Relocation

Just a cross-post to my other blog:

Relocation

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Secondhand Data

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For the last two days, I’ve been bombarded with RSS feeds about a recent study from the NPD Group. According to the NPD Group’s report (and about a thousand blogs regurgitating the information), “Nearly 85 Percent of All Apple Households Also Own a Windows PC.” While this could certainly be possible, nobody seems to have seen the original report; they’ve just seen NPD’s resulting press release . it really makes me wonder how well the release reflects reality. Let’s take my household, for example: I don’t think myself a Mac bigot, but at present, all of our functional computers happen to be Macs. Specifically, we currently own 11 computers: 10 Apple Macintoshes (ages 2-18), plus one partially assembled “white box” (read: generic) PC. The “white box” is one of my eternal projects and just sits in the closet; it doesn’t even have a motherboard or a hard drive at the moment, let alone an operating system. So that leaves us with the ten Macs. Here’s the OS breakdown, in numbers of instal...
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The Electoral College

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Today’s question comes from a high-school friend of mine, Erin Solej. She asks: “Jeff, I remember you commenting on the necessity of the electoral college, but I want to understand it better because I don't see how my vote counts with this system. Of course, I will vote, but can you please post your thoughts on this.” This is seriously a great question, Erin. I hear about this all the time—people don’t understand the Electoral College, and since people tend to fear what they don’t understand, a lot of them want to do away with it. On this point, though, I must respectfully disagree. Knowledge brings familiarity, and frankly, the Electoral College isn’t nearly as bad as some of the more outspoken among us make it out to be. So Erin, thank you so much for your question. Per your request, here are my thoughts: Back when our nation was still in diapers and the Constitution was still being written, there arose a big controversy between the states regarding representation. Some s...
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Think Different.

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Remember those old Apple ads, back in the ’90s, that encouraged us to “Think Different”? I certainly don’t mean to put the cart before the horse, but I’m wondering if I took that counsel a bit too much to heart, because advertising just doesn’t seem to work on me these days. Consider the following, all three of which happened in the last hour. As I was driving down the road with my family, I saw an ad for a car. I don’t have the slightest clue what kind of car it was (which says something about the overall effectiveness of the ad), but the tag line was: “Hate Sitting In Traffic Even More.” I was like, “Okay… so you’re saying that if I buy this car, the unenjoyable parts of my life will become even less enjoyable? Why wouldn’t I just save a couple Chases and use the car I already have?” Anna, it must be said, understood the ad as I can only assume it was intended: “This car is such a pleasure to drive, sitting in traffic will be horrible by comparison.” More power to her, but do you rea...
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