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The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them. Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity , we reported earlier this week . And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber , the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source. Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith , SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta . And lots more as well , only a few of which we’ve reported . The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources. If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks. The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip . CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase

Filed under: MobileMe Many folks were excited when Apple announced Back to My Mac as part of MobileMe . Being able to remotely access your Mac from anywhere sounded like magic. We’re used to products from Apple that “just work” but for most people most of the time, Back to My Mac “just doesn’t.” To maximize your chances, you’re supposed to use a supported router , but even that’s no guarantee. At home I have an Airport Extreme Base Station (Wireless-N), and at the office I have an Airport Extreme Dual-Band model. I don’t think it’s possible to get a “more compliant” setup, yet I still can’t get it to work most of the time. Under the adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I took a chance and signed up for a free account with DynDNS . DynDNS gives you a free hostname which will go to your computer even when your IP address changes. There are scads of DynDNS domain names available , but for the purposes of this example, let’s assume that your domain name is imac.homeip.net . After you’ve signed up for your free account and chosen a hostname, download and install the DynDNS Updater for Mac and install it on the machine you want to access via Back to My Mac. (If you want to do this for more than one computer, you will need a different DynDNS hostname for each computer. You can get up to five at no cost.) Once you have it running, make sure that it has updated, and then switch to your other Mac. You could launch Screen Sharing.app directly from /System/Library/CoreServices, but a much better suggestion is to install the free ScreenSharingMenulet which will sit in your menu bar. ScreenSharingMenulet will remember hosts that you have previously connected to, meaning that you don’t have to re-type the hostnames. Click on the menu bar icon, select “New Connection…” and then enter your DynDNS hostname (i.e. imac.homeip.net ) and check the “Add to My Computers” box so it will appear in the My Computers sub-menu in the future. Click “Connect” and cross your fingers. If it still doesn’t work, I have a few more suggestions, but I warn you, we’re going to get a little technical here. First, you’re going to want to setup a DHCP Reservation for the computer you are trying to connect to . The process isn’t very difficult. Essentially what you are doing is telling the router to always assign the same IP address to the computer you are trying to access. After you have done that, tell the router to send all traffic directly to that computer. On the Airport Express this is called the “Default Host” and is found on the Internet Tab under “NAT” but other routers have different names for it (I believe Linksys routers refer to this as the “DMZ” host. Check your router’s documentation if you’re not sure.) Warning: once you do this you are bypassing your router’s firewall. Mac OS X has a firewall, but it is not enabled by default. Launch System Preferences and click on the Security panel followed by Firewall tab. If it doesn’t say “Firewall: On” be sure to enable it. If all else fails, you might want to try another direction: Back to My Mac through iChat . I haven’t actually tried that, but it’s another option. I can’t explain why using a DynDNS domain name works more reliably than the built-in Bonjour sharing/connecting method, but after days of unsuccessfully trying to connect to my work computer, I have been able to connect via DynDNS without fail. As my Dad taught me long ago, “A good strategy is that which works.” TUAW Use DynDNS for better success with Back To My Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

Sadly this isn’t the first time I’ve had pictures of Julie Bowen , the mom from the show Modern Family , on the site playing in the ocean in her bikini. Luckily this time she’s at least giving us a good look at her mom boobs. These pictures don’t do her justice, I’ve watched the show and she’s actually kinda hot. Anyhow, I don’t know much about her but she’s somewhat of a celebrity now and she’s in a bathing suit so it’s my job to post pictures of her. She can thank me on Twitter .

