The Onion is satire.  SATIRE, people!  C’mon, people really thought this was real?

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

(Answer: yes.)

wtf?

I mean seriously, with all the headlines about how Steve Jobs wasn’t even at MacWorld Expo this year, let alone the fact that MacWorld is TODAY, not yesterday like the clip says, I would at least think that the line about how the business world uses laptops for “actual work, and not just dicking around” might have tipped someone off that maybe this was not altogether serious.

i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.

so here’s the deal.  i have a macbook.  many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds).  plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome.  so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).  

that’s when i started reconsidering suicide.  or at least technocide.

leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time.  so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything.  after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot.  ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install.  here’s the summary:

for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.

so here’s my dilemma.  i love osx, i really do.  if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system.  but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail.  again) to get it up to 10.5.  i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates.  i’d rather not just expect to fail.

so my options are:

install tiger again and leave it.  possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it.  possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different.  i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome?  seriously.  considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.

ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours.  and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.

so i’m at a loss.  what do y’all think?

i nixed the single sign on due to the fact that a) it was kind of buggy and b) i didn’t need it anyway.

but in better news.  WII.  seriously.  wii.  it’s wiitastic.  i’m wiidicted.  it’s wiilicious.  and i’ve got wii-arm now.

gavin’s b-day is coming up so we decided to get him a wii.  okay, he’s 3, but he likes crazy weird cartoony animals and games involving such, and the controls are more movement based meaning active and easy to learn, and it’s nintendo which means more games for kids, and it’s a more family oriented thing and it’s cool and and and…anyway, he likes it and it won’t be long before he starts playing.  but that’s getting ahead of the story cuz the point is the wii rocks.  i mean seriously.  more so than i had really considered.  it’s amazing how much more fun what would be a boringly simple and basic 3 inning baseball game or single tennis game is when you’re actually swinging a (wiimote) bat or (wiimote) racket.  even the dumbest minigames become more interesting when that leaning thing you do with an old school nes controller to make the car (or whatever) lean in one direction ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING.  it’s like someone watched videos of people playing video games and turning the controllers and leaning on the couch in weird angles and said “you know, i’ve got a great idea….”

a wii wasn’t something i’ve been planning on for forever.  actually, it wasn’t until we had the “what do we want to get for g for his b-day” conversation a month ago that i even really considered it.  but when i did, i thought it was a brilliant idea.  and i have been sort of following the press around the wii over the last year and the wii continues to be the most impressive in how it’s been able to grab people who aren’t gamers and appeal to them.  and it’s all in the innovativeness of the movement-based controller.  because nintendo isn’t nuts — it really is more fun to do rather than sit on your arse and watch, even if you remote control the guys on the screen with your fingers.  it’s a visceral thing.  it gets your body moving and your blood pumping and it feels good. and that’s what makes the wii rocktastic.  and it really takes doing it to realize just how wiitastic the wii is.  it makes me want to pack it up and take it with me wherever i go just so i can say “d00d, you gotta play this.”

otherwise it’s been busy, hence no posts.  we set up a freelancer account on elance where the projects and the site seems a lot more professional and businesslike.  i’m excited about that, and about making more money on our own work.

also, just a reminder, i’m sure you all have your calendars marked and have been keeping up, but today is the last day that dr. horrible will be available to watch.  after today, that’s it, it’s off the air and you have to wait for the dvd.  after watching all 3 acts i can say it was good.  not fantabulously awesome, but it was good.  it wasn’t knee-slappingly funny, but it was amusing.  the only real LOL bit was after the “hero” Captain Hammer steals Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) love interest and they meet in the laundromat and Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is gloating and says “She’s with Captain Hammer now.  And these [his fists] are not the hammer.”  He walks away and a full ten seconds later comes back and says “The hammer is my penis.”  the timing and the schoolyard-ness just cracked me up.  and Nathan Fillion is really good at being ironical (to use a Firefly word).

we’re going to california in about a week and i managed to get a macbook on ebay for $700 bucks (2ghz, 2gb ram, 60gb hard drive, office, logic, ilife  pre-loaded — i’m stoked, altho not so much about the office, i’ll probably dump that and get open office), so maybe i’ll do a road journal or something.

also, we’re giving the thinktank site another overhaul, with a dropdown menu to select the site theme.  it’s pretty exciting, and awesome.  we’ve got 4 themes up so far.  we need to figure out which one to use as the default.  behold the awesome.  we’re still working on more, but it’s functionally complete.