I had high hopes for the new game, Lego City Undercover, even though I wondered how they’d fare with a game that isn’t based on some other media property, but is made up from whole cloth. But playing it would mean investing in Nintendo’s new game system, the Wii U. It’s not available for any other platform.

The short version: Brilliant game, idiotic game system.

The Wii U hasn’t been selling. When the original Wii came out, it took almost a year for stores to have stock for more than a few hours after a new shipment arrived. They flew off the shelves at an unprecedented rate. The Wii U… not so much. From day one, you could have a Wii U by walking in and asking for one.

There are reasons for this.

The first reason, the most immediately obvious reason, is that there were very few Wii U games when the console came out, and none of them were “gotta have” games. Many of the release games were ports of games that were out for Xbox and PS3 for some time. There was a new (but not very innovative) Super Mario game. Nothing, though, in the way of a game that would drive fans to go buy the thing. Lego? Didn’t come out for four months. Zelda? Wait until 2014. (Well, to make the fans happier, Nintendo is porting the old GameCube Zelda game “Wind Waker” to Wii U for this Christmas… but it’s a game we’ve already played.)

I decided to take the plunge for my birthday because the Lego game finally came out, and because retailers have started selling the Wii U at a discount to get rid of stock. Best Buy ran a sale cutting $50 off the price of the basic model. That’s not a good harbinger for a game system that’s less than six months old.

Nintendo sells two models of Wii U: The “Basic” model is white and has 8GB of internal storage. The “Deluxe” model is black and has 32GB of internal storage, and comes with a charging cradle for the new Game Pad controller (available separately for $20 or less), and also includes the game “NintendoLand”. The calculus, then, is (a) Do you want NintendoLand? and (b) Do you want the extra memory?

What Nintendo doesn’t clearly tell you is that the difference in internal memory is essentially a moot point. Neither version has enough internal memory to be useful. The Wii U operating system consumes about 5GB of space on either console. After that deduction, there’s not enough memory left on the Deluxe edition to download “Lego City Undercover” if you wish to purchase it online. If you have any intention of using that internal memory for anything other than game-save files, you are going to have to purchase an external USB hard drive to give the Wii U a useful amount of storage. If all you need to do is save games, the 8GB console will probably do the job… and when it doesn’t, it’s hard drive time anyway.

Although the Wii U has an SD card slot, you can’t use it to store Wii U games or data. The slot is only usable when you reboot the Wii U into Wii emulation mode. However, you can’t just move your SD card from your old Wii to your Wii U. You have to first move anything you care about off that SD card back into the old Wii’s internal memory. Chances are that you bought an SD card for your Wii because all your stuff wouldn’t fit in the Wii’s internal memory in the first place. That’s okay, because you’re going to need to redownload most of your Wii games anyway. Just concentrate on the save data. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When you buy your external hard drive, if you go to Nintendo’s web site you will find that they recommend a desktop hard drive with its own power cord. It seems that the USB ports on the Wii U do not put out enough power to properly drive a bus-powered hard drive, i.e., the most commonly available, least expensive, and smallest models. Nintendo doesn’t officially support it, but you can work around this by buying a bus-powered portable USB hard drive and a powered USB hub to plug it into. Nintendo’s web site also warns that you shouldn’t use USB flash drives or SD-card adapters with the Wii U as it may not have enough power to operate them properly. In other words, the Wii U’s USB ports are decidedly nonstandard. They’re also USB 2.0 only, so you’re stuck with relatively slow hard drives.

But then, the Wii U specializes in slow.

When you first start the Wii U, you will need to download a new firmware update before you can do much of anything. If you skip the update, you can play games that you bought on disc in a store, so long as you don’t want to play online, or receive patches to fix bugs. Without the update, many of the Wii U’s features don’t exist. The update is large and takes hours to download, even if you have an extremely fast Internet connection. It seems to me that the Wii U has a flawed WiFi system: in downloading the same program to both the original Wii and the Wii U in Wii emulation mode, the original Wii downloads the file almost twice as fast. Even over a 50Mbps connection, the Wii U needs about an hour and a half to download that first firmware update, and it struggles to hit 5Mbps doing so. This may be a combination of flawed hardware and overloaded servers on Nintendo’s end.

Unlike Xbox and PS3, you don’t have the option of using a wired Ethernet connection. Theoretically, you can use a Nintendo-licensed USB Ethernet adaptor made for the Wii with the Wii U. However, folks who have tried this have reported that it’s even slower than the WiFi connection.

That download speed problem doesn’t seem to get better as time goes on.

As for your home firewall, Nintendo recommends that you essentially disable it completely, forwarding every possible TCP port to the Wii U to prevent problems with online games. There’s no mention of whether or not the Wii U supports common protocols like UPnP or NAT-PMP to overcome firewall issues. The suggestion that the Wii U should sit essentially unprotected on the Internet is unforgivably naïve.

Once you have the firmware, you have to go through the process of creating a user account on the Wii U and creating a Nintendo Network account to link it to. This involves responding to a verification email. You can’t choose to have that email sent to your Wii’s email address, for some reason.

Then you get to stare at a “Please Wait” screen while the Wii U menu loads. This takes 20 to 30 seconds, possibly longer. It’s positively glacial, and it sets the tone for the Wii U experience. Nintendo promises a speed boost with an April firmware update, but the video they’ve released shows that menu loads are now merely measured in terms of historical eras instead of geologic epochs.

When you go to load a game for the first time, there’s a good chance you’ll be presented with a popup to download an update to the game. The good news is that, unlike the original Wii, game makers can issue patches to games you’ve purchased on a disc. The bad news is: slow download speeds. Sorry, kids, it’ll be another 15 minutes before that game we just brought home starts loading.

And once you get past that, wait some more while the game loads.

I’ve never, ever, played a Wii game that had anywhere near the amount of “Please Wait” that a Wii U game has.

Be careful about putting the controller down to go do other things. As a power-saving measure, by default the Wii U will turn itself off if you don’t use it for an hour. It doesn’t bother saving your game when it does so. If you get a call from Mom, remember to go unpause the thing periodically so it doesn’t kill your progress. You can turn this feature off, after more waiting for the settings app to load.

The new GamePad controller is interesting, but sort of gimmicky in usage. The use of the second screen is not yet mastered by the programmers. Technologically, it works fine. In terms of being useful instead of a hindrance in gameplay, that’s a tossup.

