Today started unreasonably early. Up at 0500 to take Alia to the airport at 0600. Just keep in mind that “0500” in such proximity to the time change is more like 0400.
At least I made it to work by 0630… and all the lights were off…
Sean (and/or his parents) invited me to celebrate his birthday at Sushi88… Fearing for my life, I accept. Sean points out that there is a chicken-Teryaki on the menu. Safety item.
Spend most of the day hacking on my peer monitoring system, chugging lots of caffeine.
‘Round 1700 my brain ceased functioning. I figured a 10.5 on-site was good enough for a Monday.
Having time to kill before dinner at 1900, I decided to torture myself by going to look at the MacBook Pros…
Now, I don’t want to identify what retailler I went to, because if Apple ever came across this, they’d probably be in trouble. (What with the Googling et al)
So I walk into to $STORE, there’s a guy in the back helping a customer, but he greets me as I enter. I settle in at the MacBook Pro (top model) and start prodding.
It is /fast/. The camera is surprisingly good, not that it’s a make-or-break for me; not once did I use the one in immutable. System Profiler tells me there’s a gig ‘o RAM, stupid-fast CPU, and a Fuji hard drive. WTF. Even the N6220 has dual Toshiba HDDs. Popping open two terminals, I fire up dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M in one, and in the other cmdwatch -d –interval=1 ‘du -h bigfile’. (Poor geek’s performance tester.)
It’s at about this point that the guy had finished dealing with the other customer and sat down next to me. I think he figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t the typical point&drool luser. We talk for a few minutes about how great/neat/fast the MBP is.
Then he says: “Mike – Can I be honest with you?”
Me: “Err… please….?”
Guy: “Don’t buy it.”
Me: “Wha!? But I want it so bad!”
Guy: “Because of the whine.”
Turns out these things are little screamers, somewhere between 3 and 4 KHz … and once he pointed it out, it was all I could hear. Very irritating. Augh! Dilemma! Just when I was almost convinced to buy the damn thing, he’s thrown me into a tailspin! I even searched Google for “MacBook Pro whine“. In the words of Strong-Bad: “THAT IS NOT A SMALL NUMBER!”
So I head home because I’ve still got an hour to kill. No sooner do I finish telling my parents the above story does Sean call. The conversation went something like this:
Myke: “Hey – s’up?”
Sean: “Check your private messages.” (IRC)
Myke: “No where near a computer, and since I don’t have a laptop…”
Sean: “Yeah about that,”
Myke: “Yeah no kidding, I just got back from $STORE and-”
Sean: “Enough about that, they’ve fixed the MBPs!”
Myke: “Buh?!”
Revision D (D?!?) is out. See here. (via digg)
And in other news, I survived the Sushi restaurant.
It seems to me that they think if you’re ordering the chicken, you’re also incapable of using chopsticks to eat it with – they gave me a fork that I didn’t ask for. To spite them, I ate every morsel with the sticks.
Hang out at Sean’n’Sarah’s after dinner. I still think they should charge admission for their 22nd floor view.