Filed under: Odds and ends , Freeware , iPad That’s the word from the giant U.S. bookseller. There is already a version for the iPhone and iPod touch, and Barnes & Noble says customers can expect the free software around the time of the iPad launch. The reader will give B&N customers access to more than a million eBooks, as well as selected newspapers and magazines. The Barnes 7 Noble Nook , which competes with the Amazon Kindle , has only been out a short time, but if the iPad is a success a heck of a lot more people may be reading B&N books on Apple’s device rather than the Nook. Now we have to wait and see if there is a Kindle app for the iPad (other than the already-released and popular Kindle app for iPhone ), but I think it is a foregone conclusion. It sounds like Apple is going to allow these competing book apps on the iPad, rather than forcing people to only use the iBooks store; if so, that’s a good thing. [Via Engadget ] TUAW Barnes & Noble eReader for iPad coming soon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

In December of 2008, shortly after receiving a Golden Globe nomination for his turn as hirsute studio chief Les Grossman in ” Tropic Thunder ,” Tom Cruise revealed that he and the film’s writer/director/star Ben Stiller were kicking around ideas to do another project with the Grossman character. “Ben and I are always talking about what we can do with Les,” Cruise told MTV News at the time. “Do we do some viral video with Les?” We haven’t heard any movement on this possibility, so when we had a chance to speak with Stiller while he was promoting his upcoming indie, “Greenberg,” we put the question to him. Anything shaking with the Grossman project? “We’re playing around with ideas for a Les Grossman something,” Stiller said. “Maybe a movie, maybe some Internet stuff. I love that character and Tom, I think, is just insanely funny doing that guy. And I think he’s game for it too.” Is this just idle talk from Stiller? Or have their ideas for Grossman morphed from a few Internet shorts to an actual theatrical spin-off? We’ll remain cautiously optimistic and simply be happy knowing that Stiller and Cruise are still keeping alive the idea of resurrecting the classically pompous and foul-mouthed Grossman character a year and a half after “Tropic Thunder” opened.

Filed under: iPhone , iPod touch , App Review The iPhone might be the most amazing computer you can slip into your jeans, but there are some things it just doesn’t do very well. For example, you can’t really get into a bluffing match against the machine, at least not with the iPhone/iPod touch app Viva il Re ($1.99). Here’s what we mean. Viva il Re (which means “Long live the King” in Italian) is a well-designed board game by Stefano Luperto that has been beautifully ported to the iPhone by by Pro-netics S.p.A. The object is to score points and hopefully get one of your characters to become the new king, because the old king has decided to retire (can kings do that?). With the retirement announcement, “the pirouette for succession begins!” according to the official game setup. Each player is secretly hoping one of their six characters manages to reach the top, out of 13 total. When you play the board game version of Viva il Re, called King Me! , the reasonably slow pace of the game and the face-to-face interaction means that there is time to develop guesses about which characters each player is hoping will take the throne. While the app looks almost exactly like the tabletop version and most of the functionally is the same, it’s just not as much fun to compete against bots as it is to outwit other people. Continue reading and see if you agree. Gallery: Viva il Re The Game The game is played over one or three rounds, with each round ending with the election of a new king (yes, we know, kings don’t usually get elected, but work with us here). To start the game, each player gets a card listing six names. These are the characters that will score you points at the end of the game, so the higher you can get them in the castle, the better. The castle (game board) is made up of seven sections, numbered 0-5 and 10. The lower six floors are where the characters spend most of their time. In the set-up phase of the game, players place a character on a floor numbered 1-4 (each player will place the same numbers of characters, and the extras start on floor zero). Once everyone has taken their place, movement starts. Now, with each turn you can move any character up one, and only one, floor. The only time you can’t do this is when a floor you want to move to is full with four characters already. Obviously, you want to get all of your characters as high in the castle as possible, because they will each score points equal to the floor they are on when the round ends. When does this happen? When a new king is crowned. Each time a character is moved to the top floor, an election is held. You can always vote “yes,” but are limited to voting “no” to a small number of times based on how many players are in the game (e.g., with three players, you can vote “no” four times, with six, just twice). As soon