What the GamePad definitely is would be “uncomfortable”. For some insane reason, Nintendo designed it with a flared chamfer along the case join around the entire perimeter of the case. This means that there’s a sharp ridge biting into your palm as you hold it. Be prepared for a nice red mark after your first session. If, like me, you loved the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination because you could hold both hands in comfortable, supported positions… that’s gone for Player One. You get the GamePad, with its wide, square body. Aching wrists will join your sore palms after a few hours.

On the other hand, all you’ll get is a few hours. The GamePad’s rechargeable battery only lasts 2.5 to 3.5 hours, depending on usage. Once it’s depleted, it needs 3.5 to 4 hours to recharge. You can keep playing while you’re plugged in to recharge… if you unplug the charger from the charging cradle, of course. And if the game you’re playing expects you to wave the GamePad around, that cord will get in the way. The battery appears to be a cost-saving measure; there’s room for a larger battery in the GamePad’s bay, and at least one third-party vendor plans to introduce an aftermarket replacement with three times the capacity that fits into the existing battery bay.

So, you’ve got your external hard drive, you’ve banked up patience for the slow download, you’re thinking about buying a game online. You’re prepared for the idea that it may take all night, even if you have Google Fiber speeds. There’s still more gotchas there.

Unlike Xbox and PS3, your downloaded game is not tied to the account you used to purchase the game. It’s tied to the particular Wii U that you used to download it. If that Wii U breaks, you’re out of luck. You’ll need to buy a new copy.

You won’t get a discount for purchasing online. Downloads are priced at full retail, unless the game manufacturer is running a sale, which isn’t terribly common so far.

Even after downloading the game, you may still have to wait to run it as that patch download system kicks in. That’s right, the game you buy and download won’t be fully patched when you download it.

As for funds to buy the game, you can’t use leftover Wii Points from your old Wii. And don’t buy a Wii Points card in the store to charge up your Wii U unless you want to buy old Wii games with them. For Wii U games, you need to find a Nintendo Network prepaid card or use your credit card. Nintendo Network cards aren’t all that widespread yet. Oh, and you can apply Nintendo Network points to a Wii U or a Nintendo 3DS, but once redeemed on one or the other, you can only use them there.

In short, Nintendo has been paying absolutely no attention to its competitors’ online stores or to the App Store model that’s taken over the mobile world.

So what we have here is a fundamentally flawed console with few good games, limited future prospects, unforgivably slow operating software, flawed connectivity, a painful controller, and a brain-dead online store.

The sad thing is, it’s the only game in town when it comes to playing the wonderful new Lego City Undercover.

If you like the Lego video games, you’ll want LCU. The humor of the first Lego Star Wars, which has petered off and become stale and scarce in recent releases, is back in a big way. LCU is essentially a parody of every cop show and movie trope of any note, with a heavy emphasis on cheesy 1970s/80s cop show. The voice acting—a distraction in Lego Lord of the Rings, where it seemed forced and obviously recycled—is a huge asset to LCU. The dialogue is witty and often laugh-out-loud funny, with the occasional “did he really just say that?” double-entendre.

LCU is easily the most bug-free Lego videogame I’ve played. On very rare occasions, event triggers can get confused, but we’re talking once per four hours or so, instead of the constant negotiations involved in playing Lego Indiana Jones or Lego Harry Potter on Wii. Characters do a much better job of walking and jumping where you want them, too. Busted bricks and showers of studs don’t trigger massive slowdowns and don’t threaten to lock the system up. Given how frustrating the Traveller’s Tales engine has been on the Wii, this is a massively welcome improvement.

It’s also a huuuuge game, with a massive overworld that will take days, not hours, to explore. As another reviewer noted, think “Lego Grand Theft Auto, but as a cop.”

The only downside is that transitions to special events or story levels involve yet more “please wait”. At least the game’s theme music is catchy. You’ll hear it a lot during load screens.

LCU could have been the “gotta have it” game to drive sales of the Wii U. Ultimately, I think the console is too flawed for even a great game to propel sales. If you want LCU, and you know you’ll buy the next Zelda the day it comes out, whatever form it takes, you might think about a Wii U if you find a great discount.

On the other had, if Nintendo wants the Wii U to start selling, they need to:

• massively improve the operating system’s speed
• figure out how to speed up the optical drive
• fix the broken WiFi and their server farms
• add a wired Ethernet port
• add fully-standard-compliant USB ports that support bus-powered drives and flash drives, preferably with USB 3.0
• smooth out the sharp ridge on the GamePad
• put a better battery in the GamePad
• tie online purchases to a user account instead of the console

It’s also a program from a company that seems highly clueless.

Okay, I’m not happy that every time a new major version of Parallels comes out, it costs at least $40 to upgrade it… and a new version seems to be required for every new version of Windows and every new major version of OS X. But okay, these things cost money to make, and virtualization software is more complex than most. It’s still annoying when an OS upgrade breaks Parallels until you pony up for a new version.

But now they’ve gone too far. Parallels Desktop 7, which is required to run under OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, comes with advertisements. When you start the program, you get an ad for other Parallels products, or products from third parties that Parallels has deals with. Many of these products are Windows “bloatware”—software that takes up space, slows things down, and doesn’t provide much (if any) value to the user. You get these ads even though you’ve paid full retail for the software.

And you can’t turn them off.

Oh, there’s a “Don’t show me this again” button. But the thing is, Parallels has taken a unique interpretation of this phrase. Most people, seeing a dialog box when they start a program with some useless blather in it and a “Don’t show me this again” option, would assume that checking the box would prevent you from ever seeing that dialog on program startup again. Parallels’ interpretation, however, is “Don’t show me this particular advertisement again.”

So you check the box, expecting to be rid of it… and a few days or weeks later, it comes back, with a new dubious offer.

Ad infinitum.

If you ask Parallels on their public forums, they’ll tell you that you cannot disable the advertising entirely… and that they can’t remove it because it could affect Parallels’ performance.

Well, the second part is unmitigated bull excrement, certainly. They wrote the ads in; they can write the ads out. The only “performance” that will be hurt by removing the ads is the performance of Parallels’ balance sheet.

