David Alison's Blog

I've mentioned before that my lovely wife of 22 years is both brilliant and technically challenged. Whenever there is the slightest problem with technology—whether it's switching the inputs on our TV or dealing with the smallest of issues on her Windows XP machine—I hear the "David...!" yell. This has led me to consider getting my wife a Mac to replace the HP laptop she has used for a couple of years now. I would love to get her on the same platform that I'm on and get her to enjoy the Mac experience I have had so much fun with. I'm also a realist and came to the conclusion months ago that she will simply not enjoy the switch to a Mac unless it was something she really wanted. It's not that she's anti-Apple; she has been an iPod user for years and loves them. It's just that unlike me her computer is purely a utility, something that is used to accomplish her goals. Given that, a Mac would likely be a challenge for her because it is just different e...

Last week the proverbial last straw was placed on my back by Sprint. Though they have tried like crazy to retain my business over the years and I still had 4 phones under contract I had had enough. At our home on the Eastern Shore of Delaware our signal had been deteriorating for many months, to the point where you could only maintain a phone call for 15-20 seconds. People would call, you'd look at the phone and see two bars, start to talk and POOF! The call would fail mid-sentence. Fan-flippin-tastic. Five different phones, all got the same result. I called Sprint to complain. The first person I spoke to told me that he would be happy to give me additional minutes on my account to compensate for the problem. Though a nice gesture, I declined because the phones were basically useless unless you liked to carry on Twitter like conversations with everyone. He suggested I speak to someone in the technical support group and transferred me over there. After a lengthy hold a nice guy from...

Since I got my iPod Touch last month it has quickly worked its way into my daily use. Though I still keep the iPod Nano around for running, the Touch is my preferred device for general entertainment and music listening, especially if I'm within reach of a WiFi point I can access. On Saturday I upgraded the software on it to 2.0 and downloaded a couple of the free applications from the iTunes store. I'll talk about the ones I like in a future post. Overall I do like the new software. The ability to download applications directly from the App Store into my iPod through WiFi is fantastic. If I download an application and then later connect to iTunes it asks me if I also want to place the application into iTunes so that I have it there as well. It's very nicely implemented. The only problem that I've encountered so far is that the WiFi connection is now a bit unstable initially. Whereas before I could pop into Mail or Safari every time and it simply worked, now very often...