A sudden taste of what our friends up North just got

It has been snowing for the past two hours here. Yes, I typed snowing. Here. In Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia, Capital of the New (and very Deep) South. Big, wet, frosty flakes that stick and show no sign of stopping as yet. It started earlier today up in the north Georgia mountains and made its way down to the city around quitting time. Boy, when Mama Nature finally decides to drop snow on us and turn "Hot-lanta" into a winter wonderland, she does NOT mess around.

If this keeps up all night, I fully expect to drag myself out of bed in the morning, peer out the front-room window and go "What the FUCK?!?" in a way I have not done in over four years, at least. My new employer may be closed tomorrow in that event; if that happens; if so, I dearly hope and pray we will all be paid for the lost day...but I won't hold my breath waiting.

In the meanwhile, I will cozy up with the load of groceries I was finally able to buy for the first time in weeks, have a cup of hot cocoa and enjoy it.

MacBook Air: Looks nice, Steve, but I'll pass on the Kool-Aid this time

(Reposted from junquegrrl's LJ replies) So yesterday Apple Inc. honcho Steve Jobs, as is his wont, dropped a bombshell of a new product announcement at the annual midwinter Macworld Expo in San Francisco: the thinnest, lightest laptop computer ever, the Macbook Air.

Pretty it surely is, as are all the things that come out of the House of Jobs. And thin and light it surely is; at its thickest point it measures only about 2/3 of an inch, and can be slipped into an interoffice envelope (though why anyone would send something this expensive—$1,799 for the base model—anywhere that way, or carry it around with such flimsy [non-]protection, utterly escapes me).

But even if I hadn't just bought a WinBlows laptop last month and/or didn't already have a Mac mini at home, this new toy has one big fat stinking deal-breaker from my POV: No CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive! You're expected to use Bluetooth or AirPort Extreme to pull files and install apps from elsewhere, and just rent or buy movies online and store them internally...or slave another computer's optical-disc drive to the Macbook Air using something called Remote Disc. The only way you can get anything into or out of the thing if the wireless dinguses stop working is to shell out more $$$ for an optional external peripheral. When you've just dropped $1,800 on a new piece of hardware, this is emphatically NOT something you want to hear.

 This is the latest iteration of the whole "come live in the wireless world with us cool kids" meme Jobs & Co. have been trying to force down all our throats since the first Mac came out with no floppy drive a few years back. Someone needs to whap Steverino over the noggin with the ole clue-by-four to make him once and for all realize that no, not all of us out here can afford the fancy super-fast T1 lines and terabyte hard drives he probably has in his office and at home, and we still need optical media, dammit!!

A successful business gives its customers what they tell it they need; it doesn't try to tell them what it thinks they need or don't. But apparently, this rule does not apply to Apple, such is its historic accumulation of coolth in the computing community and the business world...and the power of the patented Jobs Reality Distortion Field™.

Sorry...rant over now.

UPDATE, 1/17. 5:07p: ZDNet's David Morgenstern, who claims to have been watching Apple and the Mac market for over two decades, asserts in his latest blog article that anyone who gets upset that the MacBook Air doesn't have FireWire, CD/DVD drive, RAM upgrade slot etc. is being a dumbass. He sees this as being an "elite" machine for guys in corner offices who value style over substance and are more concerned with impressing others with their newest execu-toy than in actually getting work done. Is he right?