Besides, you can disable ads in Parallels Desktop, although you have to use commands in the UNIX command shell to do so. But don’t try to share this information with other Parallels users on their forum; your message will be swiftly deleted by Parallels staff, who continue to publicly state that it’s impossible. (However, if you complain loud enough, they may tell you the trick in private, out of public view.)

That’s just plain sleazy. It’s demeaning to the intelligence of their customers on many levels, and it’s a clear sign that the company has no respect for its customers.

It also raises the question: Parallels, of necessity, insinuates itself deep into the guts of your operating system. If they’re sleazy enough to do this, what else are they sleazy enough to do?

But that’s not the end of the clueless. Have a look at Parallels’ Facebook page. On the plus side, someone from the company is actually watching the page and responding to many posts there. However, the vast majority of those responses is some variation on ”Thanks, please visit our website to open a support ticket for your [question|concern|criticism|widespread obvious PR disaster on our part].”

Guys, the key word in “social media” is social. Sending people to your support website to get a response to a question asked in public is anti-social.

The thing is, as much as you wish you could control the narrative on Facebook and avoid public conversations that air your dirty laundry… well… it’s just not possible. Better to avoid having dirty laundry, or at least be seen attacking it promptly and energetically with laundry soap in public.

What Parallels is doing is a naked attempt to control the narrative, one that’s obviously failing… and doing so in a public, insulting-your-customers sort of way. Someone needs to tell them about the Streisand Effect.

Have a public e-mail address.

His former boss and mentor, Steve Jobs, had the public e-mail address steve@apple.com, and the address was well-known to the world. Apple even publicized it on their website. What’s more, Jobs personally monitored the e-mail sent there, and was known to occasionally reply to customer messages. Johnson should do the same: let us mail ron@jcp.com with our feedback. Yes, there will be a lot of noise to go through. On the other hand, CEOs often find themselves isolated from reality behind layers of middle management; having a direct channel to one’s customers helps prevent this. It worked for Steve… and no one else in this retail space is doing it.

Find out when customers are leaving the store because you don’t have their size.

When I shop at department stores, I’m often disappointed to find that they don’t have the size I need in some garment. Most stores don’t do a great job of arranging product to make it easy to find the right size. Even when they do, it seems like they stock sizes based on some inscrutable nationwide formula, not local demand; otherwise, it wouldn’t seem like the local stores are always out of the same sizes!

Look, department-store customers are used to lassez-faire customer service at department stores: We’ve got what we’ve got on the floor, we don’t know what’s coming in next week, we don’t know nothing. If the right size isn’t there, customers just leave. It’s a missed sale… and there’s nothing to tell the retailer “you would have made a sale if you had stocked more of size X.”

Penney’s will make more sales if they have the right sizes. They’ll get more customer traffic if they feel confident the store will have their sizes. You’ll gain customer trust and loyalty if they know you will have their sizes.

The store should figure out some easy way for customers to tell you “I would have bought this item if you had it in this size,” and promote the hell out of it.

Leverage logistics for the customer.

Look, we all know that retailers live and die by logistics and inventory. Penney’s has to know how many items they have in the store, of each type and size. In this day and age, it’s all computerized, and it should be easy to tell how many size-L red men’s cable-knit sweaters you have in the store… and in other stores. If they don’t already have this capability, I’d be astonished.

So, if I come up to a salesperson wishing that the store had that sweater in stock, I should never hear “I’m sorry, we don’t have any” as the sole response. Leverage your logistics; the salesperson should be able to whip out their iPod Touch with its barcode scanner, scan the shelf label, and tell me: “Oh, I’m sorry we’re out of that. I’ve noted that you were looking for it, so we can have more items like that in your size in the future. I see we’re expecting another shipment of this item on Thursday. I can hold one for you, if you’d like. I see our store in Poughkeepsie has two in stock today; I could also call down there and ask them to hold one for you.” (Bonus points: “Or I can have them put one on the truck tonight; it’ll be here tomorrow after noon.”)

This would delight customers, and it shouldn’t cost much—especially if Johnson has any plans to roll out portable-device checkout like he did at the Apple Store. Few stores go this far for the customer nowadays… but I know it used to be standard practice for Penney’s competitors, and that was back when it meant calling the other stores and waiting for someone to check the floor display.

A frugal person seeks to buy things with the most utility for the least cost of ownership. A cheap person seeks to buy things with the least initial cost possible.

Jeff Smith, the host of The Frugal Gourmet, illustrated the difference using meat pounders. One choice was a nice, stainless-steel pounder with an elegant design and some nice artistic flourishes. This pounder was by no means cheap, but was it frugal? No, because it cost more than equivalent tools that would do the job just as well. On the other end of the spectrum was a short length of two-by-four pine stud. This could also be used to pound out a cutlet, and it was undoubtedly inexpensive. However, it was clumsy to use. It was inefficient at the task; it tended to give both the user and the meal splinters, and it was difficult to clean properly. In short, it was cheap. The frugal option was a wooden mallet, of the type you could buy in any hardware store. It was inexpensive, it did the job well, and its finish allowed for easy cleaning. It cost more than the two-by-four, but the cost of using it was lower.

There was a time where being “fiscally conservative”, in the American political sense, meant that one was frugal. A frugal person doesn’t want the cheapest thing; they want the best value for their money. They want something that will last a reasonable time, that doesn’t incur additional costs in its use, yet has no unnecessary bits that run up the price. A frugal person understands that “costs” are not just monetary; wasted time and wasted effort are costs, as well, and need to be factored in. I believe that the term “fiscally conservative” has increasingly shifted away from “frugal” and towards “cheap.” That’s regrettable, because a cheap person usually winds up paying more over time than a frugal one.

I can walk into the local mall and buy a dress shirt at Macy’s for about $30, provided I make sure that the shirt is on sale. (It’s rare that they aren’t.) I can go further out of my way and buy a dress shirt from Brooks Brothers for about $78—less if I buy from their factory outlet, and use the discount card provided through my company’s associate-discount program. A cheap person would consider me crazy for buying the Brooks Brothers shirt. A frugal person would ask: How well are they made, and how long do they last?

My experience with the shirts Macy’s sells is that they are poorly made. It’s rare to buy one that doesn’t have ragged stitching. There are often visible flaws in the stitching. On patterned shirts, the alignment of the panels is haphazard at best. The fabric is often coarse and unpleasant to wear. The collar stays are cheap material that curls or breaks quickly. Most of all, the shirts wear out within a year to 18 months.

