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The Anti-Fry's

Pat called me at the office earlier this week. The only reason he wanted to talk was to tell me about his trip to the Apple store. "It was like the anti-Fry's," he said. "No -- it was like Frys is supposed to be. Everything is clean and bright... and the people in the store are there to help you, not keep you from stealing."

Well, I couldn't get him to shut up until I promised to go with him. "Pat," I said, "you know this is pointless. We both have relatively new computers. Neither of us can justify buying a new Mac. Going to the Apple Store is like, technology porn. Look-but-don't-touch. What's the point?"

But I went anyway. And I have to say, I was impressed with the new iMac. My favorite part was not the CD/DVD/read/write drive. Not the amazing swivel arm or the sharp flatscreen. Not the pretty OSX graphics. No, I think I liked the UNIX terminal window. Who is it that finally layers a modern user interface on UNIX? Not my company. Not HP, IBM, or SGI. Not GNOME or KDE. No... it's Apple. BSD with Java 1.3.1 & Apache built-in. Hot damn.

Alrighty, that's about it. Time to head out for the evening. Just one more thing -- I've added a custom 404 error page. The first and only Perl program I've ever written. It provides a random haiku every time you try to access a nonexistent file on this site. Give it a try: http://www.goer.org/sdlkfej.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 18, 2002 at 10:59 AM