But I am stuck in the same rut, battery life is impacted again. I still think it has to do with the inability to turn off the location subsystems. Since the iPod runs on wifi, location can only be roughly determined by IP address which is not all that accurate. Why should I not be able to turn that off? The buttons for location settings are blues out ( the same as the MS greyed out) and are disabled. Is anyone listening, Apple?

In other news, Apple released the iPods, and the new touch looks fantastic. It’s finally got cameras, front (meh) and rear. While FaceTime might be nice to play with, it’s the rear facing 5 megapixel camera that has me interested. Should make that device far more fun to play with. I will have to think about that one for Christmas or birthday.

I am looking at getting an iPhone in the near future but it looks like both Rogers and Bell are sold out at the moment. Canada’s lame ass wireless providers are sucking again. I have a blackberry currently, but the iPhones are so much nicer and have so many more features.

Also been thinking about an iPad. Could be fun to play with. And I would like to get one to check the development options. Of course I would need to get a Mac to go with that since you can’t dev on anything else easily. Yea, I could write the app in c++, but I want to play with Xcode.

All that gear is an expensive proposition. So we’ll see.

Yeah, I geeked out! I don’t mind because it was fantastic. With a little luck and perhaps some sneaky moves, I might be able to get an IMAX viewing in. Real 3D is good, but IMAX is such an immersive experience.

But what irks me most are a few things about the new OS and iTunes.

1. Battery life just sucks. I used to be able to go a few days with my regular usage patterns provided I was not watching a video on it. My guess that the device is trying too hard to communicate all the time.

2. There is no way to restore back to version 3.1.3 which was the last version I had on there.

3. Should the new OS not be compatible with the current device, then why offer the upgrade? Apple know just what I have so why not just set iTunes to block it if not applicable?

4. Fix iTunes. Why should it let me add copies of music already in the device? It’s just bloody silly.

Anyway enough ranting?

Upon learning that it was originally sourced from Best Buy, it made it extremely likely that it was lacking RAM. The specs on the HP site called for 1 GB of RAM, but as usual for Best Buy, it only had 512 Mb in it.

A neighbor had an HP laptop which had a screen that was busted, so i pirated the ram, 2gb worth and placed it into the old machine. We had to take the machine apart since one of the ram chips was hidden under the keyboard. Nice design, HP!

Then I acquired a universal power supply since the original could not be located. Talk about a bad move, the screwy amperage delivered to the machine caused the CPU to cycle to 100%, rendering the machine useless. It had all sorts of trouble installing the new OS. Yep, I put windows 7 on it. Meh! Is about all I have to say that, just not enough there to be really impressed.

Anyway, google and trial and error lead me to working out the power supply issue. I sourced a new power supply through kijiji, with the help of a buddy at work. The new supply works like a charm and the machine is running great now.

That entire process took about 3 weeks to sort out. What fun!

Delivery was flawless despite the fact Amazon.ca charges significantly more for those two items than the US version.

Since returning home, I was away for the weekend, I finally Sat down to watch the bluray version. Took me a few weeks to make the time to workrgeu the whole movie, but it was worth it. The blu-Ray with the surround sound was just awesome. I really enjoyed seeing it with some sound based umph! to it. The iPod version is handy to watch as it’s so portable, but I can’t really blast the sound without screwing up my hearing.

I am also enjoying the ‘Activist Guide to Pandora’ book. Lots of great detail on the world that Cameron created and brought to life.

Yep! Totally Avatarded, feeling it out. That’s ok though, it’s a small and harmless obsession.

In the USA, the movie is available for preorder as a two disc dvd/blu-ray set for the price of $24.99.

Screenshot of Amazon.com Avatar preorder page

The Canadian version of Amazon is ripping us of by offering the Blu-ray disc at $29.99 as shown by the screen shot below.

Amazon.ca screenshot

I find it astounding that Amazon would con us in this way. The Canadian is not $.66 compared to the US dollar. We are hovering just below par at around the $.97-98 mark. That would suggest a price of around $26 for the double pack, which is not even offered to Canadian.

Avatar fans, lets get together and force Amazon to rethink its practices and ensure that we get a fair deal. Tweet this post to @amazon. Link to it in your blogs. Don’t let this travesty continue, don’t let large companies treat us like crap. Demand fairness.

Thanks…

Pandora Field Guide

And there is where the trouble starts. And the fury at being absolutely hosed by Amazon as a Canadian. The screen shots below show the difference between Amazon.com’s pricing

Amazon.com Pricing

Canadian pricing

There are two pieces of data on the images that really show the differences between the USA and Canada. The first, obviously, is the price. The US price is $10.97. The Canadian price? A whopping $25.02. More than double that of the US price. I completely fail to see how Amazon can justify that difference. The Canadian dollar is hovering around the $.95 USD mark, so I could see a price of about $12, maybe $13 to account for the exchange rate. But $25? That’s outrageous! And then to have it not ship for 2-5 weeks? The Amazon.com version ships in 24 hours.

How can Amazon justify this? Its a total rip-off combined with a total failure of service. I would really like to have someone from Amazon give me a valid and reasonable explanation of why this occurs?

I think it’s gonna be an interesting device. One that is very geared to the general public that doesn’t get or want to be bothered with all the normal hassles of computing life. The system updates, virus warnings and the installation of apps. The iPhone metaphor is one that translates so well to a larger device with the extra screen real estate. This is the device for people who are in the main consumers of content. Email, video, Twitter are all mainly consumption apps where the user is mainly limited to text inputs. The ipad will be perfect for those users.

It’s not the right device for people who create content. It’s not meant to edit images, create docs ( though with iwork it’s possible ) and build applications. Those folks will still need a laptop or desktop machine for that.

Avatar Movie

[edit mar 7, 2010] so I saw avatar in IMAX. It was incredible. The large screen and huge sounds made the 3D better than ever. The movie becomes even more immersive and I found places where I could feel touches of vertigo and others where I wanted to push the plants out of the way.

It makes me sad that it’s been pushed out in favor of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. I hope Avatar comes back after Alice bails on the IMAX shows.

Although my personal preference is to move to php for a variety of reasons, there is a focus on moving to .Net. Php runs well under dot net and ms has made significant investments into making php run really well. However, there has been some argument surrounding the use of C# as the language of choice.

In either case, I am pushing to use an MVC pattern codebase to provide better code standards. So I went and found asp mvc which plugs nicely into web express. So I download and install it with MS web platform software. This is where it gets good… The web installer starts up and while installing the mvc module, it offers to install:

1. Webcache for php
2. Php 5
3. Moodle
4 joomla

Among a few other bits. These packages are solid php offering dealing with CMS and Learning Management System. So MS is offering php as part of the who MS development experience! Doesn’t that seem a bit…odd?

To me, it seems like this is a bit of an admission that the path they chose is perhaps not the right one. This says to me that MS is offering the better language because there is some lack of interest in their tools and offerings.

This also tells me that PHP is the right language to develop in. Now if I can just make the required people see the light!

For some more laughs, the web platform also installed mysql, even though the original install of the web express package came with MS SQL Server.