Your posts are always interesting!
When I "initially" retired in 2006, I actually continued working, teaching Mathematics courses part-time at some community colleges. For the first few years, it was fun. But as time went on, students became more and more "demanding" in terms of what they felt they were entitled to. That usually meant that they wanted to get by with as little work as possible, but that was/is not going to happen, especially with Mathematics courses. But I just got more and more dismayed with a lot of the students, and I thought to myself, "This is our future generation?". There were a few good ones, but even that number decreased as time went on. So, at the end of the Spring Quarter 2011, I was not "invited" back to teach, but I never regret that. I have been happily, permanently retired since June 2011.
I have recently thought about getting the newest (June 2017) model (with a 252 gig SSD, of course), but I keep seeing all these reports about how great the MacBook Pros are, and especially the Retina displays. I actually have never "experienced" using Retina displays, and I wonder how much better they are. As it is, I have an 11 year old Sony 19" monitor that I use with my Mac Mini, an dit is fine (solid Sony product, just like most of the stuff they make). On both my Mac Mini and the Sony 19" monitor, the colors are fine, so I am unsure what I am "missing" by not having a Retina display.
It's fun and interesting to exchange posts with you. I hope other folks don't mind.
I appreciate the kudos! I’ve learned quite a bit from reading your posts and enjoy reading them. Despite the initial problems I had with my first eBay purchases, I’m happy doing business with them and also like having a PayPal account. I’ve done 90% of my Christmas shopping there, and for the first time in my life, I completed
ALL my holiday shopping before December 1! Up until last year, I was still shopping on Christmas Eve! This season has been the most stress-free I can ever remember, at least as an adult!
I really love being outdoors during nice weather, and one of my favorite pastimes is to go to my gun club for plinking, target shooting and especially to test my handloaded ammo with my Cronny Gamma Model chronograph and MacBook loaded with a really neat ballistics program, even though I have to boot the Mac in Linux to use it.
As I said previously, just doing a little part-time dabbling and consulting is okay, but I’m surprised that I’m doing as much IT work as I am for a few businesses. Their “IT” people seem to be of the “shake-n-bake” variety who are woefully under-qualified for their jobs.
I completely understand your frustration during your teaching days. How could many of your students not realize that there can’t be shortcuts, etc., in a math course??? Or that mathematics is a very demanding discipline? (I recently watched a documentary on John Nash, the renowned math professor who pioneered game theory and who developed what later became known as
The Nash Equilibria which dramatically affected the field of economics. It can be found on YouTube, and I highly recommend you look it up. The Russell Crowe movie
“A Beautiful Mind” was loosely based on Nash’s life.)
I taught American History, Government, Civics, “Current Affairs” and Economics at a private high school for a few years but soon discovered that teaching more like a college professor than a high school babysitter was daunting. I eschewed text books as much as possible, telling my students they could read them if they liked, just as long as they did it on their own time. I stressed they needed to listen closely to what I said in class, and to hone their note-taking skills. I also emphasized the importance of anything I’d write on the white board. The school in which I taught was/is a very prestigious one and is difficult to gain admission. Even so, I had a number of lazy students and even disrespectful ones. I had to escort two boys to the Dean’s office one day for disruptive behavior. On the way, one of the students stopped, turned to me and asked, “Do you know who my father is?” “Sure,” I said. “He’s Vice Regent on the Board. So what? I’d suggest you write a letter to your Congressman since I’m confident your father will be of no assistance to you here. And I’m certain I’ll still have my job after you give him whatever sob story you dish up for him.” And I did.
heheheheh
I quit teaching somewhat out of frustration, but more so because I had an opportunity to engage in a career which I profoundly enjoyed and allowed for endless creativity.
I’m re-thinking what I wrote earlier about mothballing a couple of mid-2010 MacBooks in case disaster befalls this one. I’ve been eyeballing the 2012 MacBook Pro offerings on OWC’s website and believe I’d rather go that route. The most interesting ones already have 16GB RAM and either 1.0TB HDDs or 500GB SSDs and sport USB 3, Thunderbolt and a couple which also have a FireWire 800 port.
