Bad PR For Macs

Been a couple of PR nightmares pop up for Apple lately.

First there's the unwanted photo of Bigot Harry Jackson using one of their computers to read his speech hating on the DC marriage issue during the pubic commentary phase.

But at the same time, Apple can't help the fact the bigots like their computing products, too

Then this old Mac ad touting their iMovie software resurfaced on YouTube in late September and caused some drama as well.



Model Gisele Bundchen in this ad is supposed to be the embodiment of a home movie made using iMovie. After the Mac presents Gisele, the PC presents a person wearing a dress identical to Gisele’s, in a wig, with no breasts, five o’clock shadow and an abundance of exposed chest hair.

The ad ends with the line: “Work in progress?”

Apple is a company that prides itself on its progressive politics, and many of the people that own Macs are GLBT community members. The last thing they want is ruffled feathers with an important segment of the marketing base.

According to GLAAD, they contacted Apple about the trans stereotype filled ad, and they stated they haven't run this since 2006.

But it did add up to a couple of PR headaches for Apple amongst its GLBT clients.

Airline Manager Game On Facebook

Many of you loyal TransGriot readers know that I'm on Twitter and Facebook, and yes you can find me on both social networking sites.

Facebook does have some cool games and apps that are addicting. Every now and then my homegirl Melinda challenges me to a game that tests your geography knowledge.

The first time I played it I busted her high score. She has subsequently beaten that high score I posted and I haven't gone back to it yet.

My friend Chandler introduced me to a Facebook game that grabbed my interest. It's turning into a lot of fun and somewhat of a mini labor of love called Airline Manager.

Your challenge is to take the one airplane they start you off with (a Boeing 737-800) some start up capital and build an airline. You select the routes it flies, make the ad buys, employment payroll decisions, purchase fuel and investing in the stock in the other virtual air carriers in the game.

You also have all the drama of labor unrest, random events like bird strikes, potential fines, volatile fuel prices, C-checks and all the other joys and pains real life airline execs grapple with including the possibility of a crash.

Of course this appeals to the airline junkie in me, so I have been busy in between posts, work and speech writing building up TransTexas Airlines.

Of course you know I have my virtual airline hub in Houston, and I'm having fun recalling the 14 years of accumulated airline knowledge and making all the decisions that can make or break an airline.

Some of my old CAL co-workers are playing this game as well and I've invested in their airlines and Chandler's Happy Nappy Airlines.

Over time you want to build your airline into a powerhouse that gets cargo runs and make money so that you can buy bigger airplanes. You also get passenger bonuses that you can spend on items like 100,000 pounds of fuel, et cetera.

It's also real time based in terms of the flights. For example if you have a plane on the Houston-Nashville fight it actually takes 4 hours to complete a roundtrip. The Houston-London takes 16 hours. So you learn early you want a mix of short hauls and long routes that keep the cash flowing.

And just like with a real airline, your virtual planes can't make you any virtual cash if they're sitting on the ground.

Well, now that I'm hooked on the game, we'll see if I can build TransTexas Airlines into a powerhouse or bankrupt it. I was at CAL long enough to see it done both way, and have a head start in avoiding the mistakes that lead to bankruptcy.

But we'll see.

Busy Drama Filled Weekend (And Week)

You probably noticed loyal TransGriot readers that I didn't post as much as I normally do this week or last weekend.

It's not that I didn't have anything to talk about or that I was in need of a writing break. I was more than a little irritated that I was on the cybersidelines with all of the breaking news and other assorted madness percolating on the net and elsewhere. The problem was the borrowed laptop computer I was working with went down.

Unfortunately I was working on a post last Friday at the exact moment Blogger was getting cyberattacked. A major file was corrupted that knocked me offline for a few days. To complicate matters my job called asking if I could cover an open shift and I ended up squeezing 36 hours in over a three day period.

However, during my work and at home downtime I did get the opportunity to jot my thoughts down on a notepad. Over the next few days, weeks and months you'll get to see what I came up with in this space.

