Robert Vrabel

I have some things on my mind that I feel I need to get out there. I’ve noticed some odd trends lately that piss me off. I find it funny that when new technology is about to be released it gets hyped up so much from the media, consumers, and anyone interested in the product. The product gets hundreds of fake designs created, with leaked specs, all the time. What kills me is when that new technology gets presented by the actual company, everyone gets pissed off that it didn’t have all the bells and whistles that were discussed during the hype.

People… the hype is just that… hype! Apple never promised anything prior to making their announcement on the iPad. They never said it was going to run OSX. They never said it was going to act like your MacBook Pro. They never said it was going to have a 10 megapixel camera that can do video conferencing. They made this device for a specific group of people they had in mind, and they wanted it to be very cheap. Is that person me? Not right now, and the reason is I already own an iPhone and a Macbook Pro, so I feel I’m all set right now.  Who is it for then? Personally I think this is a wonderful device for people who don’t own a laptop and iPhone/iPod touch and are looking for one device to fill that void.

For example, my mom doesn’t own a laptop. She has a hard time using the desktop PC they own because they are complicated and she is scared to break things. She loves watching videos on her flip up DVD player. She loves reading books. She loves sharing photos with people, which right now carries around print-out photo booklets.  You’re honestly telling me this device is not perfect for someone like her? Apple made this device for a certain market, and if that market is not for you… then don’t buy it! Simple as that. They said something along the lines in the presentation yesterday that they wanted something between an iPod Touch and and a Macbook. Creating a Macbook Pro like iPad is NOT between that.

I agree that I wish apple would make a tablet that ran OSX, had usb ports, acted like a real computer. A device like this would easily cost $1,500-$2000 right now. It would basically be as much as a MacBook Pro! If Apple announced that yesterday, people would be pissed at the price and complain about many other things. They would say things like “why would I buy that, I already own a MacBook Pro”, “I’m not paying that much money for one!”, how about “It only gets 6 hours of battery life? What the heck, a kindle gets so much more!”. Sure, but your wanting a laptop now… not a E-book reader.

I really think people just like to complain about anything, but that can be left for another time. My point is, they made this to fill a niche, not compete against their MacBook Pro line. The price tag of $499 is VERY good in my opinion. That is pretty cheap for what it has to offer, but that is just my opinion and from someone who spent $599 on the first iPhone.

I can see in the future that Apple would possibly create another device that is a iPad Macbook Pro, but this time, that was NOT their plan and I think they were pretty clear on that. I’m all for innovation and creating devices that are revolutionary. One thing that Apple is putting out there is that this device is revolutionary… I don’t fully agree with that, I believe the iPhone was… but the iPad doesn’t deserve that tag.

So I guess to wrap things up… you can’t be pissed when a company makes a product and doesn’t fit your needs 100% of the time. You simply just need to not buy the product, not ridicule people who do want it, and take a closer look at it and see what market it is good for.

Last night Emily and I were woken up by our door bell ringing. At first I had no idea what the heck It was because I was in a deep sleep. Once we were up, we heard it ring again and we started to freak out. Who rings your doorbell at 2am? I peeked through our guest room window, but couldn’t see any cars, nor could I see the porch.

My first instinct was to call 911, because this was a very strange situation. I didn’t have my phone in the bedroom, so I had to go out to the living room to get it. Whoever was at the door was shining a flashlight in for whatever reason as well as ringing the door bell. At this point I knew they WANTED me to open it, which my instinct was the opposite.

I ended up pulling some James Bond moves and slide across the floors to get my phone, avoiding the flash light and front door, then I proceeded back to my bedroom where I called 911. I told them my address (obviously in a panic), and they said they sent Police officers out because someone called on suspicious activity because our garage door was open. So I went and opened the door and told them everything was ok, then closed the garage door.

(Side note: I just read a article recently that someone got arrested for swearing to a 911 officer, well I did just that as well while I was on the phone. I was in a panic, and panic = swearing for me… so that is bull crap to be told you must keep your language down while on a 911 call.)

Granted I’m happy someone was looking out for us, but this was one crazy ass situation. I really thought we were getting robbed or someone was going to kill us. Maybe my thoughts were a little far fetched, but getting woken up at 2am suddenly, I didn’t have a clear mind.

It took us forever to fall back asleep, my heart was racing, and all I could think about was what was the best way to handle a situation like this? Did I do the right thing? Thinking now, it makes sense the police were randomly ringing the door bell and shining a light in to get our attention. But that also could have been anyone! Oh well… its all over now. Guess we need to check our house every night before we go to bed!

I ate at California Pizza Kitchen today and I believe they have come up with something very unique.  When we got our bill they handed us a “Thank You” envolope which contains a prize.  Anywhere from 10% off to $50,000 in cash. The thing is though, you can’t open it on your own.  You must bring it in with you on your next visit (until the end of June) and the store manager will open it at your table for you to claim your prize.

So lets see here… if you open it on your own you lose your chance at whatever the prize was.  So they are basically forcing me to come back in to see what it is.  Could you imagine opening it on your own and it being a huge amount of $, but its invalid?  Or even waiting until after June when it expires, and it being a huge amount of money that you could of won?

Damn them and there genious marketing.  I will be coming back to claim my prize, don’t you worry.