I believe that since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, Jonny Ives has been completely out of control with Apple’s laptop designs. He’s eliminated optical drives altogether as well as reducing the number of ports to one, all in his insane desire to see how light and thin he can make a laptop.
(Hey, Jonny! Ever hear of the point of diminishing returns???) With the newer laptop offerings, he’s forcing users to buy all manner of docks, adapters or whatever just so they can have more than a single peripheral attached at a time. Likewise, he’s made it impossible to upgrade anything, or even change the battery. He (and Apple in general) are on a mad quest to force their users onto the Cloud. And I resent that deeply and will resist storing anything but a bare, bare minimum of anything there. I don’t give a d**n how secure they claim their servers to be. I often think Ives is trying to revive Jobs’ old hostility to users’ ability to do any “tinkering” around in the guts of their machines as was the case with the original Mac 128 and 512K models in 1984.
I, for one, don’t want to buy a custom Mac at point-of-purchase, like specifying RAM and storage. Sure, 16GB of RAM is nice. So is a 500GB HDD/SSD. But to buy Macs like that is far more expensive than buying an “off-the-shelf” model and upgrading the innards later. And if the history of computing holds true, then such a configuration will highly likely be inadequate in just 2-3 years. Then you’re stuck with the only option being the purchase of another new laptop. To me, this is planned obsolescence gone amok. Perfidious, pernicious, insidious and a few other adjectives come to mind, along with a few more “colorful” descriptives and derogatory questions about their family lineage which I don’t want to post.
And when it comes to buying a newer iMac next year, I intend to find one which still has an optical drive, USB 3, FireWire 800 and Thunderbolt and will address at least 32GB (hopefully 64GB) RAM.
I’ve seen a number of Retina Macs, and they are very impressive indeed.
I ran TechTool Pro on my 1TB external OTG drive last evening and it kept telling me the Optimize Files was “incomplete,” that it only optimized 37 of 39 files.
Out of curiosity, I launched Intech SpeedTools and defragged the drive in just a couple of moments. I ran ST’s full suite of diagnostics and one thing that struck me was how fast it seemed to be. Gave me pause, thinking the next time I perform these tasks, I’ll simply forego TTP and use ST instead to see if it is faster.
Another issue I’ve had with TTP is that in checking file integrity, it lists hundreds of files with messages like “Invalid image file” or encountered an “unexpected character P at line 1.” All of these files, so far are fine and none have been “invalid image files” since Photoshop, Contenta and GraphicConverter all open them fine. I contacted Micromat about this and they told me to simply ignore it. In fact, the Micromat tech I spoke with seemed to take deep umbrage at my referring to this aberrance as a “bug” or a “glitch.” Not very comforting. I thought about asking him if this was some form of “undocumented feature,” which is what Bill Gates called them when Windows proved to be defective in some manner (Remember when early Pentium PCs couldn't reliable do long division?). I thought it was a bit disturbing to hear this from an Intech pro, which is why I took SpeedTools out for that test drive I referred to in an earlier post.
Another thing to note is that I have SpeedTools 3.9.3 OEM. Some features aren’t available until you buy the “full version” for $39.99, but are charged later for upgrades (bummer). Or you can buy the “Lifetime Upgrade” version for $79.99 (sucks).
The included documentation is excellent and only a few big features are disabled in the OEM version. It’s still quite usable, but having a Full Version would be nice. I’ll hold off getting that for now, and if I do, I’ll just go ahead and get the unlimited upgrade.
I also enjoy our exchanges. I suppose the moderators could either tell us to knock it off and “get a room” (just couldn’t resist, so forgive my jest), or if other forum members don’t like it, they don’t have to read them.
That being said, the moderators here are extremely knowledgeable and are enjoyable to read when they post. Without any conceit, it might be beneficial for others to read our exchanges. While we have different approaches in some things, we share a great deal in common. And it’s possible we may write a thing or three that might actually prove helpful to someone.
