I am 90 and I have Cystic Fibrosis

My daughter has cystic fibrosis. It is a serious disease which affects lung function, among other things and the current median survival rate is about 36 years old. My daughter is 5. Every year we raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation by having a fishing tournament. It was publicized in the paper with my name and phone number if you want to participate or donate or whatever.

I received a call a couple of days ago. Apparently someone old read the article. I will paraphrase the conversation below:

Me: Hello
Old Lady: HANG ON! MY HUSBAND WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!
Me: OK
Old Man: Are you the one who's daughter have CF?
Me: Yes.
Old Man: What? I can't here you!
Me (louder): Yes, my daughter has CF.
Old Man: I can't hear you!

This goes on for two or three back and forths until I end up talking as loud as i can without screaming.

Old Man: What doctor does she go to?
Me: Children's Mercy in Kansas City.
Old Man: She doesn't go to Columbia?
Me: No, we live in Kansas City.
Old Man: I knew someone from Springfield who had CF that went to Columbia.
Me: We live in Kansas City.
Old Man: I have CF too!
Me: You do?
Old Man: Yes. I caught it years ago. I go to the VA hospital and they told me there is nothing they can do for it. There are 7 strains of CF and 4 of them are untreatable. I have one of the untreatable ones and there isn't any medicine for it.
Me: ...

Ok, at this point I know that if I say anything to the contrary of the "facts" he is saying, I will be in for a long phone call. You can't do that with old people because they will make you old listening to them go on and on. So I just agreed to a few more absolutely absurd things he said when he finally topped it off with this....

Old Man: I'm 90!!!
Me: Well it looks like you have learned how to beat it!
Old Man: I guess so. Thank you for the information about her doctor.

I knew he was old and I even held out some hope that he actually did have CF until he said this. Don't ever talk to old people that you don't know.

Handwritten Spreadsheets - Spawn of a Top Ten List

I work with my Dad. He's not so bad with computers, he can do email, scan pdf's, web search and the basic stuff. Today, he came to me and asked if we had any big sheets of paper. I told him we have 11 x 17 and that delighted him. I wasn't sure what he was doing. Turns out, he was handwriting a huge spreadsheet. He needed the wide paper because there are too many columns for a normal sheet. He has now asked my sister, who also works in the company to type it out into Excel. Something in my insides hurts. To quote Dilbert, "I have uncontrollable urges to show people better ways to do things."

This leads me to a top ten list of tech things that seem to baffle my father's generation (and let's not kid ourselves, most computer users out there).

1. There are no browsers, only "The Internet". You don't use a program to access the internet, you just use the internet.
2. You cannot change your home page. Don't even try. You would have to purchase a new computer to do that.
3. Preference panes do not exist. Programs come as is. There is nothing you can change.
   
4. It is a new instance to question every time your antivirus software wants to update. Is it STILL ok to update Norton?
5. Outlook viewing pane toggle buttons exist solely to frighten the user into thinking they have lost every email except those that are unread
6. You can have only one program running at a time.
   
7. You can have every program installed running at the same time and it will not affect performance.
   
8. Everything that is forwarded to you by someone you know is true. Obama hates America and there really is a cell phone "do not call" list you can use to keep him from calling you about it.
9. Don't get me started on people that print, in full color, emails and pass them around.
10. Windows Media Center exists to display cat videos, Budweiser commercials and encrypt DRMed .wma's.
    

The Mac Myth

To start, I love my new macbook pro. To me it is better than any Dell I have ever had and OSX is far better than XP. I won't even compare OSX to Vista. We have it on a machine in our office and all I will say is %$^#$%&#&%^#$%^. My mac is easier to use and 'funner'. The old idea that there isn't any software on the mac isn't true anymore and since I'm not much a of gamer, that wasn't an issue either.

Even with that, though, I think there is a myth out there that Macs will solve your relationship problems while allowing you to post images directly from your outdated blackberry to flckr, picasa and some obsure coppermine database your Linux geek friend put together in 2002. All at the same time. All while you 'handbrake' a dvd. Oh and you can open any email and run any program and it won't hurt anything because Steve Jobs will personally grab any wayward programs and swallow them up with his sweatshirt.