as everyone votes yes on a character, total up your points and start a new round. If, however, at least one person votes “no,” that character is removed from the castle – and scores nothing – and the game continues. One special rule here: if it’s the last round in a game, if you manage to score zero points from characters, you get a bonus of 33 points. Even royalty like to shoot the moon, apparently. The game mechanics are simple enough, and the game is so enjoyable that people have made their own homemade boards that incorporate Star Trek or cute little animals . Board gamers are a pretty dedicated bunch, and you can guess that there’s something here worth keeping if they go ahead and re-theme a game. To explore the game in an online, turn-based setting, click here of download the game rules summary in PDF . The App As we said, when you go through all these steps with friends around a table, it can get pretty intense, especially once a few rounds of voting have passed. When playing the iPhone app version, though, everything moves a little too fast and the “opponents” (bots) don’t have any sort of personality to make you feel like you’re playing a bluffing game. Instead, it becomes a simple game of moving your characters up and voting now and again. Sure, this sounds like pretty much the same thing, but if just feels very different and not in a good way. The Toilet expansion is also missing. There are some nice digital-only touches. Instead of needing to remember who your characters are, they are conveniently highlighted in yellow on the game board. This makes your turns much quicker, since there’s no need to refer back to your list of candidates. It’s impossible to know if the bots ever vote “yes” to a character that isn’t on their card so as to hold on to a “no” card for later while expecting at least one other player to decline the new king, but it appears they do. We played some games where a round ended much earlier than expected, something that is certainly reminiscent of the tabletop version. The app also doesn’t remember settings – the number of players or rounds selected – from game to game, so you need to reselect them each time. Not cool. Also, each time you move a character to another level, the game automatically shifts it to the leftmost open spot on that level. This isn’t a real problem, just kind of silly. The game’s music is harmless and appropriately medieval-sounding, but why can’t we listen to iTunes while playing? This is quickly becoming our number one annoyance with iPhone games. We’re carrying around gigs of music for a reason, my friends, and we probably like our tunes better than your game’s soundtrack. On the table, King Me! is a fun and light “filler” game. On the iPhone, though, it falls flat. The main flaw of Viva il Re is that it’s for one player only. While it would make the game take longer, pass-n-play does not seem like it would be that hard to implement, and it would certainly turn Viva il Re from a C+ game into an A- in a hurry. At the very least, playing other opponents over a network would be nice. This is an interactive game, and any digital version needs to respect that. For now, we’re voting “no.” TUAW Review: Viva il Re board game app asks to be crowned originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

Filed under: Internet Tools Bookmarklets are one of my favorite things. I have an entire folder of them in my Safari Bookmark Bar for Instapaper and Readability and bit.ly and Pukka and Tumblr and … well, you get the idea. They’re incredibly handy for doing “something” with the current webpage that you are viewing, or quickly looking up other information. Quix has come up with a way to make them even better. It calls itself “Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids” and it’s hard to argue with that description. Imagine all of your bookmarklets together in one, and being able to come up with shortcuts to trigger each one. The interface is extremely minimal: a javascript popup window with a text input space. What you type in that space dictates what happens next. Quix comes with a bunch of commands already built-in , and using them is a breeze. The syntax couldn’t be simpler: just type a command shortcut (such as “imdb”) followed by a word or words (like “ghostbusters” or “raiders of the lost ark”), then press Return. As Jeff Goldblum used to say “There’s no step three.” Some of the other built-in commands: Search IMDB: “imdb search word(s) ” Search Google: “g search word(s) ” Search Google Images: “img search word(s) ” Search Wikipedia: “w search word(s) ” Search only the current site using Google: “gs search word(s) ” Reformat the current page using Readability: “read” Share on Tumblr: “tumblr” Share on Facebook: “fb” Share on Delicious: “db” Clip current page in Evernote: “evernote” There are scads more for shortening links, sending the page to other programs like CSSEdit, MarsEdit, Pukka, Tweetie, or many others. and if you don’t find the one you want, you can add your own using Quix’s easy syntax in a plain text file ( Mine is available for anyone who wants to use it.) If you still are not convinced, checkout their two minute video which shows it in action. By the time I finished watching it, I was already sold. Instead of an entire folder of bookmarklets, I have one for Quix, which does everything that I did before, and more. Oh, and one more thing: since this is just javascript, it also works on Mobile Safari on the iPhone. Ever tried to find a specific word on a long page of text in Mobile Safari? It can be a real hassle. With Quix, just type “find search word(s) ” and Quix will highlight all instances of the word on the current page and show you the first one. Quix is incredibly handy. Check it out at Quixapp.com . TUAW Quix makes bookmarklets even easier to use originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

