2007 October archive at Binary Bonsai

Archive for October, 2007

Leopard Up-To-Date

Published at Saturday, Oct 27th, 2007 in Journal. 17 Comments

If you bought an Apple product—say a MacBook Pro—during October, before the launch of Leopard, you’re entitled to the $10-upgrade to Leopard (nick-named ‘up-to-date’), you could be fooled into thinking that with the $2000 purchase receipt in hand, you could walk into an Apple Store, say in New York, pay them the $10 and walk away with Leopard. Right?

It certainly sounds fair to me. The stores are official Apple stores, there should be nothing stopping them from extending the offer to walk-in customers. And you might’ve put down two grand just a couple of days prior to the launch of Leopard, so really, they owe you…

That however, is not the case. For what I can only deem to be entirely artificial reasons, the up-to-date program is an online offer only! And that’s despite the fact that the $10 upgrade package is exactly the same as the retail package.

I’m guessing the reasoning lies in the $120 difference between the upgrade and the retail price. That is, there are people, like me, who are so eager to get Leopard, that they might actually pay full price for a product they otherwise are entitled to for a measly $10.

I don’t want to think that about Apple, but I’m just really really disappointed right now, that I didn’t get to take Leopard home with me.

Update: Received my ‘upgrade’ DVD of Leopard today. Yup. ‘Upgrade’. So I can’t reinstall the machine with Leopard without going through Tiger. That’s cheap Apple. Cheap. And it wasn’t boxed either, in that cool psychedelic scifi Leopard box. Oh, and it’s a double layer DVD too.

Guess what I’m torrentin’ right now…

New York, New York

Published at Thursday, Oct 25th, 2007 in Journal. Closed

Send more money. Plz.

NY07 Departure

Published at Sunday, Oct 21st, 2007 in Journal. Closed

Gone Daddy Gone :)

All comments will remain closed until my triumphant return.

NY07 Final Preparations

Published at Saturday, Oct 20th, 2007 in Journal. 2 Comments

New York is by far the most distant destination Rikke and I have travelled to on our own, so it is of course not without some trepidation that we make the final preparations. It’s hard enough to figure out what books will have the honor of becoming bound to our New York memories; but even worse is, what about clothes?

Copenhagen is cold these days. Really cold. But it seems the big apple is still cruising along at rather comfortable temperatures:

I sure hope that’s the case, otherwise the first thing we’re going to be doing is buying some new overcoats.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank all of you who took the time to recommend restaurants and sights in and around New York; my map is teeming with stuff we’re going to check out, and I’ll be sure to review as much of it as possible when I get back.

Underworld’s Oblivion with Bells

Published at Wednesday, Oct 17th, 2007 in Clippings. 4 Comments

I’m absolutely in love, in particular with track #2, Beautiful Burnout, from Underworld’s new album, Oblivion with Bells. But the whole album is great.

Humanized Messages for jQuery

Published at Monday, Oct 15th, 2007 in Evergreens and Journal. 35 Comments

Debuting in K2’s Sidebar Manager earlier this evening, Humanized Messages (demo) is a jQuery extension written by me, based on Aza Raskin’s article on transparent non-modal messages.

Transparent messages are the brainchild of Jef Raskin. It’s simply a large and translucent message that’s displayed over the contents of your screen. They fade away when the user takes any action (like typing or moving the mouse). In practice, the message is both noticeable yet unobtrusive. And because the message is transparent, you can see what’s beneath it. It’s just humane

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 (thanks to Joen, without whom I would be a wreck of IE loathing), and as near as I can tell, it works across the board.

Please report any issues (or feature requests), discuss it and, not least, enjoy.

NY07 Google Maps

Published at Saturday, Oct 13th, 2007 in Journal. 12 Comments

If I was in the fortunate position of having an iPhone or any similarly Google Maps capable device, I would swoon over the applicability of Google Maps when traveling in the US.

Sure, we have similar Danish services, and Google Maps itself even covers us fairly well. But compared to New York, and similar major US cities, backwater countries like Denmark are severely underrepresented in the more interesting features. Fair enough, I’m not expecting the streetview feature to hit Copenhagen any time soon, ~~but man, would I like the route finder!~~ Update: So the route finder works exactly the same in Denmark, contrary to my belief. Ehm. Yeah.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you should do so. Try grabbing the blue line anywhere and dragging it somewhere else.

Makes me want to get a drivers license and go on a roadtrip in the US, just so I can use Google Maps.

Binary Bonsai