Learfield CEO Clyde Lear proudly displays his new MacBook Pro. Clyde insists it’s for his lovely wife Sue. If that’s true –and we hope it is– Clyde will soon be trekking back to the Apple Store in St. Louis. I think it would be nearly impossible share a MacBook.
For now, we’ll add Clyde to our gallery of Mac Sliders. Someone call Cupertino, we’re gonna need more Kool Aid.
My sources tell me that another long-time PC guy is very close to getting a Mac. If/when this happens, it will be the fourth person in my little world to step off the cliff. I thought it might be fun to keep a record here. Top row, left to right: smays; Phil Atkinson, Head of Learfield IT; Roger Gardner, Learfield President/CEO. If you decide to Get A Mac, drop me a line (and a pic).
Update: Bottom/left is Chuck Zimmerman (3/6/07)
Update: Clyde Lear (4/4/07)
Update: David Brazeal (4/18/07)
One of the more frustrating computing challenges I’ve encountered is setting up a wireless network in my home. I knew enough not to attempt to try this on my own and called on some of very clever men and women I work with. But it was a booger, even for them.
Today my buddy George came over and set up my new Apple AirPort Extreme (“Easy as a Mac”):
“Just take the AirPort Extreme out of the box. Plug it in. Install the software, and in five minutes or less, you’re good to go.”
And it literally took George 5 minutes to install and configure the base station. My Netgear base station was doing the job but the AirPort Extreme had a couple of features I wanted.
Before, I had to have my Dell desktop box turned on to print from our laptops. We can now print directly through the router.
I also now have an external hard drive hooked to the router…and visible on my MacBook desktop when I’m at home. No more storage issues and three times a week the MacBook does an automatic back-up.
Yes, I’m sure it’s possible to accomplish these things in Windows on PC’s. But the folks at Apple just made it fast and simple. And I promise to share any problems I have with the new base station down the road.
Speaking of down the road… the Apple TV is scheduled to start shipping in early March and George tells me our new TV has the necessary connections and cables to take advantage of the features.
Update: Surfing from the couch (base station upstairs in the office) and –perceptually– pages are loading twice as fast as before (on the Netgear base station).
My alternate headline was, “Gomer Does the Big Apple,” but the Jim Nabors reference would be either too dated or unflattering to Learfield President and Chief Operating Officer Roger Gardner, the latest Learfielder to break down and “Get A Mac.”
Like Phil and me, Roger has been flirting with the idea of buying a Mac for sometime. He’s been teetering at the precipice for weeks and finally went over the edge this week and purchased a 17″ MacBook Pro (with all the fixin’s)
In all fairness, Roger has two teenagers at home and they needed another computer and –like a lot of folks these days– couldn’t come up with a good reason not to try a Mac.
You know I’m not a cell phone guy. Nobody to call…nobody to call me (‘cept Barb). But the new Apple iPhone is so much more than a cell phone. Makes the Treo and the Blackberry look like Fisher Price toys. The iPod led me to purchase the MacBook…and the MacBook will probably lead me to buy an iPhone.
Update: Just watched Jobs’ keynote. Amazing. And take a look at the effect of the iPhone announcement on Palm (Treo) and Rimm (Blackberry) stock in the hours following.
Videocue is a clever little application that puts a teleprompter right on your Mac (I’m sure there are similar apps for Windows). Just type in your script and position it under the (built in) iSight camera on the MacBook and start recording. Drop in still images; control the scroll speed of the text… all for $29.00. The pro version includes Chroma Key (I can’t wait to do my first stand-up in front of the White House). I’m telling you, this thing is too cool for school. I usually just ad lib my videos but there are times you want to work from a script and this makes it a snap.
Flipped open the MacBook last night and discovered I had no net access. No DSL light on the modem. No dial tone coming into the house. Called Sprint (now Embarq) DSL Tech Support because it was the only number I had. He transferred (nicely) me to the right number where Naomi gave me a couple of things to try. They didn’t work. This morning I called back and spoke with Ivan who determined the problem is inside the house and since I didn’t have the “inside the house service plan,” it would cost me $25 for every 15 minutes a tech was on site.
But then Ivan said, “Wait a minute. I can put you on a new pricing plan that will save you about ten dollars a months AND include free “inside” support.” Uh, yeah… let’s do that. The tech will be out Monday morning.
I don’t think I posted on this, but several months ago a nice lady at Sprint noticed that I was paying more for DSL service than I needed to, changed me to a package that gave me more features for less money.
I’m sure many of you have horror stories going the other direction but, for the record, the Embarq/Sprint folks have been making my life better.
PS: Weekends are usually when I do most of my blogging but w/o net access we’ll be dark for a couple of days.
Update – 9/11/06: Embarq said a repairman would show up between 9-11 a.m. so I was prepared to wait all morning. Steve arrived at 8:30 a.m….found the problem almost immediatley and was gone by 9:00 a.m.
Update – 9/12/06: Couldn’t get online last night. Had dail tone, but no connect to net. Called Earthlink (Sprint ISP) and talked to Jeremy. Polite, helpful and really new his shit. Quickly determined my account had be de-authorized (for some unknown reason) and got me going again. I hope I don’t have any great Embarq/Sprint/Earthlink customer service stories to share for a while.
I am incapable of keeping a clean, orderly desktop on any of my Windows machines. Folders and files and shortcuts scattered from top to bottom. It is in no way the fault of the OS. It’s my sloppiness. I have discovered, however, that I can keep the MacBook desktop clean. Maybe it’s the dock or the way Finder works or, perhaps, it’s just the beautiful desktop images that ship with OSX. It would be a shame to cover them. I don’t know. But here’s the desktop as of 5 minutes ago.
Phil Atkinson, head of Learfield’s IT operation, was forced… I mean, he really had no choice… to purchase a MacBook Pro. As our company does more with podcasting and video and iTunes… having a Mac in the house will just make Phil’s life a little easier. At least, that’s the line he gave me. Here you see him closing the cover on the win box and opening the Mac. An image heavy with symbolism. He reports that Bootcamp makes it a snap to run OSX and XP (sound of cash register in Cupertino).
I can’t remember who made the first “portable” computer I owned but the bastard must have weighed 15 pounds. Connecting to the web wasn’t an issue in those days because it didn’t exist (in any way that mattered to me). I can’t even remember what I did with the laptop on the road.
This is my first outing with a Mac and I couldn’t be happier. The hotel charged me $10 a day for cable access but I just plugged it in and was up and running. Wifi was very slow at the conference but the Mac found the signal with no fiddling or port futzing.
I’m posting this from the Seattle airport where $8 buys 24 hours of really fast net access. Nobody needs 24 hours but what a great way to pass the time (or do bidness). And, again, so easy. This is the way mobile computing was meant to be.