The MacWorld keynote always makes a big splash. You can set your watch by it, not to mention the stock market. And even the MacWorld-uninitiated have been dealing with iPhone hype every summer since 2007.

This is all to say that if Apple was going to annoy me, they’ve had ample opportunity well before this iPad thing. But for me, Apple’s hype machine remained a faint noise in the background until my new job in 2007 assigned me a MacBook Pro as a work laptop. Since I’m a longtime Linux user, the Mac OS took some getting used to, but soon I actually started enjoying it. And when I drunkenly dunked my precious Nokia N95 in the anti-hangover water by my bedstand in June of ’08, I ended up replacing it with a 3G iPhone, which I used for over a year.

I enjoyed it. I got myself a bunch of apps just like everyone else. But about six months ago, the Apple/Google rivalry began over the Google Voice iPhone app.

That did me in. I couldn’t help feeling that Apple was abusing its power as a market influencer, once again moving us away from openness and interoperability. Nobody said this better than Fake Steve Jobs. I got really mad and cancelled my iPhone contract (and my AT&T landline), sold the 3G on Craigslist, sold my MacBook Pro, sold my Apple stock.

It felt really good.

But while I’d realized what annoyed me about Apple’s product policies, I still hadn’t put my finger on why Apple’s hype machine bugged me so much. After all, it’s just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It doesn’t move me or the people I respect to buy their products.

But with today’s iPad keynote, I finally realized why. After all, tablets are nothing new. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad is hardly a market breakthrough. Tablets? E-book readers? That’s so three years ago. Movies on the go? Wait, doesn’t everybody’s laptop do that now? Last time I was on a plane, it sure seemed like it.

No, what bugs me about Apple is that they’ve figured out how to cater to that particular thing I hate about Americans: tell them [this is good] in the right way, and it becomes true. In the last couple of years, Apple has transformed itself from an innovator of never-before-seen hardware and groundbreaking UIs into a gently smiling, well-connected uncle you see at the family reunion who explains that the groundbreaking tech of the last year is now mainstream enough to buy.

I’m hardly an HP or Amazon apologist. But I hate it when true innovators don’t get their due. I even feel bad for Larry Ellison and his premature invention of the NC. Apple knocked it out of the parck when they invented the iPhone. But what have they done for us lately? Right now, it seems we’re doing a lot more for them.

After some setbacks, I finally managed to get gcalsync to work! Here’s what I did:

1. Install the J9 Exchanger along with the JSR75 extensions.
• JVM/JavaVMCheck_enUS.prc
• JVM/J9JavaVMMidp20.prc
• JSR75/fileconnect.prc
• JSR75/pimop.prc
• JSR75/PIMPrefs.prc
2. Soft-reset your Treo.
3. Download the gcalsync.jar file straight to your Treo.
4. Open the IBM J9 Exchanger program and launch the gcalsync midlet.
5. Set your time zone offset: USA/Pacific time, for example, requires -08:00 for both upload and download.

That’s it! This worked for me. The only problems I’ve seen so far:

• All-day events don’t seem to obey the time zone offset.
• Recurring events aren’t handled.

I welcome any comments or further tips you might have.

“Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered[...]. This is important to us, because we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance sheet liability.”

Now, you know and I know that this is just idle chatter until Ballmer points out what, exactly, is the source of the liability. Novell is just a bunch of idiots who are afraid of getting humiliated by M$ again. And anyway, we’ve been through this once with SCO, who happily watched its stock climb (briefly) during its finger-pointing, wolf-crying infringement claims and frenzied cashing of checks sent in by terrified “infringers” (some of whom later demanded their money back!). Do we have to go through this again?

I got me one of them free wireless things so I could take it apart. I felt bad for about three seconds that I wasn’t going to hook it up to my DSL. Now that I see that people are getting charged to use the wireless I’m supposed to hook up to my broadband, it’s out with the scissors and screwdriver.

$ an -l2 gruolnbwuf
fur blowgun

Now, someone needs to stop me from registering “furblowgun.com”.
This is what happens when a system administrator doesn’t like its job.