Brooks Brothers shirts, on the other hand, are very well made. Rarely, if ever, do I find a stitching error—even on their “factory second” shirts from their factory outlet stores. The material is high-quality, and properly aligned. The collar stays are sturdy and resilient. With proper care, I can get three years out of a Brooks Brothers shirt.

One year for $30, or three years for $78. I come out ahead with the more expensive shirt… and I feel better and look better doing it. That’s the frugal choice. By spending a little bit more, I get a better value for my money. It may mean that I have to plan my purchases more carefully to afford the initial expense, but because I get a better bargain in the long run by doing it, it’s worth it.

The opposite end of the spectrum, the truly cheap option, would be to buy a shirt at Walmart. While the Macy’s shirt is not particularly good, Walmart is well-known for squeezing their vendors to provide the cheapest possible product. The president of Snapper, the lawnmower company, famously told how Walmart’s purchasing agents tried to convince him to make a flimsy, cheap mower for the store (and tarnish his brand in so doing) because the Walmart shopper wanted a “disposable” mower that was cheap enough to discard instead of maintaining. Sometimes you can buy a product that appears identical to one sold elsewhere, including the model number, but the Walmart version is cheaper because it’s missing features that you would have gotten if you’d purchased elsewhere. Cheap, but perhaps the exact opposite of frugal. Much of what Walmart sells, in my opinion, is similarly disposable.

On some level, people realize this; there’s at least one academic paper showing that people perceive goods sold at Walmart as inferior. Yet, rather than save to buy what they perceive to be a superior product… they’ll go to Walmart. Does it really help that you can “afford” the GE microwave at Walmart when it breaks quickly and cannot be repaired because Walmart required GE to use inferior parts that aren’t available as replacement components?

Americans have bought into the cheap lifestyle. Yes, there is a place for cheap: many “consumable goods” are a place to economize by buying based on cheapest upfront cost. These are things that are inherently used up as you use them, like toothpaste or food. Unfortunately, this attitude has spread to “durable goods” as well: furniture, computers, appliances, clothing, cars, homes. We call them “durable” goods because they should last. They may occasionally need repairs, but they should be minor, as these are things that can be made durable—resistant to wearing out, long-lasting.

How does your company requisition durable goods? Do you evaluate suppliers to find the most frugal option, the one that will have the most benefit on your workers’ productivity given the combined cost of purchase and maintenance over the projected life of the item? Or do you just find the cheapest quote for something that meets the minimum requirements on the day it’s purchased? In my experience, most medium-to-large American companies choose cheap, not frugal.

Learn the ways of frugality and apply them to your own life. Spend a little more where it will give you better value; go without or spend less in other areas where you will lose less value to compensate. Encourage frugal thinking, at home and at work. Write to your legislators, and ask them to use your taxes frugally, not cheaply; you want value for that money!

Frugal should be a core American value. Let’s make it one.

My first computer wasn’t an Apple. It was an Atari 800. As a young boy into videogames, the Atari was the natural step up from the Atari 2600 game console. It was videogames that got me fascinated in computers, and it was the Atari that helped me discover how much I liked making them run.

After a few years, though, I had outgrown the Atari. The system had limits, and the company was reaching its limits as well. As a loyal Atari owner, I disliked the Apple II, with its relatively crude graphics and very un-arcade-like analog joystick. In middle school, though, all the school computers were Apples, and I saw software that just wasn’t available for the Atari.

So, my Christmas wish one year was for an Apple //c. By then, Mom and Dad had learned the true meaning of the word “peripheral”—an education that started on the Christmas morning after I got the Atari when I didn’t want to shut it off lest I lose my programs, having no cassette drive or disk drive.  I had an Apple with all the trimmings. It was a well-travelled computer, making weekend trips to the family cottage in New Hampshire and the occasional trip in to school to supplement the small computer lab there.  I was an Apple owner, but I wasn’t truly an enthusiast yet.

That came in eighth grade. By then, I was the undisputed computer nerd of the town school system; the adults came to me for advice. That’s how it came that one day they asked me to come down to the computer room: I excelled in English, I lived and breathed computers… they wanted me to be an editor of the school newspaper, because they wanted to create it using a new thing they were testing: a Macintosh.

I had read about the Macintosh in Creative Computing and BYTE, and it had intrigued me… but that day in the computer lab, it was love at first sight. I took to MacWrite and MacPaint like a duck to water, and I started to learn the intricacies of ReadySetGo, one of the first of a heretofore-unknown type of software: desktop publishing.

Guess what was on the Christmas list the next year?

I had a Mac Plus back when they were still beige. I have oddly fond memories of the wub-wub-wub noise an Apple 800K disk drive made as it changed speeds, the ka-CHUNK a floppy made as you inserted it. I learned about INITs and CDEVS; I studied Inside Macintosh and learned Pascal. I took BASIC computer programming as a high-school freshman when the class was still being taught on Commodore PETs; being an old hand at BASIC, I breezed through the curriculum and started handing in programs written in Microsoft Macintosh BASIC, including GUIs.

I remember getting my first hard drive, a Jasmine 80MB SCSI disk that sat underneath the Mac, and thinking I’d never find enough things to fill it. I remember playing Epix’ Winter Games on the Mac, sliding the mouse back and forth rhythmically to simulate cross-country skiing. I recall driving from my parents’ home in North Granby, CT to the suburbs of Springfield, MA, not long after getting my drivers’ license, to get my hands on a freshly-minted copy of System 7, and lusting after the Macintosh Portable in all its portable-typewriter/boat-anchor glory while I was there. I remember the magic of the ThunderScan, a device that replaced the ribbon cassette in the ImageWriter II printer with an image sensor, allowing you to use the printer as a crude drum scanner. I spent hours going through my favorite VHS movies with the VCR hooked up to a MacRecorder, creating sound clips of favorite lines to use as beep sounds.

That lead to a particularly favorite prank. The school system’s computer expert was named Dave, and he wasn’t yet comfortable with Macs. One week, he made it known that he’d be taking the school’s Mac for the weekend to learn more about it. I played a little joke on him (with the knowledge of the teacher in charge of the computer club): Before he left, I added a program to the Mac’s startup disk that let you tie sounds to certain system events. Upon ejecting a disk, the Mac played a sound clip from the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible: “This disk will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!”  He later related that he panicked at first, before realizing that he’d been had.  (This was before computer viruses were on anyone’s radar.)

