Rui CarmoI'm genuinely amazed at the amount of stuff that piled up in my news inbox in the past few days. I've avoided taking any active interest in the news on the grounds of:
- My having a life, at least outside work.
- It being much more fun curling up on the couch with a good book, nursing the blisters on my feet (brisk walks for air, clearing up my sinuses and my mind and pushing my heart the right way).
- Most of the news being utter crap anyway.
Still, some interesting stuff does pop up occasionally, and the absence of some things has become pretty obvious.
I'm still keeping track of iPhone mentions, for instance, which have shifted from utterly foolish, pie-in-the-sky notions to nearly believable finger-pointing. My guess is that people will go nuts if they spot a single Apple FCC filing before Xmas, although, as always, I'm still skeptical the thing even exists.
And if I happened to be positive the thing actually existed (never mind the current crop of "industry analysts" that are so sure of the thing's existence they remind me of the 70's ESP research), I would still not expect it to reach European shores at anything resembling a decent speed.
Along those lines, consider the Merom MacBook. First shipments to Portugal were supposed to arrive last week (on the 20th), and ignoring for the moment the delta between that date and the launch date, there's no news of their arrival yet.
Being a pessimist by nature, and even considering that the ether has been extremely quiet regarding second-generation MacBook issues, I'm already having dreary visions of trying to sort out hardware problems amid the utter chaos of the Xmas season.
Oh, and it's amazingly hard to track down 2G nano accessories right now. I'm looking for a decent ruggedized case for mine, and all I can find are the old models, which have the corners all wrong. That and entirely too many packs of iPod socks, which for some reason aren't that popular.
And did I mention that you can only get half of the Nike+iPod solution (i.e., the sneakers) over here? And that, for some unfathomable reason, I am suddenly unable to buy an Apple Remote?
Granted, I didn't try all the places I know, but it reminds me of when I got a Mighty Mouse. That time took seven tries.
Yes, yes, I know I'm bitching. It's all a matter of managing expectations - over the years, I've found that having lower expectations will ultimately result in being less disillusioned about the world in general, and (oddly enough) having more pleasant surprises.
Anyway, "normal" news coverage should resume in a few days. I've got over half a dozen posts in draft form that I'd love to put out there ASAP, but today I have proven beyond all questionable doubt that you can have blisters on blisters, and besides having failed to make a sizable dent in my "to read" pile, I'm falling behind on my Mandarin studies...