Last year it was rumored that the Peter Jackson -produced Guillermo del Toro -directed two-film adaptation of The Hobbit would be filmed in 3D. del Toro was quick to deny the claims , stating “we are not talking about 3D, we are NOT writing the screenplay for 3D right now- we are hiring my DoP Guillermo Navarro to shoot the film and we are not discussing 3D with him either or with WETA digital or WB or anyone else.” Guillermo noted at the time that “after Avatar the market may change and” they might “start discussing 3D down the line.” He promised that if a day should ever come around, he would inform the Lord of the Rings fan community on the TORN forums. Well, Avatar came and went, taking over $2.5 billion worldwide, and that day has come… del Toro wrote the following on TheOneRing.net forums: I wouldn’t read much on it just yet, but now, after all this time, after AVATAR doing the Box Office it did, we have had enquires from above about The Hobbit being in 3-D. No impositions or heavy leaning. Just enquires. Just fulfilling my promise to let you all know if discussions ever started.  Cheers,  GDT I’m assuming that MGM/Warner Bros will decide to shoot the film in 3D, or at very least, create the 3D in post production. Thanks to Andrea Francesco Berni for the tip. Tobey Maguire is not Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. Really! Peter Jackson Says Spielberg’s Tintin Has Finished Filming, Computer Animation Will Take Two Years, Updates on Hobbit Brian Cox to Play a Dwarf in The Hobbit? Tolkien Family and New Line Settle Lord of the Rings Lawsuit Guillermo del Toro Denies 3D/Casting Rumors, Names DP, and Talks Avatar Rumor: Peter Jackson To Direct New Middle Earth Film, Linking The Hobbit To Rings?

Editor’s note : Guest author Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of video site WatchMojo . Below are his picks for the ten most likely M&A deals in online video. Previously, he wrote a series if posts about the state of online video (Part I , II , III , and IV ). Which online video companies will get bought in 2010?   Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers.  Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner. Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins. Right now, as the chart above shows (click to enlarge), there are two types of online video companies: those with sky-high ad rates but fairly limited inventory (company A) and those with huge inventory but woeful monetization (company B). Companies can extend profitability through technology, ad solutions or content. With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. 1. Demand Media will acquire Tremor Media Demand Media has raised $355 million but to this day still generates the bulk of its revenue from its domain registrar unit, eNom. However, it is trying to move into the content business, with its “Content Farm” strategy getting a lot of attention . Demand Media’s existing content lends itself better to an arbitrage strategy built around Google marketing and monetization, but over time it will want to do a better job entering both display and video advertising and it will do that by buying one of the many, many video ad networks out there. Brightroll, which is focused on brands, is one option.  Tremor is another, focusing on reach.  That strategy should fit well with Demand Media’s modus operandi.  Tremor Media’s ads reach 177.6 million uniques, or 85% of internet users. 2. Lagardere Groupe will acquire Dailymotion At first glance, French media conglomerate Lagardere seemingly sees no value in communities as a marketing platform: “There is no clear business model because you have a huge, massive audience, but it is not a marketing community,” says to Lagardere’s Chief Financial Officer Dominique D’Hinnin. Monsieur D’Hinnin might be right, but never underestimate France’s sense of nationalism. Dailymotion is France’s answer to YouTube and it has taken steps to reduce its share of user-generated and pirated content in favor of professional videos. (Disclosure: Dailymotion is also one of WatchMojo’s distribution partners). With $68.5M in funding—including a tidy sum from Le Fonds Strategique d’investissement, which is an investing arm of the French State—you can imagine that one of the pillars of the French media landscape, Lagardere Groupe could eventually step in and acquire Dailymotion despite its admitted monetization problems: “At the moment, we are poor at monetising our audience,” admits Dailymotion CEO Cedric Tournay. Lagardere could help with that provided Dailymotion can continue to de-emphasize its less advertiser-friendly content. Additionally, Lagardere will be able to leverage Dailymotion’s audience to promote its own content: the company owns Hachette along with numerous other media entities. 