I recently just upgraded a Hard Drive for a Macbook. I purchased the Western Digital Scorpio Black from newegg.com.  The process was very easy and only took about 5 mins.  Having the correct tools is key.  You will need:

• coin (or something to unscrew the battery)
• Small screwdriver (I used a eye glass set)
• Torx 8 (T8) screwdriver

Since you can access the hard drive straight from the battery location, you can basically just pull the other one out, unscrew the casing, and put the new one in.  Once it was loaded in, I booted off the Leopard Disc and proceeded with a “Restore My Computer” through Time Machine.  The process took about 6 hours over ethernet and everything was restored exactly how it was before.  I assume it could be drastically cut down based on how many backups you have inside Time Capsule. I was curious how much of a performance gain would occur with the new hard drive so I recorded some load times.

So there is actually a HUGE performance gain from using 7200rpm instead of 5400rpm.  Now what are the downsides?  We’ve noticed that the fan for the computer kicks on more often doing simple tasks.  I’m sure this is due to the hard drive producing more heat.  The hard drive is self doesn’t seem to be louder, but the macbook’s fans definitely are.  Most people complain about vibrations, I couldn’t really tell much of a difference but if its spinning fast you can notice it if you feel the bottom directly under where the hard drive sits.

In conclusion, the performance gain and amount of space is totally worth it for the downsides mentioned above.  I would recommend upgrading!

For the longest time I’ve had problems with Growl not notifying me if a message filters through a “Rule” inside Mail and goes directly to a folder.  I’m not sure if its simply not a feature Growl supports or what, but I’ve finally found a way to notify me in a different way.  Looking at the rule options I noticed you can add multiple lines for what to do when this message fits this rule.  Adding the “Bounce Icon In Dock” option now bounces the Mail icon when a message hits a my rule.

Finally I can be notified instantly!

I recently did the latest update to Leopard which totally screwed up my macbook pro.  The update made finder and the dock unusable, so I basically couldn’t do anything once it booted in.  I tried doing an archive and install and upon installing leopard it would fail.

The strangest thing to me is that Tiger would work perfectly fine and then upon installing Leopard it wouldn’t work.  Doing some research online (which was really hard to find anything) I discovered that that the failure to install leopard could be due to memory issues.  I didn’t beleive it at first.  Doing a update to the OS and having it screw up be related to a memory problem? Looks like I was wrong.  I did the Apple Hardware test and sure enough it was reporting some strange memory error, which I couldn’t find a description online when typing the error code in.

I ordered some new memory from Crucial (4gb) and with my luck one of the sticks was bad!  I ended up having to use one of the good sticks, and one of the good sticks from the orginal set.  So now I got 3gb and I was able to install leopard again and do the update just fine.

Very strange! Apparently Leopard is VERY dependant upon RAM. If you’re having strange issues, replace your ram.  Its really cheap to do and could solve all your problems.

Recently Google Analytics has added support for Event Tracking.  This allows you to track users actions that involve  javascript, AJAX, and flash.  Before it was really hard to track if someone was using components on a page that didn’t actually get page hits.  The code is very simple to use and here is an example of how to use it:

pageTracker._trackEvent('Menu', 'Click', 'Clicked More Link');

The first parameter is your category, the second being the action, and the third being your label.  The above example could be a “More” link in your menu that when clicked uses javascript to show more links.  You can can essentially use this for any actions a user does on a page involving javascript.

How does this work in flash?  You can use flash’s ExternalInterface.Call(); function and pass it a string of javascript code (like above) which will track an event from within flash.  You can simply replace each parameter with a variable based what action the user is doing.

Using the the Track Event function from Google Analytics will help keep all of these actions in one spot.  We previously were tracking these actions by made up pages and having to access the Content area to see them all.  It was a little harder to track since it gets mixed in with all the other pages.  Looking forward to seeing what else we can use this for!

I launched My Rock Band Songs a little over a week ago and it has been going great!  The site has now grown close to 900 users with an average of 255 songs added per user.  I never imagined it growing this big, but the success of it has been great and I have been learning a lot.  I have been receiving lots of feedback from my users and have implemented many suggestions that were sent to me.

This wedensday will be my first Rock Band party since I made the website.  I’ll finally be able to put it to use myself in a real situtation which will be nice.  I’ve talked to many who have used it at parties so far and they said it has helped a lot!  Looking forward to seeing how this site will grow over the next couple of months, I have some great ideas brewing and I’ll be hard at work to develop them .

I just launched a new site called http://myrockbandsongs.com .  I first made it just for myself and found in the process of doing that some people were interested in managing their own songs too.  I created a sign-up for it and a easy way for people to add their songs in by just check marking which ones they own.

Emily and I went  to dinner at Andiamo in downtown Royal Oak awhile back. We ordered some Rose wine that we have never had before and It turned out to be the best Rose wine I’ve had in America. We ordered a bottle to take home which ran us $12.00. Fast forward a month or so, we went back to purchase another bottle but were going to be charged $40.00! The guy who sold it to us before must have messed up. I was pretty upset about it since I thought I’d always get it for $12.00. I of course didn’t buy it.

I searched all around at random wine shops and couldn’t find it anywhere. I figured I’d never get a chance to drink this sweet nectar again. Doing a lot of research online I ran into a website called Winerz. I searched for my wine, Santa Digna 2007 Rose and finally found it! You have to purchase in bulk by the case (12) and shipping is pretty expensive since the package is very heavy (40lbs). It turned out to be only $11.00 per bottle. I was shocked at the price considering it was $40.00 at the store! So lo-and-behold my shipment came yesterday and it was perfect!