Look What Arrived This Morning….. [UPDATED]

This is the Snow Leopard Up To Date disk that seemed to disappear for myself and others and required a call to Apple to get another one shipped in a timely manner. Mr. Mailman dropped it off today. There is no postmark on the envelope so I can’t tell if they actually shipped it on the 28th like they said. It was shipped from Valencia Ca, so I suspect that it was going by mail all the way and Purolator was never involved in the actual shipment.

At least it didn’t get lost.

UPDATE: To those who’ve contacted me regarding buying the retail copy I got from Apple, I’ve already unloaded it. Thanks anyway.

Rogers Rolls Out HSPA+ In Five Cities…. You’ll Excuse Me If I Don’t Jump For Joy Upon Hearing This….

Rogers HSPA+ rollout which I’ve discussed previously has gone live in five cities in Canada:

“With Rogers 21 Mbps HSPA+ network, customers in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal are the first in North America to experience the fastest world-class wireless speeds,” said John Boynton, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Rogers Wireless.

The only problem is, nothing that customers have in their hands now can take advantage of this speed. Rogers apparently thought of that too by bringing out a new “Rocket Stick” that does HSPA+:

The new 21 Mbps HSPA+ Rocket Mobile Internet Stick brings Canadians the freedom to enjoy mobile Web experiences at speeds that are as fast as those you would find at home or at the office. The HSPA+ Rocket Mobile Internet Stick features a USB connection to a laptop or a desktop PC, easy installation with no CD required for Windows or Mac Operating Systems, integrated antenna for maximized reception performance and data transmission and multi-colour LED indicating connection status.

Starting today, Canadians can pre-order the new HSPA+ Rocket Mobile Internet Stick for as low as $74.99 only from rogers.com.

Great. So they have one thing that does HSPA+. What about people who simply have 3G devices? I’m assuming that there must be backend upgrades of some sort which will mean that existing customers who have 3G devices may get better performance.  That’s not clear from the press release. Perhaps my “new best friends from Rogers” could be kind enough to fill in that blank for me.

In any case, while you have to give Rogers points for being the first North American cell carrier to have HSPA+, it really doesn’t mean much if Canadians are still paying way too much for wireless access.

Angry Virgin Mobile Customer Asks For My Help [UPDATED]

I had a person by the name of “Christopher” post a really serious comment about Virgin Mobile to my blog in the last 24 hours. His charge:

“They are treating their Customers like Garbage, as is apparent by the amount of serious and similar complaints. My point is that this cannot be a coincidence. As an individual citizen it is very hard to get a company who freely bullies their Customers like this to refund me my balance or even treat me with respect. I honestly thought that Virgin Mobile was supposed to be different, now I realize the Marketing gaffe and hype was just that. In reality what they advertise and what Customers are being delivered are night and day.”

That’s a serious charge and I would encourage you to read the entire comment to see his full argument. The question is, does this have merit? “Christopher” does point to a website that seems to have similar complaints. So it would seem that his argument does have merit on the surface. I’d love to hear Virgin Mobile’s side of the story. They can contact me with their thoughts and I can put them in touch with “Christopher.” I’d also love to hear from Virgin Mobile Customers who have had similar experiences, or great experiences with this carrier. I think it would be interesting to know if this is truly a widespread problem or not.

UPDATE: I just had a representative from Virgin Mobile contact me via e-mail:

Hey IT Nerd -

How’s it going? My name is Jeremy and I work at Virgin Mobile Canada. I was just sent your blog post from yesterday with Christopher’s complaint.

If you could connect me with Christopher that would be awesome. Feel free to send him my email, or if you have any contact info for him send it to me and I’ll give him a shout. I’d need to get his full name, phone number, and other details so that I can loop in with our Customer Care team to find out all the details on Christopher’s situation.

We really do worry about our customers when things go wrong and do everything we can to make them happy. Nobody’s perfect, but if we’ve made a mistake we’ll say “sorry” and we’ll fix it. So I look forward to getting to the bottom of this and taking care of whatever has possibly gone wrong here.

Let me know if you need anything else from me to get rolling on this…

Thanks!

I have forwarded the original unedited complaint to them with “Christopher” carbon copied on that e-mail (The original complaint had “Christopher’s” phone number in it. I removed the phone number from the blog to protect his privacy). Hopefully this gets sorted out in short order. I’ll keep you updated as to what happens next.

So I Installed Snow Leopard, And…. [UPDATED]

.. I have to admit, Apple has the upgrade process dialed in. Here’s all I had to do to upgrade:

1. Insert the Snow Leopard disk
2. Double click the installer
3. Agree to the license agreement
4. Choose the drive I wanted to install Snow Leopard to
5. Type in my password.
6. Go find something to do for 50 minutes (in my case I did the dishes).

That was it. Dead simple. The installer did it’s thing and 50 minutes later I was running Snow Leopard. Another 5 or 6 minutes after that I downloaded and installed the 10.6.1 update. And all is good. Here’s my initial impressions:

• My system starts up slightly faster.
• I gained back some disk space. I can’t recall what my disk space was before I did the upgrade, but I’ve gained at least 5 or 6 GB back for sure.
• The Finder (the user interface for Mac OS X) is a lot better. A lot of stuff that has annoyed me about the Finder is finally fixed. For example folder windows consistently open to where I left them last time I was in the folder. That was something that really annoyed me. Also when you click on a folder in the dock, you can finally drill down to sub folders in that view rather than clicking on the folder and having it open a new Finder window. Very cool!
• The system “feels” slightly faster doing some things, and the same doing other tasks. YMMV.