Since the laptop was being worked on, couldn't take it with me to compile those thoughts that came to mind while I was at work. In addition, thanks to the recent flood we had here in Da Ville, the public library computers aren't an option for the next several weeks because the system servers were housed in the basement of the main library building downtown that flooded.

My computer guru Polar excels at and earns his living cleaning up electronic messes, so I had to patiently wait until he got some time in his busy life to deal with it.

I just received Computer Prime today. The replacement motherboard didn't work, so it had to be sent back to the manufacturer. Polar received the new new motherboard, and thanks to his hard work Computer Prime is ready and better than ever.

I have a much larger hard drive, new power supply, new DVD/RW drive and memory to spare to make Computer Prime run faster.

As always, thank you and know that I deeply appreciate you loyal readers for spending your valuable web surfing time here at TransGriot. Thanks to those of you who are moved enough by my writing to comment on the various posts as well.

Big thank you to Polar for everything you've done to get Computer Prime literally back up to speed. Know that I deeply appreciate it.

Speaking of back up to speed, the break is over, and it's past time for me to get back in the blogging game

Computing Reeducation

As many of you know the motherboard on my desktop died last Friday. A new replacement one has been ordered and hopefully I'll be back doing my thang on Computer Prime soon.

In the meantime, Polar graciously lent me his Compaq laptop in order to tide me over until I get my beloved desktop up and running.

I have owned a computer since I bought my first HP 2600 series minidesktop back in 1997. I prefer and love desktops probably because the vast majority of my computing time and Web surfing over the last decade has been spent in a desktop environment.

Since I've never owned one, much less played with one for an extended period of time until now, it has taken me a few days to get acclimated to the quirks and idiosyncracies inherent in laptop computing.

It took two days for me to get out of the habit reaching to my right and using my right hand to manipulate a mouse to do whatever I needed to do while typing various posts. My thumb kept brushing the pointer thingy and moving my cursor as I typed, which kept pissing me off while typing the first post I attempted to do.

It also took me far longer time wise to compose that first laptop generated post than it normally does on my desktop system.

I had to adjust some of my computer quirks I feel comfortable doing as well.

I use a technique in which I rapidly move the cursor instead of just highlighting the messed up text and hitting the 'delete' key. I had to not only go back and correct the jacked up text, but figure out how to move the cursor to do it.

I type 55 WPM as well, so it's slowed down my typing speed as I've had to get acclimated to holding my hands up in a much higher position than normal and being cognizant of not trying to inadvertantly hitting combinations of keys that may trigger stuff I don't want or need to happen.

I'm relearning how to cut and paste on this laptop. I'm also trying to figure out what I have to do so I can start putting photos back in my posts to make them look nice and illustrate what my words have to say.

Yeah, I could simply call Polar and ask, but the Taurus in me wants to at least try to do it on my own before punting and dialing up the Bear Cave to ask him.

But now that I've had the opportunity to play with a laptop, I have to admit that I'm beginning to like it enough to the point I may seriously consider buying one in the future as a backup.

The price has come down on them and the computing power is going way up. The portability is also a nice selling point as well.

It would help me in terms of being able to access info during my lobbying trips to DC. If I need to blog while I'm on one of my road trips I won't need to hunt for a desktop so I can do so. It would allow me a more rapid response time as well in those situations.

So yeah, my desktop being down sucks. It puts a crimp in some of the stuff I like to do while composing posts, but I can always go back and paste the photos on them later.

In the meantime, I'm going to start making lemonade out of this lemon situation and get 'ejumacated' on the mysteries of laptop computing.

Computer Down

Hey peeps.
Will be offline for a few days. Motherboard died on my computer yesterday and it will be at least a week before I can get back up on The Net.

I do have some posts on automatic that will come up during my anticipated downtime.

I have to order some parts for it, and that's a pain since I love writing something on an everyday basis.