That Mac Plus was also well-travelled. The latter half of my high-school career was spent at a private school in Hartford; I was a fixture in the computer lab there, and an editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. When crunch time came for the yearbook, that Mac came to school with me daily in its big blue Cordura bag.

Somewhere in there was the summer I sent a resume to MacConnection hoping for a summer job, despite being a teen; they were headquartered in the next town over from our cottage. I managed an interview with the CEO, but I didn’t get a job.

I remember two treks from New Hampshire down to Boston for MacWorld Expo, back when it was a massive affair occupying two conference halls—and before the era of the Stevenote. I brought home bags of goodies, and a wonderful memory of spying Harry Anderson, star of Night Court, from afar as he negotiated a sizable purchase from one of the big Mac mail-order companies at the back of one of their booths. (Anderson was one of the most famous Mac enthusiasts of the era.)

Late in senior year, I hit Grandma up one more time, and made it count: I got the top-of-the-line Macintosh IIfx. (It’s often joked that the name expanded to “Macintosh Too F—ing Expensive”.) I got a stripped-down model and added my own hard drive, memory, and keyboard. I loved that thing.

Around that time, I was a beta-tester for a friend’s program, Wallpaper, which let you set color desktop patterns larger than the Apple-approved 8 square pixels. One of the background patterns I created featured in the advertisement for the program that appeared in MacUser magazine.

When I went to the University of Rochester, I remember setting it up in my dorm room on the Computer Interest Floor and having someone come in and exclaim “Woah! You’ve got a workstation!” (The E-Machines 16″ Trinitron monitor was physically imposing, and computer monitors bigger than 13″ were still uncommon then.)

That IIfx saw me through college, and through my first job and much of my second job. Then, I convinced my employer that I’d be more productive if I had a PowerBook, so I got a PowerBook 1400c. Sadly, when I left, they wanted it back… but I picked up a discarded Power Macintosh 7100/80AV to replace it. Meanwhile, the IIfx continued on as the girlfriend’s computer.

While at Global Crossing, I upgraded to my first personally purchased new Mac, a Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500MHz. For some time, that second processor sat idle, unused by virtually any software, until Mac OS X came out. I got that the day it came out, and lived with its shortcomings because it was cool, and it was UNIX. I also saved up for the original Cinema Display, the first of Apple’s awesomely huge displays. (That display was in nearly constant use until earlier this year, when the backlight started to flicker and I replaced it so Dad could keep using the G4.)

When I’d been at Bank of America for a while and replenished my funds, I bought a Power Macintosh G5 Dual 2.7GHz and a new Cinema Display. That served me well for years, and became another hand-me-down. It currently resides in my basement, awaiting rebirth as an Ubuntu system; the Cinema Display is my second monitor for my work laptop when I’m home.

The G5 gave way to a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz; that was my workhorse system until the girlfriend’s 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac flaked out and I found that 4GB of RAM wasn’t enough for a power user; I replaced it with a 27″ iMac Core i7 Quad, and gave the 24″ iMac to the girlfriend.

This spring, for graduation, my girlfriend’s daughter and her friend got MacBook Pros; I now have OS X Server and Remote Desktop to manage the household network.

I wasn’t the first person in line to get an iPod, but it didn’t take me too long to get one. I loved that first-generation device; I took many long walks with it. Sadly, it died after I handed it down to Mom and Dad, when they didn’t realize it wouldn’t take well to being left on the dashboard of their Jeep in the Florida sun.  By then, my girlfriend had given me a fifth-generation iPod.

I was waiting at the door in my Apple t-shirt for the UPS driver on the day the iPad was released. I’ve used it every day since. I am a voracious reader, and five years ago I would’ve said that I would never stop buying paper books. I love books, and I love bookshelves. I have visited a bookstore once in the last six months; I now buy almost all my books for the iPad, because it’s so much more convenient. I have my iPad with me in places I’d never lug around a book, so I get to read more.

Last Christmas, I got an Apple TV. The household has three Apple wireless access points.

Prick me, and I bleed five colors, modern monochrome logos notwithstanding.

Back in the late 1990s, when Apple was struggling and the faithful engaged in guerrilla marketing to help the company, I managed to read about Apple offering the first set of “Think Different” posters in time to order a set. Dad built some fames for them; they have places of honor in my office. (Well, except for Picasso, because I’m short on room, and frankly, he’s creepy.)

While the Atari got me into computing, Apple products shaped and fed my interest throughout my life. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ company, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have gotten half the jobs I did—my first job out of college, working tech support for Xerox printers, came about in part because of my computer knowledge, and in part because of my long experience with desktop publishing.  I may never have met the man, but he had a profound impact on my life.

Rudely awakened, dropped by voicemail, made to wait at CHG&E’s contractor’s whim for most of a day, a garden trampled and dug up, a ruined lawn, all because of what seems to be an institutional lack of common courtesy and decency aforethought.

First off, I have to say that individual CHG&E front-line employees I’ve dealt with have almost all been very helpful, courteous, and a benefit to the company. However, it’s obvious to me that CH’s management has some serious customer scorn going on.

To put the following tale into context: In January 2011, in the middle of a week of deep freeze, somewhere between 800 and 1,000 natural gas customers in Kingston lost service because a gas regulator froze up from cold and precipitation. I was one of those customers. The weather wasn’t particularly cold or particularly wet for the area; I can only assume the regulator was not well-maintained. It took a few days for CH to restore gas service. During that time, like many other Kingston residents, I was without heat, hot water, or the ability to use the stovetop to cook. CH’s employees busted ass to restore service, but the important thing is that they shouldn’t have had to.

So, the current work.  I understand that CH needs to replace gas lines, and after January I’m all for modernizing the system. However, when someone comes and paints up your sidewalk with dig-safe markings, and then commences to dig a foot-wide trench across the mouth of your driveway, it would be nice if the perpetrator gave you some advance warning.

On Saturday, more than a week after the work started, I get a letter dated the previous Wednesday from CH. A “Gas Operating Engineer” from the company deigns to tell me that the gas main, and the service lines to the homes, are being replaced by a contractor. Because my old house has an indoor gas meter, they will need to get into the house to turn off the gas and pull the new pipe.

