Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Important lessons learned from a power outage

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If a tree falls in a forest, probably nobody except conservationists care very much. If a gigantic, century-old (or more) tree suddenly has one of its tree-sized branches fall off and block an entire street and take the power out with it, lots of people care. Yesterday this happened around the corner from us. It was fascinating to walk over there and see this massive piece of a tree lying in the middle of the street—and the even more massive tree it used to be a part of still looming over the street. I tried not to think about my kids walking past that tree every day on the way to school, or the fact that I had driven by it about 10 minutes before it fell.

Anyhow, this branch falling knocked out the power at our house from 2:50pm to 1:30am. And it was just the few houses around ours: houses a block away had power. The PG&E guys were working on the power lines the whole time (including at 11pm, Right Outside Our Window) and I don’t know who they had with chainsaws in the middle of the night cutting up that tree. I couldn’t sleep (what with PG&E guys right outside our window and chainsaws going nonstop half a block away) so I got up and went to my computer.

Darin gave me a 13-inch Macbook Air for my birthday this month and this is by far the best Macintosh laptop I’ve ever had. Holy God, is it great. It’s as fast (or maybe somewhat faster) than my 2009 Macbook Pro. It’s so light that I walk around the house carrying it with one hand. I’m sincerely annoyed by Intuit’s refusal to update Quicken for Mac, so my financial software life is somewhat in flux, but in all other aspects the Macbook Air completely and totally rocks. And it helped me learn two very important lessons.

Lesson 1

Despite the power having gone out at 2:50pm, the Air still had 90% battery life when I opened it up at 11pm. I read a friend’s new book, I worked a little bit on a couple of plays I’m writing, and I wrote a gigantic journal entry about all the things that were bugging me (and doing their part to keep me awake). At 1am or whenever I went upstairs, I had about 70% battery. This thing has amazing battery life. I’d kind of been aware of it before (certainly had better battery life than my Macbook Pro, which seemed more interested in seeing if it could make batteries bulge than in using them for a long time), but last night completely amazed me.

Lesson 2

I am never moving to an Internet-based computer like a Chromebook. There are tons of reasons not to use a Chromebook already, but if my computer had been Internet-based, it would have been a paperweight last night. I know they’re talking about making web-based devices that have locally-based applications so you can still use them when you don’t have Internet access, but in that case, why not get a computer that functions that way all of the time?

If you’ve written an application and your only help for it is an online page, let it be known that I find that very annoying. Particularly at midnight, when I’m cranky.

Lesson 3

The ice in the freezer was still loose when I checked it this morning. The very bottom layer was more molded together, but I could have easily filled several glasses with ice. Our refrigerator did a very good job of holding in the cold while the power was out.

Simple Still Isn’t Easy

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Amazon decided to advertise its new Cloud Drive for music (Did I miss something? It’s a big network storage thing, right? Why is this so much more awesome than any other way of uploading my files somewhere?) by selling Lady Gaga’s new album for $0.99 today. That’s right, you can buy “Born This Way” for $0.99 at Amazon or for $15.99 at iTunes. No brainer, amirite?

Holy. Jee. Zus.

I bought the album on Amazon. The Amazon MP3 Downloader started up and told me it’s downloading the album…without filling in the bar that tells me how much it’s downloaded. I guess it downloaded one song, but on the very next song it said: “Download failed; retry download.”

Um. Okay. How do I do that?

There is no handy “Retry” button in the toolbar. There is no “Retry” menu option. I opened the Amazon MP3 Downloader help file and searched for “retry”: the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the help.

I have no idea why it’s not downloading my album. I don’t know where to go to retry or to restart this process. The choice in the toolbar is “Pause Download”, which I don’t want to do — I want it to finish the damn download.

On the next couple of songs, I’m getting the error message “Can’t connect. Check your Internet connection and retry download.” I know perfectly well my Internet connection is just fine. And I have downloaded music for Amazon before, so I have no idea: has something changed and I’ve forgotten to push some button? Are their servers getting slammed with purchases and the only available error messages blame me, the user, for their services faults?

I’m not a naive user of computers. I know plenty about how to use them. But how much energy do I want to invest in learning every single method of how to do things, especially when there are already incredibly intuitive ways that are standard on the Mac OS? That Amazon has chosen not to do this, has in fact made it hard for me, speaks volumes. They definitely have the book download process sussed out, but they have ways to go on building a media empire.

If I had given $16 to Apple, I would have my damn album already.

(In addition, it turned out that initially I had an old version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Um, okay. It asks me if I want to update and I say yes…and I get kicked over to an Amazon web page, where I need to click another button to download a whole ‘nother installer, which will then update my application. This is not how Mac applications do it, guys. You hit a button, and it all magically happens in the background. I don’t have to pay attention to web pages or get extra buttons. This has been a deeply frustrating experience.)

A year without TV

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We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.