Yay consumerism

I went to the Apple store today. I want­ed to look into get­ting my iPod ser­viced. The bat­tery life is less than stel­lar, espe­cial­ly when I wear it run­ning. The bat­tery drains a lot faster when I’m mov­ing around a lot. Also, one of the sides had popped out, which I thought must have hap­pened when I got attacked. I was afraid that the unit had been dam­aged and that I would­n’t get war­ran­ty ser­vice. I also want­ed to look around. The Apple Store is like a big toy store, of course. As my Dad always says, “the dif­fer­ence between men and their boys is the price of their toys.”

Well, the nice folks at the Apple store were great. Just about every­one in the store talked to me at some point. They popped the case back into place with a spe­cial tool and did a soft­ware update and sent me on my way with instruc­tions to test to see if that fixed any­thing before tak­ing more dras­tic mea­sures. All free so far, so yay. Appar­ent­ly the side pop­ping out like that is fair­ly com­mon, and it might not have even hap­pened when I got mugged.

I saw one of the floor reps hav­ing a lit­tle trou­ble with the demo mod­el of the Palm Zire 31. I helped her turn off the “full screen” Graf­fi­ti mode so that the Note Pad would work right, and chat­ted her up about my idea to col­lect sketch­es peo­ple had made with their Palm devices. She drew an eye on the screen right then and gave me her card after beam­ing the sketch to my Palm. So now I think I’ll real­ly have to do this thing. It’s a great con­test or com­pe­ti­tion because the medi­um is so lim­it­ed, draw­ing in 320×320 1‑bit col­or or 160×160 1‑bit col­or. It’s real­ly chal­leng­ing to get any­thing good done at that size, but it’s also quick and fun. My “Steve Rock” icon was drawn on my old Tung­sten T.

I’ve been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on this com­pe­ti­tion because I do web devel­op­ment all day; the last thing I want to do when I get home is make web­sites. But I do have one advan­tage: I have a very advanced cus­tom-built con­tent sys­tem that I wrote large­ly on my own time and have every right to take advan­tage of. So I should be able to put it togeth­er if I can just bring myself to do it. I could even give away some kind of prize to the win­ner, but then I’d have to judge it or make a pan­el of judges. Plus, I would­n’t know what to give away. A cheap Palm device? That would be sil­ly because any­one sub­mit­ting entries would have to have a Palm device already, and I cer­tain­ly could­n’t afford to give away a high-end Palm. Maybe a nice sty­lus for a give­away? Some­thing to think about.

I also checked out wire­less stuff. When I move I’ll be pro­vid­ing access to my house­mates and I’d rather not crawl all over the place sta­pling down eth­er­net cable. So I asked a bunch of ques­tions and got a bunch of answers. Cool.

Last, but not least, I looked at key­boards. I almost walked out of there with a $99 USB key­board that would work with Garage­Band. Part of me does­n’t want to admit that I want one, because I know real key­board enthu­si­asts like who has (and builds) high end music equip­ment, and anoth­er friend who makes his liv­ing edit­ing music indus­try trade mag­a­zines and buy­ers’ guides. I’ve always been around intense elec­tron­ic fiends. Admit­ting that I have my eye on an M‑Audio Keysta­tion 49^e feels a lit­tle like a liv­ing in an art gallery and think­ing about get­ting a Back­street Boys poster for the wall.

And so be it. I don’t want or need to be mis­ter key­board. I’m blessed with a lot of peo­ple that can give me point­ers and feed­back and so on, but in the end a key­board in my hands might end up unused until it dies of obso­les­cence. I just want some­thing to noo­dle around with, to play with. I want it to be easy, and I don’t want to have to think about it. I think get­ting the con­sumer key­board is prob­a­bly exact­ly the right thing.

Even though I made the deci­sion to buy it while I was stand­ing there in the store play­ing with it, and even though I had the mon­ey in my bank account to do it, I did­n’t. The key­boards will still be there next week after I get my next pay­check, and if its real­ly a good idea now, it’ll be a good idea then too. Even though I want­ed to run right home and start noodling with it, I know I prob­a­bly would­n’t get a chance to play with it at all this week­end, which is stack­ing up to be pret­ty busy, what with Sun­day being Bay to Break­ers and I think I’ve got sev­en­teen dif­fer­ent things to do on Sat­ur­day. If I’m not going to get to play with it, it may as well stay in the store.