“A representative will contact you during this process in an effort to schedule your service replacement that will allow us to minimize our construction time and its impact on you”, says the letter. “All areas impacted by construction will be restored to their prior condition.”

Okay, so I guess we have to move some stuff around in the basement to free up access to the gas meter, which is buried in a corner. We make plans to start cleaning up, but because we haven’t been contacted about scheduling yet and we already had weekend plans, we didn’t make tons of progress toward that goal on Saturday or Sunday.

Fast-forward to Monday morning. 7:10 a.m. The doorbell rings. It’s the contractor.  They’re ready to replace our gas main, can they come in and look around in half an hour or so?

This, apparently, is Central Hudson’s idea of “scheduling.”

The contractor doesn’t like it when I say “no.”  He doesn’t want to take “no, not today” for an answer, not even when I point out that (a) we have had no notice of when they were going to do this, (b) we aren’t prepared, and (c) having just been rudely awakened we have not yet showered and prepared for work. He finally allows as how maybe they could start at 9 a.m. after we shower?

Notice how this ignores the question of who will remain around to give them access to the house. Lucky thing for them that I had the day off—especially considering that at 7:25 a.m. they’ve already got a four-foot-deep hole in the sidewalk and the street.

I try calling the engineer who sent the letter. I get voicemail. I try calling CH’s customer-outreach specialist per their website, and get voicemail. Okay, I try the main customer-service number.  I’m told that the office doesn’t open until 8 a.m., so the people who could address the issue aren’t available.

At 8:05 a.m., I’m still getting voicemail. I try calling the office of the senior vice president of customer services, Charles Freni; the voicemail system tells me in a strange robotic voice that the function is not valid and hangs up on me.

By 8:20, I call the CEO’s office. I’m just talking to the secretary when Alana Mikhalevsky, the Operating Supervisor for Community Relations & Consumer Outreach, calls me back. I explain the situation to her, and she agrees that the situation has been horribly botched. She tells me she’ll make some calls, get in touch with the right people, and get back to me.

That’s the last I hear from Alana today.

The clock hits 9 a.m. and keeps on going; no one working outside bothers to come talk to me. By 10:15 a.m., I see the foreman and a presumptive CH employee looking at paperwork on my front steps. I go out to talk with them. No one apologizes. They ask if they can come in now. I let them in, and they tell me that it shouldn’t take long, the gas should be back on by around noon.

They don’t turn the gas off until noon.

Around two o’clock, they tell me they’re having problems. It seems that the gas main has a right-angle bend in it under my lawn, which means they can’t simply pull the new plastic pipe through the old iron pipe. This doesn’t particularly surprise me, given the topography of the lawn: the service enters the basement about three feet below ground level, and the yard slopes downhill about two and a half feet before reaching a two-foot retaining wall in front of the sidewalk.

This means they now have to dig up my yard and front garden.

I have the pictures of them digging out the gravel from behind the wall that forms its drainage, and the dirt from the yard, and commingling them into one pile. Of them stepping all over the plants. Of them piling tools on the other plants.

It takes them some time to unearth the elbow and replace it. Meanwhile, the apparent CH guy leaves. The workers are now on overtime and frustrated by the 90°F-plus temperatures. The older guys have some care, but the younger workers don’t seem to have much respect for what they’re doing to someone’s property and hard work.

Meanwhile, the stepdaughter and her friend (who lives with us) come back from a walk, and tell me that the contractor’s flagman has been wolf-whistling at them whenever they go by.  Classy. (They later tell me that while they were later walking to my girlfriend’s workplace, the work crew’s truck drove past them and the lot of them did it again, apparently including the foreman.)

Eventually, they get the gas line hooked up, and they put the dirt and gravel back into the hole (not in any particular order, that I could see), and when they come up short, the worker starts taking shovelfuls of dirt out of my other garden to make up the difference. When they’re done, I have some very traumatized plants, garden edging that used to be straight and is now a wavy approximation, a bare patch of lawn, gravel all over the lawn, and no gas service because they aren’t qualified to turn it back on and the CH guy has fled.

Around an hour later, a CH serviceman shows up to unlock the gas shutoff, turn it on, and watch my stovetop light up again.

This isn’t what I expected, and if I had a true choice for energy service, I’d be choosing someone else.

What should have happened?

• CH should have sent out notifications well before they started ripping up the road, and they should have started making arrangements for access at that point.
• The contractor should have verified with CH that the homeowners had been contacted and had replied before ringing doorbells at 7 a.m.
• The contractor shouldn’t have started digging up sidewalks before confirming access to the house.
• If the contractor is going to start work at 7 a.m., the customer-service line should be prepared to take calls about the contractor’s work at that time. A supervisor should have pager or cellphone contact information for the engineer in charge of the project.
• CH’s voicemail system should not default to unceremoniously dropping calls to executive offices outside of business hours.
• When sending notifications about work, the letter should include usable contact information, not the company’s main line where you can be put through to the voicemail of the engineer who is out in the field someplace.
• Alana should have followed up with me at least once during the day to make sure that things were progressing okay.
• After I spoke with Alana, CH should have made sure that one of their engineers was on site, if not their manager, and they should have come immediately to my door and offered an apology in person.
• Since I had already been greatly inconvenienced, and had put my life on hold to allow CH to do the work on their unannounced schedule, CH should have made sure that they had employees on site to take care of any problems or necessary work as quickly as possible (such as turning the gas back on).
• The contractor should have come to me before digging up my garden, giving me the opportunity to save plants, note any problems with my irrigation system, etc.
• The contractor should have taken care to preserve the construction of the wall, including the gravel fill, and should have used a tarp to prevent the gravel from spreading into my lawn.  At a minimum, they should have raked up the gravel.
• It goes without saying that they shouldn’t have dug up my other garden.
• I would have expected them to at least tell me that someone would be by to finish putting things right with my lawn, such as reseeding it.
• It would have been nice if they’d asked for a broom to sweep up all the dirt they tracked into my house with the multitude of comings and goings. Okay, it was just the cellar stairs, but it would have been excellent customer service.
• There’s no excuse for contractors wolf-whistling at passing women, especially those that might be underage. They’re lucky I didn’t see it happen myself, or I would have called the cops.

