My Slice of Reality,

I finally placed Sam and I. Well, ok, more likely me because as we are all well aware Sam is gay. Me, well my status is still a little vague so today…I release upon you…the Technosexual!

(TEK.noh.sek.shoo.ul) n. dandyish narcissist in love with not only himself, but also his urban lifestyle & gadgets; a straight man (or not) who is in touch with his feminine side but has fondness for electronics such as cell phones, pda’s, computers, software, and the web.

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Just a note to anyone who’s interested. When attempting to copy one mounted hard drive to another, make sure you use the -r option. Why? Well, it allows you to copy the directories beneath the root of the drive. Yea, took me a bit to figure that one out. So the command would look like

root@anduril# cp -r /mnt/hda1/* /mnt/sda1

That will copy the entire drive to the secondary, USB mounted hard drive. It’s not bit-for-bit but rather copies everything. The copy I’m currently doing (at archaic speeds I might add) uses the switch

root@anduril# cp -rfb /mnt/hda1/* /mnt/sda1

I do NOT know however, what the -fb switches do. Lol. Just seemed like it would be a good idea. Its not showing status of the transfer though so I’m pretty sure the -f is either a “silent” or a “force” switch.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been dreaming, dreaming of an Apple laptop that is. I’ve talked it over with Sam, hung out in some Mac IRC channels and even made a few posts about it on various message boards. Tonight, I decided to swing out to the Apple store in King of Prussia and pick one up. Or at least, that was the plan.

I get there and as I walk in someone says “hello” to me, pretty standard stuff at a computer store. No asking if I had any questions though or what I was interested in. Fair enough so I start playing on the 12in iBook I have my eyes on. Thirty minutes later, I’m still playing on the damn iBook. In that time no one had come up to me asking if I had any questions. Even when I went and stood stock still, in the middle of the store, they still didn’t help me. There was five employees there, not a single one doing anything.

I walked out.

Ten minutes later after thinking about it I walked back in, went up to someone and said “Look, I sat here for thirty minutes waiting to get questions answered. I’m willing to drop $1500 on a laptop. Anyone interested”

Five minutes later – I finally got helped.

It was at that point that I realized the people who worked there, were idiots. I was interested in buying a laptop, obviously interested, but not only did the girl not sell me on the laptop she told me to think about it because it’s a big investment for students! Not only that, she didn’t even know answers to half the questions I asked about the iBook. I’m sorry; Apple has three types of laptops that all use the same damn parts. The specs would take up less than one sheet of paper. How can you not know what the hell your talking about?

The best part of the whole evening though was hearing one of the guys respond to a customer, “I can try and answer your questions about the hardware but I just repair em. I don’t know too much bout em.”

At that point, I did leave, my desire to buy an Apple thoroughly shaken. If this is how their sales people are how good are their tech people? Can I expect any measure of support? A PC I can fix, even a PC laptop but Apple’s ya really can’t.

Why should I buy a Mac again?

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I’ve gotten in a few arguments with people in the past few days about The Passion of Christ and why I think it’s a bad movie and I have no intent to pay to see it. Ever. One of my prominent reasons was that, whether intended to or not, it will raise anti-semetic thoughts and feelings. Before then, I had no proof that Mel Gibson is anti-semetic, just a general feeling based upon how he shows things occur. Well, looks like others have done the work I didn’t do. When asked flat out about whether the Holocaust occured, and remember its not so much what people say but how they say them that matters, Mel said the following:

“Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.”

Thats straight from his interview in Readers Digest. Then there’s his interview about everyone else besides Catholics going to heaven. Yup, according to him everyone but die-hard Catholics are going to hell, bar none.

He elaborated: “Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. Honestly. She’s, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it; she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

Yup, he believes even his own wife is going to hell. Is this really the person that should have made a movie which will represent one of the most passionate (no pun intended) moments in the Christian faith? I’m left with more and more doubt.

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