I’ve been a member of Catalog Choice for 6 months now. The service allows you to opt-out of physical catalog delivery. They aim to make a difference.
They’ve signed up 474,252 members who’ve opted out of 5,648,050 catalogs. Time will tell if these catalogs actually stop coming, but I’m hopeful and have opted out of 18 catalogs so far.
Did I mention that it’s free?
Thanks to everyone who sent my favorite gift this Christmas. I guarantee they’ll be used.
If you can read this, my 6-week nightmare with Media Temple hosting is over. Since switching, I had one problem after another… from their entire service being down for almost 24 hours to extreme slowdowns.. can you say 30 sec php load times? (9.4 secs for my homepage at the time of writing)
They pride themselves on friendly, knowledgeable tech support. They were friendly, but certainly not knowledgeable. I found them more interested in recapping the phone conversation that actually helping out. I was given incorrect information, the classic run-around, told there was nothing I could do but wait – and frankly my patience ran out. They gave me three free months of hosting, but honestly I don’t want it.
If you are thinking of hosting your website with Media Temple- don’t.
The list of shame:
- Less than 10 hours notice before 24 hours of downtime
- Performance 10x slower than my previous shared host
- Processing time overages with no warning (I guess should have been monitoring myself. Although this is tough to do when there are no debug tools and the readout is more than an our behind realtime.)
- Lost email (But hey, my spam count was way down.)
- Snide & not helpful phone tech support (they’re geeks just like you, only less helpful)
- Who asks for text account passwords over the phone?
- All marketing and no muscle
Here are my 10 early predictions for MacWorld 2008.
A new deal with NBC-Universal (I wish)
Stronger AppleTV implementation
AppleTV gets capacity upgrade and direct iTunes store access
Movie rentals
The trend continues even as some actual challengers appear for iTunes. Awesome Leopard sales, Mac hardware, iPods and iPhones.
This just makes no sense to me. There’s a reason we don’t see more tablets in the wild- they aren’t the correct form factor. And the mini-cds? C’mon.
The technology is incredible and has hit mainstream this year with Micosoft Surface and iPhone. Apple will be looking to exploit their R&D costs and innovation with a new product. Perhaps a new display series?
The MacBook Pro external design hasn’t changed in the 6 years since the introduction of the PowerBook G4. During that time we’ve seen the introduction of several iterations of the iBook and the introduction of the MacBook. For a bit of perspective, just think- in January 2001, the iBook still looked like a toilet seat.
Why should the Touch get all the 16GB fun?
Time to show off some new gee-wiz features. A virtual GPS, iChat and games would top my wish list.
Probably some new form factors and price points. Maybe even without the “touch” factor- think keys.
Apple will parade a few developers on stage to show the incredible apps they developed in mere moments with the amazing SDK.
And to round out #10.. there always seems to be an ad or two in keynote presos. This will be no different.
A special performance by John Mayor. 
I came across this interesting interview with Will Friedwald, “Owner Of The Worlds Largest iTunes Collection” this morning.
I’d also love to see a “Pro” version of iTunes geared toward massive collections. But, I do think that iTunes will finally get there on its own.
Just look at the growth of the capacity of iPods: a 160GB model holds 97% more data than the original. iTunes will have be enhanced to hold a similar growth in music libraries. iPhoto has been similarly enhanced in recent versions with exponential storage capacity updates.
For the record:
Will’s Library:
849 GB | 172,150 tracks | 809.2 days
2,935 artists | 11,561 albums
iTunes library database file - 282 MB
iTunes library XML file - 259 MB
Mine:
260.37 GB | 59,915 tracks | 147.6 days
9,778 artists | 7,083 albums
iTunes library database file - 104.9 MB
iTunes library XML file - 91.5 MB
Yiles- like yikes, but more refined.
Going to fullscreen mode in QuickTime 7 triggers a really cool effect where the player scales up to fullscreen. Neato- glad I paid the $30
Spotlight is a nice search tool, but I’m finding that the speed can’t touch LaunchBar. Sure, its nice to be able to search inside files and the like, but I’m more about opening files and applications without resorting to half a dozen clicks.
I’m really curious to see how much faster Spotlight is on my dual G5 2.0. My only experience so far is on my 1.5Ghz PowerBook.
What’s with the fact that you no longer can use apple-[ to go back in Tiger’s system prefs? Is there another shortcut that I’m missing?
I’ll admit I read this elsewhere and wrote it off as a lame gripe, but Quicktime 7 Pro registration sucks! Here I am playing with my fresh install of Tiger. I download one of the extremely cool hi-res movie trailers from Apple’s website, then bam- no full screen mode. I need to register.
Come on! I own four copies of Final Cut Pro, five copies of Final Cut Express, and all the other Apple goodies and I have to shell out $30 for a registration key. Jeez!
btw- Road Runner is smokin’ today-