I got some pretty good pics with my new Nikon ultracompact.  It’s nowhere near DSLR quality—I’m a bit disappointed in the image detail under normal use—but for a stick-it-in-your-pocket camera, it does pretty well.  It certainly did better than I expected with the fireworks show!  I’ve posted the pictures to Flickr.

I just bought a newer iMac, and I bought a FireWire external disk for it and migrated my backups.  It’s time to bury the Time Capsule.

First, I should say I didn’t have any problems with the Time Capsule’s reliability—unlike, apparently, a great many people.  It seems that early builds of the Time Capsule were prone to premature failure.

No, it’s the actual usability of the thing that soured me.

The Time Capsule is essentially a wireless access point with an integrated network-accessable storage (NAS) device.  Time Machine is picky; it won’t play nice with many other NAS devices.  However, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly fast NAS device.

My iMac was connected via a Gigabit Ethernet network. While I can copy files Mac to Mac over my GigE network at essentially the limits of the hard drives’ speeds, the Time Capsule is a laggard. It seems like it has an underpowered processor. That wouldn’t be surprising, except that Apple commands a premium price for the device, and Apple now has their very own powerful embedded processor chip, the A4.

The poor network performance pales, however, compared to the way Apple chose to implement Time Machine for networked volumes.

On a system with a directly-attached hard drive for Time Machine, Mac OS X uses features of the HFS+ filesystem to work the backup magic. These features aren’t available to network-mounted volumes.  To work around this, Time Machine creates a disk image file on the Time Capsule in a “sparse bundle” format that can grow and be modified as backups are made.

It takes forever for the system to parse in the disk image. Even with a dual 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo.  Even with a quad-core Core i7. If you’ve changed a lot of files, your hourly backup may take more than an hour.  During that time, your system can be sluggish as it deals with the backups.

But that’s nothing compared to trying to restore a file.

With a directly-attached drive, Time Machine is wonderfully responsive.  You can fly back through time, find your file, and restore it in short order.

With a Time Capsule, you’re going to need a lot of patience.  You’ll click on the Time Machine icon… and wait.  Eventually, you may get a progress bar telling you that it’s working on mounting the backup image.  You’ll wait another minute or two.  Finally, the Time Machine screen will appear.  Twenty or forty seconds after that, the contents of the directory you want to restore may actually show up on that screen.  When you click to go further back than the most recent backup… prepare for lag.  The further you go back, the longer the wait.  Uncharacteristically for Apple, there’s no feedback to reassure you that the system is doing something with all these pauses; if you aren’t within sight of your Ethernet switch to notice the blinking lights, you might think the system has frozen.

Did I mention that it’s even slower if more than one computer is trying to read or write to it at a time?

With the Time Capsule, you have to be truly committed to restoring a file to put up with the delays.

The really crazy part came when I tried to delete the sparsebundle file after using Disk Utility to restore its contents onto my new FireWire drive.  After the Finder warned me that the file would be deleted immediately, and I clicked OK, it took about an hour for it to delete the one file.  (That’s probably because it’s a bundle hiding who knows how many actual files behind one icon.)

It does work, if agonizingly slowly, and it has saved us from disaster once: my girlfriend’s hard drive died, but we were able to restore its contents from the Time Machine backup on the Time Capsule.  Of course, it took the better part of a day to restore under 200GB of data, but she was happy to get her stuff back.

One place where the Time Capsule does fall down is in certain migrations from one Mac to another.  The files on the Time Capsule are keyed to the system’s name and MAC address.  When you move to a new Mac, you may find you have to create a new backup file on the Time Capsule.  While you can still access the old file, Time Machine will no longer automatically prune that file when your backups fill the Time Capsule.  You’ll either have to delete your old backup image, accept a much smaller active backup space, or attach an external USB2.0 drive to the Time Capsule for additional storage.  In my case, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the old image onto a new external hard drive.  When I pointed Time Machine at the external hard drive, it recognized that it contained backups for a Mac with a different name, and asked if I wanted to use it anyway. You don’t get this option if all you have is the Time Capsule.

I hope Apple creates a Time Capsule Version 2 that’s actually useful for backing up and restoring multiple Macs in one household. I’d like to see a version that has two or three 2.5-inch, 10k RPM drives with a hardware RAID, and an A4 processor providing wire-speed networking. It should also implement a network protocol that works natively with Time Machine, not using the wonky sparsebundle format and its speed flaws. (However, it should have some way to dump any given machine’s backups to a disk image, so that users can migrate.

In the meantime, my advice to Mac users is: if at all feasible, go buy external FireWire 800 or USB2.0 hard drives for each of your Macs, and use that as your Time Machine setup.  It will be faster, it will be easier to deal with, and you’ll get more use out of them.  External hard drives are cheap nowadays.

The thing is, despite this feat of digital integration, I know there’s so much more that my house should be able to do, but can’t… and most of it is due to legal or policy restrictions that do little except inhibit innovation and preserve outmoded business models.

For instance, both my TiVo and my Blu-ray player have network connections. Neither, however, can play videos that I purchased from iTunes. Everything with a video output seems to support Netflix nowadays; where’s the AirPlay support? For that matter, why can’t the entire industry agree on a standard for sending high-def video locally over TCP/IP, and implement it everywhere?

My TiVo used to be able to record shows that it thought I’d like to watch. Since Time Warner implemented switched digital video, forcing me to accept a buggy “tuning adapter,” that function works rarely if ever, and almost never manages to find the high-def channels. Of course, it’s a bit of a crapshoot if some of those high-def channels will tune, or if the tuning adapter will punt on them. The sad thing is that the tuning adapter is little more than a customized cable modem, and I already have one of those in the house. There’s no technological reason why the TiVo can’t send its tuning requests to Time Warner via TCP/IP. My opinion is that Time Warner will take any action it can get away with that makes TiVo ownership painful, in hopes of renting its own substandard DVRs to customers instead.

TVs now come with Ethernet support to retrieve movies from Netflix and YouTube. Imagine if you could also use this capability to send video signals within the house: Networked televisions could all draw on the same feed from your TiVo to let you watch a show as you wander from living room to kitchen to laundry room without them being out of sync, and without huge investments in video distribution infrastructure.

Gigabit Ethernet switches are cheap. HDMI splitters are not.