In terms of stuff that broke after the upgrade. That list is thankfully short:

• iAlertU crashes when you trigger the alarm. Hopefully it gets updated soon. Until then, I’m not using it.
• I use a program called MP3Gain to normalize the volume levels of my MP3s. It wanted to install Rosetta which is the software that allows Power PC applications to run on Intel Macs. That was a non-starter for me as I have no interest in having Rosetta on my system. So knowing that MP3Gain is simply a front end for a UNIX application called AACGain, I knew that if I replaced the Power PC version that was inside the application bundle with an Intel one, it would work fine. So that’s what I did and the application works fine under Snow Leopard.
• My FTP program Cyberduck didn’t work under Snow Leopard, so I’m running a beta version at the moment (which seems really stable).
• My D Link DNS 323 NAS box wasn’t liked by Snow Leopard because of the version of SAMBA running on it. I could see it, but I couldn’t access the files on it. Not good. So I’ve updated to a beta firmware that has an updated version of SAMBA. It too is remarkably stable for a beta product.

With the exception of the MP3Gain issue, I expected all of those things to happen as I checked this list before upgrading and did some Google searches as well. Plus if things really went south, I had a recent backup (you do back up your computer don’t you?) from the night before. I also proactively updated a lot of my applications to Snow Leopard  compatible versions. So that likely made the upgrade process easy. I’ll have to play with it some more to get additional impressions, but I’m pleased with how things went. Given the circus that I had to go through to get my copy of Snow Leopard, that’s a good thing.

UPDATE: Another thing I’ve noticed, my file copies over Gigabit Ethernet are MUCH faster in Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard Finally Makes An Appearance!

So after being one of the many Canadians who didn’t see their Snow Leopard Up To Date copy arrive in a timely manner, and having to phone Apple to say WTF? I just had Purolator Courier deliver a full retail copy of Snow Leopard a few minutes ago.

You can figure out what I’ll be doing this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In any case, I’d like to thank Apple Customer Service for resolving this issue in a timely manner (other than the fact that I was on hold for 20 minutes before getting to an actual human). However, Apple may want to choose some other company to ship their stuff as Purolator/Canada Post really screwed this up and cost Apple a ton of money plus angered a bunch of Canadian Fanbois.

Oh, still no reply to my e-mail to Apple P.R. I guess that Apple P.R. really could care less. That’s sad, but not exactly a shock.

New Apple Ad Makes Fun Of PC “Innovations”

I guess that Apple didn’t want to be left out of releasing new ads. This one titled “PC Innovation Lab” appeared last night highlights several of Apple’s technological innovations, including MagSafe power connectors and extended-life batteries in the MacBooks, while at the same time bashing PCs for their lack of innovation:

What do you think of this ad? Share your wisdom by leaving a comment.

Microsoft Brings Kylie Back To Promote Windows 7 [UPDATED]

If you thought that Kylie (who according to her is a PC and she’s “four and a half”) was cute in this ad, Microsoft is hoping that you’ll find her even more cute in this new ad for Windows 7:

My thoughts? The original ad was cute and likely to be effective as it shows something that someone who is “four and a half” might do with a computer. This ad is a bit over the top with all of the quotes from various tech blogs and her saying that Windows 7 is “snappy and re-pon-ki-ser.” The 80′s rock anthem playing in the background doesn’t help either.

What are your thoughts? Post a comment and share them with us.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that the 80′s rock anthem playing in the background is “The Final Countdown” by Europe.

Snow Leopard Updated…. That Didn’t Take Long

Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.1 tonight to the universe. It fixes the following problems:

• compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
• an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
• some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
• an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
• instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
• an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
• Motion 4 becoming unresponsive

There’s a bunch of security fixes tossed in as well as an updated Flash player as well to solve that rather sneaky downgrade of Flash that 10.6 did to users. Snow Leopard users can grab this update via Software Update. I’d download, try it, and let you know what I think, but I’m still waiting for my copy of Snow Leopard. Oh well. I’ll just have to download the Security Update for Leopard instead as it contains many of the security updates that appeared in 10.6.1. Oh you Tiger users on Intel and Power PC can feel the love too as there’s a Security Update for you as well.

Firefox Updated…. Now Checks To See If Flash Is Up To Date…. Interesting…..

Firefox 3.5.3 is now available and to get it, click “Help” followed by “Check For Updates” or you can download it here. The big news is that besides nuking a bunch of security related issues, it actually checks to see what version of Adobe Flash you’re running and if you’re running a version with a security hole it will prompt you to update. That’s a very good feature and I hope that they check other plug-ins in the future as that is a great way to ensure that you’re completely secure. If you’re a Firefox user, I’d download it ASAP.

Global Gaming Factory Punted From Sweedish Stock Exchange

It now seems that the purchase of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factory is officially doomed. That’s because Global Gaming Factory has been removed from the Sweedish Stock Exchange. But their problems don’t end there:

AktieTorget, the Swedish stock market where shares of Global Gaming once traded, said a disciplinary group found it had “provided false information,” displayed “a lack of accountability,” and “seriously violated” the exchange’s transparency principles.

A report issued by AktieTorget’s disciplinary group called into question most of Global Gaming’s public statements since June, when the software company and operator of Internet cafes first announced it would acquire The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent search engine. The banishment by AktieTorget, which last month suspended trading in Global Gaming’s shares, is without a doubt the most serious barrier yet to Global Gaming’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay.

The story of Global Gaming’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay now seems less about whether the company actually will ever take control and more about whether anyone involved will be accused of a crime.

I’d imagine that the people behind Global Gaming Factory are lawyering up as we speak. Misleading investors is a charge that will have you being someone’s prison bitch tossed into jail in short order here in North America. The same has to be true in Europe. I would expect perp walks to be taking place shortly.

Oh, I also expect that this isn’t the last we’ve heard of this.