Apple

Been meaning to post something about the iPhone purchasing experience. On the day the iPhone 3G was released, I went to an AT&T store and placed an order for two phones, and received them 3 days later. The salesperson I dealt with was an absolute professional, and a pleasure to work with during the provisioning and transfer process (I was formerly on Verizon). Overall, it was just about the easiest process ever, which is why I've been confused by reports of people having a difficult time or still waiting in line. There's a simple remedy: go to an AT&T store.

For everyone getting ready to rid themselves of an iPhone (for whatever reason), please remember: inside the iPhone is simple flash memory. This memory is fairly recoverable, even when a restore is run to "wipe" the contents. WIth the ability to "jailbreak" an iPhone and access the filesystem, the problem of leaving sensitive data on the device becomes a little more problematic.

At this stage, I'd recommend waiting until the version 2 software ships and seeing if there's a true secure wipe before flipping a used iPhone.

Between writing the Advanced Sysadmin book, writing for MacTech and Editing at Mactech (and other sundry things), these days, I live in Microsoft Word. After Macworld this year, I wound up with a few copies of Office 2008 and immediately started using Word 2008. Overall, I'm pretty happy. It's Intel native (although it takes longer to launch - ?!?), and has some nicer features than 2004 (not many, though). If I had to purchase it with my own $$, I wouldn't have. Unfortunately, Word is so deep seated that it's sometimes mandatory, depending on who you're working with.

I'm extremely happy to say that I'm in the process of writing one of the official reference guides for Apple's high level ACSA certification: Advanced System Administrator, v10.5.

Microsoft got into the 'blog thing' pretty heavy about two years ago and I still keep finding some Microsoft blog that I haven't stumbled across quite yet. Most of them are quite good, too. This particular entry is useful, and more in line with what I tend to handle: How does Entourage Work? It steps through the various ports and protocols that Entourage uses when connecting to an Exchange Server.

As mentioned in my initial posting, full video of Macworld sessions would be made available. Well, it looks like certain sessions have been made available. Thus far, only my collaboration session has been made available:

IT812: Using Collaboration Services on Mac OS X Server

At a session, people always ask if I'm going to be posting the slides. While I always do, I have long said that slides without the talk are typically of little use. Apparently, this year, all sessions but the "Power User" sessions will be available for download - slides and audio - for free! Exciting!

If, however, you just can't wait, I have both of my session slides available here:

LI222: Learning the Terminal ("Basic Foundation in Command-line Skills as it Relates to OS X")

Every Macworld attendee typically comes away from Macworld with something that they personally dig very much. While there were a lot of great announcements at the show, there are two in particular that stand out to me:

1. Garmin reenters the Mac GPS market.

2. MacSpeech licenses the Dragon speech engine.

    I finally made a little time to start cleaning out the "computer graveyard" that has been growing a bit too large in my basement. It was actually a sobering experience in many ways.