I, personally, have NO use for voice messages yet … it was a pleasant surprise to find my iPhone notes in Mac OS X Mail … but the best part of it so far was that  I DID manage to FULLY enjoy being able to cut, copy and paste stuff … and THAT I still have yet to test extensively.

Aside from all of this, however, I DO notice that the interface and response is snappier .. although I may need to REALLY stress it to see for sure because in order to hack my iPhone to show the MMS option, I had to restart the phone to take the settings – so maybe it’s not as fast as I thought it might be.

What pisses me off about this mixed tragedy and blessing iPhone 3.0 software was that they burned all of us “old” iPhone users by giving the new guys stuff that this damn phone should have had YEARS ago and for people like me to get the upgrades, I have to fork out anywhere from $400 to $600 – which I think is ridiculous. Just like with Blizzard, I wonder everyday WHY we give our money to these people.

Like everything else in this country, I am beginning to realize that this whole “customer is king” spiel is a farce. There is no way I can be king when what I want costs an arm, a leg, and two whole eyeballs – in so many more ways than 1.

I keep saying that Jamaicans bitch and complain about stuff – how people “fight ‘gainst” … an’ I’ve been here less than a year and already I see where I had it good there … GOOD I tell you. In Jamaica, want a new phone, buy it. It might be expensive in Jamaican money terms, but: (1) the prices are still subsidized and work out less than you would get overseas – never-mind the limited varieties … and (2) none of the providers tell you that you can’t upgrade because your contract is still young.  They don’t even care if you upgrade so long as you pay your damn bill. /sigh

Anywho – it’s late, I am tired (and very disappointed) and I am going to bed.

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