Apple juice

06 Dec 2006

Spent most of this afternoon absolutely raging at an iMac. They’re unstable, buggy, pieces of crap and any pretense at simplicity is entirely unfounded. Several behaviours (or lack thereof) are altogether ridiculous — even Windows manages to do photo thumbnailing & previews better, and, yes, it’s a PC. Take that and shove it up your “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials — I can’t use Excel, but I can sure as anything see what photos I have on a CD when I throw them in my drive. Sigh.

I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Windows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s experience, perhaps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Production Studio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like applying for a credit card (for practical reasons, not just “silly-season” consumerism), but I won’t, yet.

Also had fun this morning sending a hundred and fifty dollars (or thereabouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite anything so spectacular, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If anyone wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feeling this investment may prove profitable sometime in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morning was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality electrician skillz, knowing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for certain usage. Or something.

Mind you, I’m no particular stranger to blowing theatrical lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of perhaps twenty par 64′s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site manager reckoned they hadn’t needed replacement in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rating on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.

I should probably just leave the lights alone for a couple of months so that I spend enough time working to afford video things — which would, recursively, cause the same problem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.