3. Scripps will acquire 5Min When 5Min (another one of our distribution partners) launched, it focused on user-generated how-to content. Thankfully for them, they have since moved away from that and currently mesh a) aggregated premium and super premium content with b) their monetization engine, a strategy which has propelled 5Min to become a Top 10 comScore video company. Scripps is a producer of super premium content, and like Discovery Holdings, it might prefer to distribute its programming through TV and cable. But, with consumers viewing more and more videos on the Web, it will need more content for its sites and will look for more inventory online. The two companies already have a strategic deal in place, so they have some familiarity with each other. 4. Google will acquire Ooyala Last year it was rumored that Google was going to acquire Brightcove for $500-700M. That was always unlikely because many of Brightcove’s financial backers are the very same media companies that view Google as the bane of their existence.  Moreover, Google makes a lot of acquisitions but rarely are they large (YouTube, DoubleClick and AdMob being the exceptions). A more logical fit to expand its video foothold would be Ooyala , which competes with Brightcove and includes Glam Media and others as clients… and was founded by a former Google executive. Google has the consumer video market cornered with YouTube.  Iit could leverage Ooyala to go after the corporate market by undercutting Brightcove. 5. Microsoft will acquire Brightcove The consolidation in ad services peaked with Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s $6B acquisition of aQuantive. After selling ad agency unit Razorfish, today aQuantive is Microsoft Advertising , and as advertising continues to move into video, MSFT will probably want to offer a video content management to go along with the Atlas ad serving platform.  That is where Brightcove fits in. If you think about it, Google owns video search by way of its YouTube acquisition. Microsoft wants to push into cloud computing and at least conceptually, owning Brightcove would give it a legitimate cloud computing foothold in professional video content with no real threat to any of its core businesses. It could also better integrate Brightcove (which increasingly powers media companies’ videos) into Bing’s video search, helping it kill many birds with one (albeit expensive) stone. 6. Yahoo! will acquire Freewheel After acquiring Blue Lithium and Right Media, Yahoo! got a shot in the arm and grew its advertising reach across the Web, outside of the Yahoo.com property. Freewheel is founded by former DoubleClick employees but Google (which bought DoubleClick) might have less interest than one would think in augmenting its video advertising reach across the Web considering it owns YouTube which accounts for 40% of online video consumption. YouTube only monetizes a small share of the billions of videos on the site. Freewheel, which allows marketers and publishers to manage campaigns across a variety of distribution sites, would be a nice fit with Yahoo!, which might want to extend its Audience Network in video offerings. 7. Gannett will acquire Livestream Gannett already invested $10 million in Livestream (then known as Mogulus). The fit is a natural: print media will want to bolster its video offerings (be it content or technology). The main challenge here is that media companies have grown wary of buying technology firms, but news organizations will have a natural predisposition for all things live and the investment sets the stage up for an all-out acquisition. 8. Nielsen will acquire TubeMogul TubeMogul provides analytics to countless marketers and publishers (we use them at WatchMojo). Nielsen and comScore are both looking at adding video capabilities and TubeMogul has done a good job of getting wide adoption, providing Nielsen with a quick entry into the burgeoning video space. Also, David Toth, former president, CEO, and co-founder of the NetRatings service joined TubeMogul’s board. 9. AOL acquires Howcast AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow is a sign of things to come: When AOL was spun off from Time Warner, it was shackled with restrictions on its use of cash and thus the size of the deals it could complete. But AOL wants to create content, lots of it. AOL’s Tim Armstrong is an investor in Howcast ; he was also an investor in Patch, a local startup Armstrong acquired after joining AOL (to his credit, he simply recouped his initial investment and did not participate in the capital gain). Howcast creates videos themselves, lets users create and upload videos and aggregates other professional content (Howcast is one of our distribution partners as well). While Howcast might have proven redundant with the StudioNow acquisition, AOL has a history of doubling up when it focuses on a space (think ad services: Tacoda, Advertising.com, and Third Screen Media) and Howcast is more focussed on how-to videos. 