Someone thought that slogan was a good idea. For real. Must not have occurred to them which organ's color is affected by by spray-on tan.

All apostrophes and spaces as printed:

Dr'Brown's Repair

When It Break's Down Call Dr'Brown
Washer's/Dryer's/Ref//Oven's/Hotwater Heater's

35$ estimates
24hr service

The cabling system has a base-plate connector of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings are in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The main cable winding is of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremble pipe to the differential girdlespring on the 'up' end of the grammeters.

As it turns out, the new Express N looks and quacks like a duck, but is not a duck at all. The hardware and software interfaces look the same as the previous Express, but function very differently. In fact, to achieve the same operational result, you have to configure them -- using the same set of controls -- in opposite directions.

A simple test case: two Express base stations, one old and one new, both of which you want to connect to the same Airport Extreme N base station and both of which you want to share their respective ethernet connections with wired clients. On the old Express, you tell it to participate in a Wireless Distribution System (WDS). This setting alone is enough to allow ethernet clients to share the connection, but there is nothing in the user interface which reflects this state. You can optionally disallow wireless clients on this base station, but wired client sharing is implicitly always allowed.

Contrast this with the new Express which, if set up to participate in a WDS, will not share its Ethernet connection (but again, with nothing in the user interface reflecting that state). However, if you instead tell the new Express to simply join the existing wireless network, not extend it (which setting on the old Express would explicitly not share its network connection), the previously available "Allow wireless clients" setting mysteriously changes with "Allow Ethernet clients". Check that box and suddenly all your wired devices are online. Note however, that wireless clients are now implicitly disallowed, since this Express is no longer participating in a WDS.

Dear Apple: this is not user-friendly, easy plug-and-play wireless networking. This is obscure, opaque barely-functional wireless networking that makes blindingly apparent why those less technically inclined often feel anyone who can actually make these devices work is a practitioner of the dark arts.

AAA sent a Ken Betts truck, but decided a service truck would do, even though I asked for a tow. Turns out, no, I didn't just need air; there's a gash in my tire. Sorry, it'd be another 45 minutes on top of the 30 I'd already waited.

After an hour, I called to find out where the truck was. Just another 40 minutes, sir. Sorry, that's just how long it takes. Increasingly frustrated calls to AAA followed, but all they could say was that calling another towing company could take just as long.

ETA for the proper Ken Betts truck? 4:02. Too late to get a simple flat tire repaired and a full two and a half hours after my initial call. At that point, they would have had to leave it for the weekend at a random Big O Tire in the middle of Oakland. No, thank you.

So I turned to my six-days-remaining factory warranty to have it towed to the dealership. The dealership is already closed, needless to say, but at least they'll cover storage in a secure location for the weekend. And the wait for the new truck from another company? Just 70 minutes, but "probably sooner" I am assured.

75 minutes later, I'm on the phone again. No truck. It is now 5:30 PM and No. Fucking. Truck. There was a mix up. The towing company was waiting for a call back from BMW who had called me around 5 to verify that I still had a warranty (yessir, for six more days, I sure as hell do) and then neglected to call the towing company. "They're sending a truck now. It'll be there in 30 minutes."

Forty minutes later I am just getting my phone out to make another call when the truck finally turns the corner onto the cul-de-sac on which I have been trapped for the last five hours.

Now all I have to do is catch a cab.

Even if the 1970's era industrial design may be forgiven (though even that's a stretch), the terms of service are too much, too restrictive, too ripe for 1984-style abuse.

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party...

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

You would think, given Amazon's stature in the book-selling world, that they could demand better terms from publishers. Apparently they couldn't even demand reasonable pricing and will be losing money on every best-seller sold.

Update: I just watched Amazon's Kindle introductory video, wherein is contained the information that Amazon charges "a small fee" for each file you email yourself to read on your Kindle. You can't even read your own documents without paying Amazon.

There is USB built into the Kindle and no word on Amazon about whether you can also transfer files that way. If that is the case, it's unfortunate that customers will have to know that depending on their choice of transfer mechanism, they'll be receiving a bill at the end of the month. That's not very user-friendly, Jeff.

Anyone wanna do the math to figure out what a rebate is worth if it takes a year and a half to get it? I'm sure the implications on the other side are plenty rosy:

Patrick Crowley: "Hey Dave, our earnings are gonna be weak this [month/quarter/year]. Nvidia's beating our pants off again. What ever shall we do?"

Dave Orton: "No problem Patrick, just ask our rebate processing center to cut the contract down to one person."

Crowley: "But sir, they've got millions of rebates backlogged. It'll take years to get through them all."

Orton: <blank stare>

Good thing Earl over at MegaMail Processing & Co. is such a diligent and determined employee.

As of 2:10 pm, during a live press conference, a doctor for the hospital confirmed that Falwell had died of "cardiac arrhythmia, or sudden cardiac death." When asked for comment, the Lord God stated, "Have fun in hell, gasbag."

To calibrate your battery:

1 Plug in the power adapter and fully charge your MacBook Pro battery until the light on the power adapter plug changes to green and the Battery icon in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.

2 Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for two hours or longer. You may use your computer during this time as long as the adapter is plugged in. 3Disconnect the power adapter with the MacBook Pro on and start running it from the battery. You may use your computer during this time.

When your battery gets low, you’ll see the low battery warning dialog on the screen.

4 Continue to keep your computer turned on until it goes to sleep. Save your work and close all applications when the battery gets low and before the system goes to sleep.

5 Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or longer.

6 Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

Important: Repeat the calibration process every two months or so to keep your battery fully functioning. If you use your MacBook Pro infrequently, it’s best to recalibrate the battery at least once a month.

If you purchased additional batteries, follow the calibration procedure with those batteries as well. For more battery information, see “Using Your Battery” on page 74.

From MacBook Pro User Guide, page 24.

Figuring a two hour charge cycle, that's an eleven hour calibration procedure every two months. Does Apple really expect anyone to do that? Are AppleCare reps going to be trained to deny battery claims if "proper procedure" has not be followed? Please, Apple, don't forget "the computer for the rest of us" that doesn't require arcane knowledge to operate.

Case in point: iCal invitations, which are sent via email. The question is how to determine which email account is used, if you have multiple accounts. If iCal used some simple-but-dumb mechanism to determine which account to use, I might excuse them for being lazy and hope that next week's Leopard announcement would bring relief. But the chosen mechanism is not-at-all-simple and exceedingly dumb, a combination that makes me think someone planned this. Or two different people worked on the invitation system without talking to each other.

Here's how it works: the account used for sending the invitation is determined by whichever account is currently selected in Mail.app. That alone is enough of a UI faux pas (creating a state that the user is unlikely to be aware of, made worse by the fact that it's in another app and is an entirely transient state), but Apple didn't stop there. Logically, you'd assume that replies to the invitation would be sent back through the same account chosen by Mail.app. Not so. For some reason (known only to Steve perhaps), iCal writes a different return address into the invitation.

This address is obtained from Address Book.app by selecting the first address listed on the card you've marked as your own. If replies are going to the wrong address, just rearrange them, right? No, the order of items in an address book card is not user-controllable. In fact, it's not even visible to the user. There's an order the data is stored in and an order the data is displayed in. So if you want to reorder them, you have to delete the addresses at the top until the one you want first is in the top slot, then add the other addresses back at the bottom, and then trust that the order is preserved when you exit editing mode, even though Address Book reorders items such that, e.g. your work address is first, home second, etc.

I'm not sure even Microsoft could come up with something that convoluted (though I'm sure they'd take the challenge).