I bought the VGA cable for my iPad. I could use it to put presentations on my TV, or YouTube videos, but not movies I bought from iTunes; apparently I’m not allowed to watch anything at resolutions above 480p in analog form any more, as I might bootleg videos that way. (Of course, if I’m technically competent enough to use an iPad and a VGA adapter with my television, I could probably find a way to copy that video in digital form if I were truly so inclined.)

There’s a vast market for “universal remote controls.” The technology in all my entertainment-center remotes is identical; why do I need to spend even more money on integration? Why can’t vendors sit down and create a universal standard for commands, the way that USB has a universal standard for keyboards and Bluetooth has a universal standard for headsets? For that matter, HDMI was supposed to enable this, by letting components talk to each other and share command information: insert a disc in a HDMI-equipped Blu-ray player, and it could tell your audio receiver and your TV to make appropriate settings changes, and the TV could pass back remote-control commands it receives from its remote. In practice, this technology only works if all your components come from one vendor, and even then it’s often half-baked.

There’s so much that could be done with our existing technology, if only we could keep scared businessmen from prohibiting it.

I’m not a rabid open-source advocate of the Stallman camp, the type who believes that all software must be free of charge and free of restrictions. Open-source software has its uses, and there are places where proprietary software is necessary to ensure growth of the ecosystem. Whether the software is free or not, though, the protocols need to be free and unencumbered. Proprietary devices are more useful, and thus more likely to be profitable, if purchasers can use them in novel and unanticipated ways. In the modern world, what your widget does isn’t as important as how it plays with others.

I only wish that consumer-electronics manufacturers would realize this.

Adams Fairacre Farms is a three-store chain in the Hudson Valley of New York.  It’s really more of a “Super Farm Market,” as they advertise themselves, than a grocery store.

The good

When you walk into Adams, you walk into the store’s best department:  the fruits and vegetables.  Adams works with local farms to stock as much local produce as possible.  In general, they have higher-quality produce than any of the chain stores at any given time of year, even if it isn’t local.  If you care about quality veg, one trip to Adams will convince you to make it a regular weekly stop.

Adams’ meat department is no comparison to the local competition; it rivals any dedicated butcher shop for variety and quality.  They stock both quality “store brand” meat—typically better than the premium national brands found at other stores—and high-end brands like Bell and Evans.  They typically stock a selection of USDA Prime beef, as well as local beef.  The meat department is well-staffed, and they will gladly handle special requests.  There’s also a full-service seafood department.

The delicatessen carries Boar’s Head products as their value line. Again, the quality, the selection, and the service beat the chain stores hands down.  They will make sandwiches to order.  There’s a selection of hot and cold foods.

There’s a cheese department with a wide range of gourmet cheeses.  A very good salad bar.  An on-site bakery.

The rest of Adams’ “grocery store” is relatively small, but they carry most items that a serious chef would need, if not with so much variety as a large chain store.  Typically, what they do carry are premium, local, or otherwise hard-to-find brands.  If you’re making a recipe that calls for an unusual ingredient, Adams should be your first stop.

Kitchen Store

The Kingston Adams has a small kitchen-goods store.  It’s a mixed bag; they carry some decent items, a fair amount of overpriced items (like CIA cookware), and a good dose of high-hype, low-quality items (Food Network branded stuff).  It’s neither as cheap as Bed Bath and Beyond, nor does it cater to the serious cook like local favorite Warren Cutlery.

Garden Center

The other half of Adams is the garden center.  The greenhouse and nursery stock a wide range of plants, all healthier than what you’ll find at the big-box home centers. They carry a range of other garden products, again emphasizing the premium lines such as Droll Yankees bird feeders and the upper end of the Weber grill range.

Checkout

Adams really shines at the checkout.  Although there are fewer lanes than the big stores, they’re well staffed, and the clerks know what they’re doing. It’s rare for lines to get more than two deep, and there’s usually little delay from checking out.  Like much of the store, the checkout is cramped, so bagging can be a challenge.  Many lines offer bagging staff, but you’re welcome to bag your own, and it may speed things up even more.  Adams offers a 5¢ discount for each reusable bag you use.

Unlike the chain stores, Adams doesn’t offer automated self-checkout.  You won’t miss it.

The Bad

Adams day-to-day prices are generally higher for identical items than any other local store.  Many of their products simply aren’t available at other local stores because they are premium or ultra-premium brands, and those products are usually considerably more expensive than what you’ll find at Hannaford or ShopRite.

While Adams has excellent vegetables, the small size of the chain means that they sometimes don’t have all the vegetables you might need for your menu.

The hot foods available range from good to merely edible.  This has gotten better over time, but it’s still a very hit-or-miss proposition.  The cold prepared foods are likewise highly variable.

Adams has a longstanding habit of not complying with the Ulster County retail pricing law.  It’s not unusual to find products that have no marked price, and no price on the shelf.  This is especially true in the frozen-foods and dairy areas.

The store gets very busy on weekends, when it draws a lot of traffic from New York City weekenders.  Unfortunately, that crowd has a… different standard of grocery-store etiquette.  This can make it frustrating to navigate the store and the parking lot.  The store’s parking lot becomes overcrowded at certain times on the weekends, around holidays, and most especially when the store runs special events like their annual garden show.

There is no dedicated bottle-return area.

Suggestions

Here’s what I’d like to see Adams change:

• Try to negotiate more competitive prices on some commodity items, like soda.  Work with vendors to ensure those items are consistently stocked.
• Improve the signage in the parking lot, to ease the traffic flow issues at peak times.
• Build a more consistent quality in the hot foods, perhaps preparing less at one time so it doesn’t dry out in the steam case.  (Go tour the Wegmans store in Pittsford, N.Y.; that’s how you do it.)
• Consider installing WiFi in the store.  Adams appeals to affluent buyers—the type that have iPhones and iPads and such, and WiFi appeals to them.
• Tell the folks at the deli counter that some people are hard of hearing, and they should push the button to advance the “take a ticket” number before they call it out.

Having lived in Rochester, I can’t help but judge every grocery store against Wegmans.  Wegmans isn’t perfect, but they’re better than everyone else.  In many ways, Adams comes close, albeit on a smaller scale.  That’s especially true in the vegetable department; not surprising, since both companies started as farm stands.  For me, saying a store is “like a small Wegmans” is high praise indeed.