10. News Corp. acquires Break Media from Lionsgate, spins off NewCo News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch is in the process of divesting from the Web: first selling Photobucket , then chucking Rotten Tomatoes to Flixster while retaining a stake in the new venture.  I see something similar happening with Acquisition #10. Break Media is one of the so-called YouTube clones who has managed to differentiate itself by focusing on the men’s 18-34 market and creating content, be it videos and now video games.  Back in 2007, Lionsgate invested $21 million in stock for a 42% stake in Break.com. At the time, it also got a call option (basically, the right to buy) which is “exercisable at any time from June 29, 2007 until the earlier of 30 months after June 29, 2007 or a year after a change of control, to purchase all of the remaining 58% equity interests (excluding any subsequent dilutive events), including in-the-money stock options, warrants and other rights, of Break.com for $58 million in cash or common stock, at the company’s option.” The 30 month window expired on December 29, 2009, and despite Break’s momentum, I don’t see any major incentive for Lionsgate to exercise its call option. I do, however, see the following happening (well, maybe…). Lionsgate might be more willing to trade its 42% stake in Break Media for a smaller share in a NewCo. that houses both Break Media and News Corp.’s IGN Entertainment, another leader in the men’s 18-34 space. (again, bothh Break and IGN are distribution partners).  This NewCo. would then be a more likely candidate for an IPO and would allow both Lionsgate and News Corp. to focus on their core businesses and cash out their investment over time. Needless to say, all of the above deals are idle, if informed, speculation on my part.  What do you think are the most likely video exits this year? CrunchBase Information Ashkan Karbasfrooshan Information provided by CrunchBase

Filed under: Cult of Mac , Apple With TUAW’s Your First Apple series, we let you get a glimpse of our own histories with the Mac. My own history with Apple’s computers has been a bit convoluted. The first Apple computer, in fact the first computer of any kind I remember using, was an Apple II+. I was in kindergarten in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I don’t really remember much about those early experiences. Like many people of my generation, when I returned to the US I went to schools that had computer labs crammed full of Apple IIe computers. Of course, the only programs that were ever run on my elementary school’s Apples were marginally “educational” games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Odell Lake, and the massively popular Oregon Trail. Meanwhile, my family had a KayPro PC at home, which meant my dad had to teach an eight-year-old kid how to navigate through the amber-lettered jungles of DOS — something I’m glad I’ll never have to do with my own kids. The Apple IIe was the only computer I used in school through 1990. I spent most of seventh grade cooking up little text-based adventure games in BASIC, and I even learned some rudimentary drawing and audio programming, all of which I forgot long ago. In mid-1990, the school revamped our computer lab with brand-new Macintosh Classics: the first Mac I ever used, the first machine I used that had a hard drive, and the first time I ever used a GUI to interact with a computer. Oddly enough, despite the huge leap in capabilities the Mac Classic had over the Apple IIe, we spent half of eighth grade using the Mac to learn how to type. I guess I should be thankful I learned to touch-type way back then, but spending several months on typing tutor software was a hard sell after spending the previous year doing actual programming . After that first year with the Mac, my experiences with Apple’s computers went through some rollercoaster-like ups and downs. Click “read more” to find out why. Some time in the early 90’s, my dad dumped his KayPro for a custom-built, unbranded, 386-based PC running Windows 3.11, which I inherited from him after he upgraded yet again. It was the first computer I had all to myself. After learning my way around the Mac’s interface, learning Windows 3.11 took all of five minutes. The PC also had color graphics, which was a definite improvement over the black-and-white Mac Classics at school. I didn’t get much actual work done on the PC, though, because nothing I produced on it was compatible with my high school’s Macs; I mostly used the PC for games. My high school actually had two computer labs: one full of state-of-the-art Macs for basic computer training and programming, and one full of ancient, DOS-running IBM PCs used for business-related classes. I spent ninth and tenth grade learning how to program in HyperCard, which I used to create a couple of