So as soon as I get my computer technical difficulties settled you'll see me back on my regular posting schedule.

New Computer!

Hey TransGriot readers!
Been offline for about 36 hours getting a new computer, and nope, it's not the Dell in the blog post picture.

Actually it's a 1.7 gig AMD one my roommate used to own that she used for gaming. It no longer suited her needs since she long ago bought a computer that dwarfs mine in capabilities and processing power to play WOW, but it definitely worked for me. It's far more powerful than the 500 speed Pentium III that I've been playing with since 2003 and best of all, it has Windows XP.

I talked about the problems that me and Polar had when we tried to upgrade that P-III and discovered that one of the legacies of a formerly corporate machine, especially when you buy one from a company that does tech support is a BIOS that doesn't allow you to change it without a password.

This one wasn't as painful because my roomie had a local computer shop build it, and was equipped with a kick butt user friendly BIOS that's easy for even a semi-computer literate user like me to understand and navigate. I also inherited from Polar's old computer that died the painful thunderstorm death the CD-DVD ROM player and the DVR-RW burner.


As for my old P-III, it's getting a makeover. Polar and I have a pile of computer parts to play with, and he thinks he's found a way around the BIOS lockout problem.
So if all goes well, the P-III will become a backup computer.

I'm still trying to get my sound calibrated, getting used to XP, test driving all the new features, downloading plug ins and finding and migrating all my old files since I now have two hard drives and 48 gigs of space to play with. I had only 8 GB of hard drive space on the old one, and 5 GB of that was taken up by my music and picture files.

I'm getting adjusted to it and like the stability so far. It's fun being able to play DVD's on my computer now and having the ability to burn things to a disk is cool as well.

Now if I could just get the new sound card figured out, things will definitely be copacetic.

In Praise of Black Voices

When I bought my first computer and called up PDQ.net to hook me up with my first Internet dial-up service back in 1997, all I thought I was doing at the time was simply getting Internet access. What I didn't realize was how that simple act would not only irreversibly change my life and expand my horizons exponentially, but in the process garner me new friends as well.

One of the places I found myself increasingly drawn to was a then Black-owned discussion site called Black Voices. It had various discussion groups that people could post to on politics, sports, music, books, current events and the ever popular Rant area. There was even one for gay and lesbian Afronetizens.

And it was a wild, fun, serious and raucous place depending on the day of the week. We had some serious, thoughtful and sometimes contentious discussions on the politics of the late 90's, social justice issues, the gap developing between poor and middle/upper middle class African-Americans and other subjects du jour.

We also went through a week long exercise in which we set up and brainstormed this scenario. After a second US civil war, the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia were ceded to African-Americans to set up a new country called New Kemet. We actually spent a week discussing what kind of government New Kemet should have, economic development, social justice, military/defense issues, et cetera.

We even came up with Afrocentric emoticons and shorthand to punctuate our posts with and give the Net some flava.

I liked hitting the sports area which was just as lively. As the resident BV Comets fan who was riding high during the time of the first WNBA championship dynasty, me and the LA Skanks fans (oops, Sparks) would constantly trade barbs about the other's team. One LA Sparks fan made a crack about Sheryl Swoopes constantly evolving and creative hair styles once to which I responded, "I know you ain't talking about weaves when you peeps in Southern California use more horse hair per capita than they have available in the entire state of Kentucky."

But it was the creative way in which we dealt with flame wars that is still memorable to this day for me. We BVers called it Rant Rappin' and the gist of it was that if you were pissed at a person, you had to rewrite a current (or past) song to insult them.

It made you pause and wonder if you were mad enough at this person to go through the time and effort to diss them that way and paradoxically kept flame wars down. But if you decided you WERE that mad at this person, it was on like Donkey Kong.

