So I call Apple Monday afternoon with my 15″ PowerBook white spots problem, right? The next day at 10:00 AM, the shipping kit shows up at my house. I come home at lunch and pack the laptop up, then call Airborne Express. It gets in to Apple at noon their time the next day. They ship it out the same day, and it’s back at my house, good as new, on Thursday morning. I almost left work to go home and get it, I was so excited. Man, call with a problem on Monday afternoon and get your restored unit back on Thursday morning. Pretty impressive. Name a PC manufacturer where you get that kind of response without being some corporate powerhouse. And trust me, even the response for corporate customers is not what it claims to be.
Yep, even with my own set of gripes about Apple, there are plenty of reasons that make me stick with them. By far they are the lesser of the many evils in the world of the computer manufacturer. Now if only they would give me a way to use iDVD with an external burner… 8^)

For a nice memory jogger, head over to Apple’s site and download the re-released 1984 ad. Do you remember it? I do. I appreciate it even more now, realizing that it was made 20 years ago. That also reminds me that I vividly remember something like a TV ad that aired 20 years ago, which is a separate train of thought altogether. Anyway, it’s pretty neat, and true to form, there’s a little something extra from the gang in Cupertino. See if you catch it.

I am using my 17″ PowerBook while my 15″ is being repaired. I forgot how nice this huge screen is! That is, at least when I am looking at it. When I am carrying it, I definitely can tell it’s not the 15. That 15″ is really the sweetspot for the geek who hauls his notebook everywhere (me). Getting my data and apps switched over to the 17 was relatively painless, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and JBoss.

Alas, I have confirmed that my new 15″ PowerBook is among those that have the notorious white spot problem. If you haven’t heard about it, you can check out the equally-melodramatic CNET and ZDNet article archives, or for a more technical, level-headed explanation check MacFixIt. Thanks to the Pillarist for that weblog post that took me to the MacFixIt article.
It sucks, but I am sure that Apple will handle it as well as they did the LCD problem I had in 2001 with my Titanium PowerBook.

In an effort to reduce the number of application servers running on my PowerBook, I decided to not install JRun and try to use ColdFusion MX Server on JBoss, the open source J2EE server that ships with Panther. Panther ships with 3.2.2 Release Candidate 2. Using the EAR deployment method with ColdFusion MX Server’s install, I was able to deploy CFMX. Woohoo! Copying the cfusion.ear file to the deploy directory enabled CFMX to launch without issue. I then stepped through the 6.1 setup wizard and away I went. However, upon rebooting the machine, I realized the CFMX was redeployed, and I had to step through the configuration process all over again.
I purchased a JBoss book last night that will hopefully unravel this mystery for me. More to follow…