graphic adventure games complete with an X-Y navigation system that took quite a while to code properly. One program I developed in tenth grade on the Mac LC III was an Aliens vs. Predator adventure game, with graphics taken straight from the Dark Horse comic series and audio from both the Aliens and Predator films. I also created a HyperCard-based trojan to mess with the other kids in the lab. It was basically just a HyperCard stack that, once launched, would auto-generate new cards until the RAM filled up and the Mac crashed. High school was a high point in my experiences with Macs, but for the rest of the 90s and the first few years of the 2000s, it was all downhill. Once I got out of high school, my long relationship with the Mac went on an extended hiatus. After joining the Navy in 1995 I hardly used computers of any kind for several years, to say nothing of Macs or the Internet. For almost four years I barely touched a PC for anything other than playing video games. Macs didn’t register on my radar at all, and the few times I came across one, I had the same reaction that a lot of today’s Mac haters still have: “For as much as they’re charging, I can’t even get any decent games for this thing?” In late 1999 I finally started using the internet on a regular basis via a 56k dialup connection through my roommate’s ancient and thoroughly crappy Performa. I don’t know which model Performa it was or even what OS it was using — it was either OS 8 or System 7 — but I was not impressed with that machine at all. When my roommate offered to give me that Mac in exchange for me paying his part of the rent for a couple months, I turned him down, because I hated almost everything about that Performa. When I moved in with my girlfriend of the time, she had two computers: some anonymous box from HP running Windows 98, and an iMac with OS 9. Since the iMac didn’t have any games for it, wasn’t compatible with our cable modem, and had that horrible piece of garbage hockey puck mouse, I wouldn’t go near the thing. I preferentially veered toward the HP machine for everything I did. From mid-2000 to early 2003 I once again barely even saw or used a Mac except for the handful of times I visited a Mac zealot friend of mine who lived in Seattle. I inherited yet another ancient computer from another friend of mine for my home use, one even older and less capable than the Performa: some Gateway box running Windows 95. Unable to even hook that machine up to the internet or run 3D games of any kind, the Gateway saw little use for the two years I had it. After almost ten years of using computers solely for internet access and the occasional bit of gaming, I’d become sort of a luddite. Beyond basic word processing and web browsing, I really had no clue how to use a computer anymore. I ended up becoming a Mac switcher in early 2003, completely against my will, when I moved in with my wife. She had a dual 1GHz G4 Power Mac running OS X, and for the first couple of months using it, I had no idea what I was doing. I think my ignorance showed through enough that my wife got paranoid of letting me use her Mac at all. I eventually got the hang of it, but it was a painful process; I insisted on using Internet Explorer, stayed well clear of OS updates, and didn’t even attempt to do anything out of the ordinary with her Mac. It was only after buying a used PowerBook G3 off of eBay for $200 that I really started figuring the Mac out. In the process of upgrading the processor to a G4, upping the RAM, swapping out the hard drive, and hacking the thing to run OS X Panther and Tiger (the model of PowerBook I bought was supposed to max out at Jaguar), I quickly gained an appreciation for the ins and outs of OS X. In the process, I reached the point where I flat-out refused to use Windows unless I absolutely had to for some reason. Within the space of a year, I also went from being completely ignorant about computers to being free tech support for all my friends; and for the few of them still using Windows, my first bit of tech advice is almost always to stop using Windows . OS X may or may not be inherently “better” than Windows, but over the past several years I’ve figured out that I only get the urge to throw my Mac out the window once or twice a month versus once every five minutes with the average Windows box. My wife upgraded to a MacBook in 2007, so I inherited her Power Mac — just in time, as it turned out, because even after all its upgrades, my PowerBook was definitely showing its age, particularly in the way it liked to chew through hard drives. In February of 2008 I bought the 17″ MacBook Pro I’m still using today — the first brand-new computer I’ve ever owned. It’s been a long, weird ride — BASIC programming, typing tutors, HyperCard programming, then close to ten years of neo-Ludditism — to where I am now, in a house full of Apple-branded gadgets, most of which would have sounded like science fiction when I sat down in front of a Mac Classic for the first time twenty years ago. TUAW My on-again, off-again Apple relationship originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read