So here's my view on the mac myths.

1. Macs crash just like windows. - sure they don't crash as much, but your mac will probably lock up on occasion. My motivation for this blog entry was my macbook pro locking up when I simply enabled bluetooth. Maybe it was hardware, maybe it was something else, but it locked up and that's all most end users care about anyway. The most stable system I have ever used was Suse Linux back in the day (2000), but Linux has it's own issues and still hasn't met my needs, though Ubuntu is pretty friendly.
   
2. Things are easier on a mac, but you still need to possess a brain to be able to use one. - Yeah, iPods are easy, but I've had mine not sync and screw up on occasion. Same with my mac. Sometimes things don't work right. Time Machine is a good example. It should be drop dead simple, but when I tried to hook it up to my firewire, it tried to turn my machine into a 286 running CAD, if that's even possible. I imagine it would be like installing Vista on a 3 year old computer. Anyway, it took over and I won't go into the gory details, but let's say that you can't just plug it in and expect it to work without thinking. Maybe it will for some, but my guess is those people also possess a brain. It's not just me because about every other mac break weekly is a big discussion about which backup software to use with or besides Time Machine. For the record, I use SuperDuper and it rocks.
   
3. Yeah, there is Microsoft Office for the mac, but it is fugly. - Most people want Office. Most people want office sex. Since office sex is more complicated and Office is on the approved list, it gets the nod. Office 2008 on the mac works, for the most part, but it makes you feel like you are running some legacy app. So even in a mac myth list, i get to bash Microsoft. How fun. I will say, however, that Entourage does actually connect and sync to Exchange reliably, which was impossible for me with Office 2004. That alone was worth the upgrade.
4. Mac apps are not bulletproof - On the whole, mac apps are more stable than windows apps and have less of a chance of dragging down the system if they crash, but crash the can do. I seem to have the most trouble with Adobe apps, but maybe that's just me. The iLife apps will crash sometimes (iPhoto anyone?) and they should be the most stable of them all. For instance, I had to take some photos yesterday and I needed to quickly email one of them. I had iPhoto up and plugged in my digital camera and it was beachball city. I've come to loathe the beachball as I did the hourglass. I waited and waited, but after about 10 minutes gave up held the power button while cursing. Actually, with windows, I would probably have been able to control-alt-delete, but command-option-esc wasn't doing me any favors on my mac.

So, just remember, next time someone tells you how their macs are perfect, they are full of shit. If a windows user states this, call the proper authorities at once. However, if a linux user says they haven't crashed in two years, they are probably rationalizing the two crashes they have had as 'user error', therefore not linux's fault. Also, it's harder to crash from the command line in my experience.

Why and How I Switched from Windows to the Mac

I started out with an iPod mini and then bought an iPod. I loved it so much, it made me want to try OSX. I was worried that it wouldn't integrate into my existing windows work network (Small Business Server), so I didn't want to shell out the money for a mac. So I installed OSX on a partition on my Dell laptop. I liked it so much, I reinstalled it as the main partition. Even with the time investment and problems mentioned in the article, I liked it better than windows, and I have used windows all my life. I was also able to integrate it fairly well with my network, after some tweaking. A couple months ago, I bought a macbook pro and sold the Dell.
So, I think this is a big reason why Apple doesn't do anything. If OSX would have worked perfectly on the Dell, I many not have switched to mac hardware. But it doesn't and won't. You can get much of the mac experience on a PC, but it just isn't the same. But, by being able to try out OSX on my Dell, I bought Apple hardware.

Billy Packer is Batshit Crazy

During the national championship game, Billy Packer proved his batshit craziness by proclaiming that Kansas would know how to handle the pressure of this championship because of the championships Kansas has had in the past. Ya know, when the players were in the womb in 1988. Because they would know because of that, ya know.

Ye First Post

Well, this is my first post ever. Will I have anything to say? Will it matter? Will anybody care? Stay tuned for further developments...