It was a lot of fun logging on and reading a brand new lyrical spin on the current hits of the day. Even though I was involved in a few BV Rant Rap battles, at that time I didn't reveal my transwoman status to my BV peeps. I wanted the Original BVers out there in cyberspace to get to know me based on my intellect and personality, not have their perceptions colored by whatever late 90's prejudices they may or may not have had about transgender people.

There was one memorable Christmas holidays Rant Rap battle between me and Dymolishn that went on for three days. We rewrote Christmas songs to insult each other. To this day I crack up every time I hear the Luther song Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Alexander O'Neal's Sleigh Ride and superimpose my remixed lyrics on them.

And woe be unto the Internet racists who dared to befoul our Internet cyberhome. 'Don't feed the trolls' was not the operative word at BV back in the day. It was 'Embarrass, belittle and utterly humiliate the trolls' by burying their BS and ignorance in a blizzard of history, facts and knowledge with an insult or two mixed in for good measure. They got to the point they quit trying to mess with us.

So coming up with one liners to deal with right-wingers (and HRC and Barney) for me is a snap thanks to the time I spent at BV honing my rapid response skillz.

It was purchased by AOL around 2000 and it wasn't quite the same to us Original BVers after that, so we ended up drifting away over time. I still pop in from time to time just to see if any of the original gang shows up.

These BVers became my first Internet family. We even got to a point where we planned meetups for BV members clustered in various cities. So to Shareign, Kodzansette, CD, the late Mr. Swing, Chila-o, Jwal, any of the other Original BVers that I love and forgot your user names (and you too, Dymolishn), if you're still surfing the Net, here's a ^5 to all of you, thanks for the memories and drop me a line.

Upgradin'

Yesterday I spent a pleasantly nerve-wracking day at AC's house while he helped me upgrade my late 20th century computer to the demands of the early 21st century Internet.

AC is one of the smartest and more multi-talented friends I have in my life. He's a major reason my car stays in tip top shape, he's a talented writer and has mad carpentry skills that he's put to good use. In addition to rebuilding the basement in his house into an entertainment center and doing roofing and other repairs on his house and ours, he rebuilt part of the walk-in basement of this house into a room with a fully functional bathroom. Like the TransGriot, he can intelligently talk about a wide variety of subjects while doing all that.

In addition, his music collection is heavy on 70's and 80's rock and roll and R&B. His collection in addition to having CD's is heavy on albums, something I have in my R&B and jazz collection back at my parents house. If I'm DJing a party that has a mixed race crowd, the first place I head for is his house.

We both have a cluster of computers from our ten plus years on the Net, so we decided to see what parts we had from upgrading those various machines that have long since outlived their Internet usefulness were still viable that we could harvest. We also were prepared to get new ones as needed to augment building my newly improved computer.

I got much needed RAM memory added to my machine, so it's loading much faster along with any YouTube and other video files. We needed to add some USB ports to my machine, so we checked out the CompUSA store on Hurstbourne Parkway near his place that's going out of business to see what they had available.

I also discovered during those parts forays yesterday just how much computer technology has advanced since I bought my first Hewlett-Packard one in 1997.

He also had a CD-RW burner he was no longer using that he added to mine. It came from a Compaq he owned that died a painful fried motherboard death when a sudden thunderstorm popped up while he was engrossed in working on it. I had a 48X Creative CD-ROM drive I had on my old HP minidesktop machine that's now installed on this one.

But the major goal of this impromptu upgrade, slaving the 8 GB hard drive from my HP minidesktop to the 8 GB one I have in this system is what caused us much of the drama. I bought this machine I currently have in a 2003 corporate technology sale.

Although corporate machines are more robust than the average general use ones, the drawback is that the BIOSes on corporate machines for obvious security reasons aren't designed to be easily changed as we discovered to our frustration.

So although it was a success on many levels, I'll probably be heading back to my friendly neighborhood computer store to get an 80 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM drive or wait until the next computer technology show hits the Kentucky Convention Center or the Fairgrounds.

Shoot, gotta have room for my MP3 and picture files. ;)