June 10, 2005

Mmmmm pancakes

Still trying to get settled after being gone for a week. I think I had to slog through about 800 emails at work, and yesterday narrowly averted a major plumbing incident at home (thankfully I was home).

The Netherlands was a lot of fun, I should have my pics up shortly. Here's a few things I noticed:

  • Unlike the US, most places don't take credit cards, not even grocery stores or train stations. If they do, they generally have a minimum purchase amount. For those unaware, this is a violation of their merchant agreement with Visa and is not allowed under any circumstances. I don't tolerate this in the US, but wasn't sure if international merchants had the same agreement (I checked, they do). Thank god my ATM card worked so we could get cash. Sigh.
  • Most BMWs you see are de-badged so you can't tell what they are. Odd.
  • If you stare blankly at someone long enough, they'll start talking to you in English
  • There are no overweight people in the Netherlands. I may have been the fattest person in Amsterdam.
  • I think "Space Coffee" should be renamed "Space Rip-off".
  • The blumenmarket (Flower Market) is filled with two stalls of flowers, and 20 stalls of kitchy tourist crap.
  • If you're a football (soccer) fan, Europe is for you.
  • Seeing naked people on TV isn't all that erotic if you can't tell what on earth they're talking about.
  • The food service, in Amsterdam at least, was pretty lousy. Maybe it was because we were American tourists, but still. Don't you want me to come back?
  • Two big thumbs up for inexpensive (and clean) public transportation.

Missing the keynote at WWDC was disappointing, but everyone tells me that the rest of the sessions aren't really all that. I watched the keynote and it would have been nice to be there in person for the reaction, but maybe it's better to be distanced from the distortion field.

I see where Apple is going, and why, but as a developer and a customer, I know the next two years are going to be painful. While this isn't the 68k->PPC transition, it's pretty close. It's going to be very confusing for customers. Why doesn't the app I just downloaded work? Oh, it's only built for [PPC or Intel], so sorry. A universal Camino would be HUGE. This has got to hurt Apple's stock as well. I was going to buy a dual 2.7 GHz G5 tower, but now why should I bother? It'll be an obsolete platform in less than 2 years. I guess I'll just keep that $4k and spend it elsewhere while I wait. I can only wonder who else is doing the same?

On the Camino front, obviously 0.9a1 isn't out yet. I was sorta hoping that we'd get some of these redraw issues fixed first, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Perhaps at the start of next week we'll declare one of the nightlies as alpha. I still need to finish the new 0.9 release notes.

Posted by pinkerton at June 10, 2005 8:38 AM