A week ago today I ordered a Sony KDF-E42A10 42", three-lcd, high-def TV from Crutchfield. They said they'd get it here in 5-7 days. Well, this is day 7. At least Eagle Global Logistics is showing that it's in SFO. Hopefully tomorrow they'll call to arrange a time to drop it off here.
I suppose I can't really complain. $500 cheaper than the local Good Guys, no tax, and free shipping. Add to that 18 months of interest-free financing, how could I say no?
Isn't a consumer-oriented society great?

I hate PCs. I'm a Mac user for a reason. But I needed a backup solution for my Mac, and the miserable best I could find was to run Retrospect on a Windoze box. Sure, I could run it on a Mac, but that would mean dedicating a Mac to the boring and mundane task of sitting there all day waiting to back me up. Plus, a Windoze box is much cheaper, and I was able to set up an SATA RAID array to hold my backups.

Okay, so I started putting some other software on my PC. Not much, stuff like the TiVoToGo software that still isn't available for the Mac. Anyway, at one point, after a few weeks of reasonably reliable operation, networking on the PC started to go south. After reboot, it would work fine, but you could watch Retrospect scanning my Mac and see it slow...down...do a crawl. Just a few bytes per second. Nothing like the 100-200 MB transfer rates I was getting before.

After much poking, learning more about PCs than I ever wanted to know, and lucky Googling, I discovered that the on-board nVidia Ethernet hardware has some trouble with power management. So, I disabled that feature in the driver, and now it seems to work fine. Not sure when that feature got activated, or why it was only now giving me trouble, but who cares?

By the way, if you need more evidence as to why PCs suck ass: there are databases on the web explaining the function of various cryptic files you find executing on any Windoze box. In my case, I was trying to determine what piece of software might've been causing problems. There were lots of vague things in the process list, stuff like nSvcIp.exe and nTrayFw.exe. I knew my box had a lot of virus protection crap (wholly unnecessary on a Mac) from nVidia (they make the chipset on the motherboard), so I investigated some of these files. It's amazing how many entries in the DB were for the actual file (maybe one), and how many were for files of similar or same name that were the leavings of various trojan worms (literally dozens). What a piece of shit Windoze is.

Beautiful landing, Cmdr. Collins! Welcome home. Congratulations to all!

I ordered a Mighty Mouse last Thursday, after much anguish trying to determine if it was suitable. No Apple store had it in stock, and few even had it on display (both of which I consider egregious errors on Apple's part).
So, I finally placed an order via the online store on Thu 8/4. At this point, they're estimating 2-4 days delivery (it was same day/one day). I get an order confirmation, and forget about it for a couple days. I go to check status during the weekend, and the system is "down for scheduled maintenance."
I check order status today, only to discover that the order has been canceled. So, I call, and after speaking to three different people, learn that due to a prior fraudulent order using my credit card, I can no longer use that card with Apple's online store.
Back in April, I received an order confirmation email for a new PowerBook. Now, I never placed this order, so I called Apple. They quickly canceled the order, but my card was never charged (AFAIK). I tend to use a debit card with a $1000 daily limit, so there's no way for something as expensive as a PowerBook to have been purchased.
At no time, did Apple inform me that my card was flagged and could never be used again. Nor did they inform me when my Mighty Mouse order was canceled, nor did they inform me that the card was invalid when I placed the Might Mouse order.
And, to top it all off, the Mighty Mouse delivery estimate is now 7-10 days. While the fraud supervisor was gracious enough to approve this order and give me free overnight shipping, and he made it a "replacement" order, which apparently increases one's priority a bit, he could not really do anything to make up for Apple's incredible lack of communication.
Much of this could've been avoided, of course, if Apple had just shipped 200 mice to each store instead of 20. If they were trying to keep it under wraps, they could've ensured that a subsequent larger shipment arrived a couple of days later, rather than leaving everyone hanging.
But really, why make such an effort to keep it a secret? Who the fuck cares if we learn that Apple is going to ship a new mouse? How could it possibly affect anything about Apple's business? I'm not suggesting a six-month-early leak. But a week or two would not give anyone any kind of competitive advantage, and might have kept a few people from buying competing mouse products in anticipation. Instead, Apple has probably driven away frustrated customers.
In any case, secrecy on this product was not so important that Apple couldn't have shipped more units.

I use tools like Perforce and Subversion on a daily basis. I'm a Mac user at heart, and I hate tools like vi and emacs. However, Perforce and Subversion both use external editors like vi and emacs to allow the user to change things, namely checkin comments.
Well, BareBones Software has a pretty decent little text editor called "Text Wrangler" that comes with a command-line utility edit to make it easy to use TextWrangler from the command line (they also make BBEdit, TextWrangler's commercial big cousin). Invoking edit (use "bbedit" when working with BBEdit) all by itself launches TextWrangler. Specify a file name and TextWrangler opens that file, allowing you to edit it with a proper Macintosh user experience.
But, edit can do much more, including this: if you invoke edit -w <file>, it will open that file in TextWrangler, and block until you close the window! (I've tried this before using Apple's open -a command, but it immediately returns, making it useless.) This means you can use edit -w in the external editor configurations in Perforce and Subversion. And, if you add --resume to it, it will return to the Terminal.app after you're done editing. This may not seem like much, but it's more than any other non-CLI Macintosh text editor has been able to do.
Note: Chris Cotton tells me that TextMate also supports this usage.
Basic configuration for most UNIX tools is to set the $EDITOR environment variables (like this in bash:

EDITOR=edit -w --resume
export EDITOR

Read on for alternative information on how configure these tools.

To configure an external editor for Perforce, you can also set the $P4EDITOR environment variable.
To configure the external editor for Subversion, modify your ~/.subversion/config file to include this line:

editor-cmd = edit -w --resume

See the Subversion Book for more information on setting external editors.