Aloha is a tourist gimmick. Mahalo means: Give me tip.

Hawaii is full of rude, tip-hungry rednecks. I thought the impression would fade once i left Oahu for Kaua’i, but it just got WORSE.

Beautiful islands, sad, pissy, people.

“Toshiba bar? What do the girls look there”. What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t like asians?

I thought it really says something when a company runs it’s business on it’s own products.

Pretty much right after the Apple software took over our computer the thing stopped working. Everytime we tried to re-boot it there was a cute little picture of an IPod with a sad face.

Of course there is no manual, you have to navigate through their ponderous help site. The very helpful sight told us it was dead. We called and talked to a tech. We told him about the sad face and he said that meant it was dead. Pretty technical so far.

We couldn’t exchange it for a new one because we had the thing for an excessively long time, about 6 weeks, which meant it had last for a reasonable amount of time. We could mail it in for exchange with a rebuilt one (one that had died like ours but been resurrected) or we could go to an Apple store.

We live in Maryland, with a population of around 4.5 million people. There are two Apple stores in the Baltimore-Annapolis region. We went to the one in Towson Mall. We got there around 7:30. They have no signs or directions inside the store – very hip.

We went to the back of the store and waited in line for around 20 minutes. When we got to the clerk and told him our problem he said that he was sorry but we had to come back some other day. You see the store was closing at 8:30 (though the mall closes at 9:00)

“Yeah?” I said. It was now 8:00.

“Well, you need to exchange this and all of our Geniuses are with customers. There isn’t enough time for a Genius to help you before we close.”

I expressed astonishment that Apple needs to hire real live geniuses to take a bad Ipod back and give a good (rebuilt, remember) Ipod back to the customer. His reply was essentially, tough shit, you want an Apple then you gotta pay the dues.

I gave the busted Ipod to away and they danced the dance to have it replace. My son uses an RCA flash drive MP3. Works great and doesn’t screw up the PC. And we don’t ever feel tempted to buy all the I-Shit that every merchant on the planet is hawking.

Sorry, Steve et al. You may be rich but your company sucks.

10 Ways Switching to a Mac Will Improve Your Life.

dood, not cool.

even if she was being snooty & smart alecky, wanting to punch girls in the face is not cool.

so apple has done a retail paradigm shift — store full of wonderful, shiny items that bring back your sense of child-like wonder with the universe, but no cash registers. actually, i kinda like that. you’re just not used to it. so there are some glitches to work out (and bitches to work out, like yourself). big deal. soon all stores will catch on and people will look at those old cash register thingies and wonder why we ever used them.

and not being able to get the box open from the correct side means you = wus.