My Macinations

I hate stupid software!

I have a MobileMe account and I use Aperture to manage my photos. So, today, I was publishing an album to share with the family; a large album of about 200 photos. I use MobileMe because it allows sharing of full resolution pictures for the family to download and print if they wish.

So I publish the album and I wait for it to finish publishing which takes a couple of hours to upload. After it’s up on the MobileMe gallery page, I realize that a photo is missing and a photo is not good to post. So I go back to Aperture, add the missing photo and remove the other photo and click the synchronize icon.

Aperture starts re-uploading the whole album. THE WHOLE FREAKING ALBUM. Two hours of wasted time and bandwidth.

For whoever designed the synching algorithm: What the hell were you thinking?

Why I won’t be getting an iPhone on July 11th or anytime in the near future?

Well, it’s simple. Blame Rogers.

Being a webmaster, I would love to get an iPhone. The internet access that it provides gives me a lot of convenience with regards to checking the health status of my servers and other internet related stuff.

When the iPhone’s arrival in Canada was finally announced by Apple and Rogers, I was very excited, although, not exactly hopeful.

See, I’ve been dealing with Rogers for a long, long, long time. I knew their philosophy. Rogers philosophy has been very consistent and simple: Let’s see how much we can screw our customers.

With that knowledge, I had predicted (in a comment posting on another blog) that Rogers’ iPhone plans would give something like 200 MB of internet bandwidth for $60. I was a bit off and fairly surprised that they provided double that bandwidth for that $60.

However, when the official plans were revealed I got to read the fine print, my suspicions were confirmed. Rogers had created awesome f*%k-the-customer plans.

See, to get that 400 MB for $60 plan with reasonable features, you actually have to pay:

1. $60 for the plan
2. $15 for “iPhone value pack”
   (who would use their cell phone without call display?)
3. $6.95 “System access fee”
   (a bogus fee that they used to make people believe it was a government thing.)
4. $0.50 for mandatory 911 access
   (why is this not buried in the price to begin with?)

And everything is taxed at 13% (in Ontario).

($60 + $15 + $6.95 + $0.50) * 1.13 = $93.17

$93.17 For basic iPhone service that includes a measly 400 MB of data access with a paltry 150 anytime-minutes. If this is not a f*%k the customer plan, I don’t know what is.

$40 (+taxes) more per month gets you 2 GB of data and 800 anytime-minutes.

The kicker is that these plans come only with a three years contract. So Rogers gets to screw you harder for much longer.

$93 per month won’t bankrupt me, but I have this thing called principle: I refuse to get screwed willingly by a monopoly.

I survived without an iPhone so far and I will continue to do so.

I have five friends and we were set to get an iPhone each, but with these ridiculous cost plans, our minds have been changed. Well, except maybe one of us who is more of an attention whore than the rest – he would pay that ridiculous price just to say “hey look at me, I have an iPhone’. So right here, Apple has lost 5 (maybe 6) potential iPhone sales.

Today, around the web, there are plenty of articles about how Apple is reprimanding/punishing Rogers for those atrocious plans by reducing the iPhone shipments to Canada.

I don’t think it is punishment nor retribution. Apple is a business and they must have realized that Rogers would never sell that many iPhones with those rates, so they redirected those phones to places that are more likely to sell them than Rogers.

So the question at the end of my previous article “Apple’s iPhone coming to Canada” has been answered:

The answer is a big fat “NO”.

The predictions that I made in my other article about the reasonableness of Rogers upcoming plans in my other article “Has Apple met its match in Rogers?” have come true.

Sometime I hate being right.

Yes, Rogers sucks.

Update: After going through a couple of occasions where I had to drive a long distance back to home in order to have access to my networks to fix stuff and after Rogers allowed you to add a data plan on top of any of their normal plans, I got an iPhone and I’ve been happy with it. The plan costs me $60 per month.

Yet another useful feature has been eliminated in Leopard.

The audio controller that the Finder’s column view had for the preview pane when previewing audio files has been eliminated. Why? I don’t know. No logical explanation can come to mind.

In Tiger, if you set your window’s view to the column view and point it to a folder that has MP3 files, when you select one of those files, the right-most column shows a controller that allows you to play the audio file, select the point where you want the play head to be and control the playback’s volume. Leopard: NO MORE!

What you get in Leopard is a silly, YouTube-like preview square with a big ‘play’ button in its middle. No volume control and no skipping ahead. You can always hit the space bar to get a big window showing iTunes like display, and you can skip ahead, but you still can’t control the volume.

Somebody should tell Apple’s engineers that an UPGRADE is when you make things better, not worse.

One of the ugly new interface “features” of Leopard is its translucent menu bar. In my opinion it’s ugly, distracting and serves absolutely no useful purpose. I have no clue why any sane person at Apple would want to implement it.

There have been many complaints about it on the internet since Leopard reached people’s hands; and unlike the shiny Dock, so far, the menu bar has no workaround to fix the problem and make it opaque.

However, I found a very simple solution after two minutes of looking at this annoying eye sore.

It’s simple. Open your desktop picture in any image editor and fill the top 22 pixels with white. Now because the system caches the desktop image, the change won’t appear until you log out, or simply go to the System Preferences and through the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, select a different picture for your desktop and then select your original white top image again and done. You’ll have a white menu bar without the visual clutter.

Well, I’m excited about Leopard (Apple’s new OS), and of course, I pre-ordered it as soon as Apple started accepting pre-orders.

It’s supposed to come in tomorrow on the 26th, and indeed, I received my notification of shipment from Apple with a tracking number. However, the tracking web page is nearly useless. Here is what I get on Purolator’s tracking page:

2007/10/25    18:58    Shipment In Transit
2007/10/25    18:57    Received
2007/10/24    08:30    Shipment In Transit

So I get that it’s somewhere in the world and it changed hands once so far.

Update 2010-04-29: Well, I had to use Purolator again to send a package over-seas. The purolator tracking stopped in Toronto’s Aiport. The package arrived and I got news from the recipient and until now, even though the package has been delivered, Purolator’s tracking system still lists it as in transit in Toronto’s Airport.