Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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An Apple a Day

Rich Galen

Friday March 16, 2012

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READER ALERT

The only way anything political will be in today's column is by accident. So, if you don't want to read about my new Apple iPad, move along home. Nothing to see here.

END READER ALERT

Today, at 8 AM local time, the Apple iPad (colloquially, but not officially, known as the iPad 3) goes on sale at the hundreds of Apple stores in the US and overseas, plus Wal-Mart, AT&T, Verizon, Best Buy, Radio Shack and Target stores.

Thing is, most stores got a total of 15-20 units and it is likely there were that many people lined up outside your local Best Buy by midnight last night.

I am not an Apple person. I am a PC person. I was not a Steve Jobs fan, and having read Walter Isaacson's biography of him my non-fandom was well-placed. I have always been a Bill Gates fan because � I'm not certain why, but I have been.

I am much more comfortable in a Windows environment on my PC than on an OS X machine. And don't bother emailing me to tell me how much I would love the Apple system if I just gave it a chance.

I don't want to give it a chance.

I do own three Apple products. An iPod which was a present from Mullfave Ginny Wolf and which I used to wearing it out; an iPhone which I bought a couple of months ago when my umpteenth Blackberry stopped working; and an iPad. Two iPads � soon to be three.

I bought an iPad as a gift for The Lad when they first came out two years ago. He is an Apple person and wise beyond his years. When I told him I had pre-ordered the iPad for him he said I was going to want one soon enough and I should order one for myself.

As usual, I took his advice and, as usual, he was correct.

When I got my iPad I quickly realized that there was one button on the front, the screen was jet black, and I had no idea what to do next. I called The Lad and asked him what was supposed to happen and warned him not to feed me that "Apple is soooo intuitive, crapola, because I couldn't get it to do anything."

Having been related to me for over three decades he waited until I was done, told me what to press, how to slide my finger around the screen, and "if you get stuck, just tap around the edge of the screen - sooner or later a help screen will appear."

Yeah. Well.

There was a time when I wrote database software to help make ends meet and some of it was pretty good.

None of it was written on an Apple. All of it was written on PCs first with DOS, then with Windows.

Now, I have become something of an iPad geek. As I have mentioned to you before I was a Geek before the word geek was invented which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1984.

I have "jailbroken" my iPad to put apps on that are not sanctioned by Apple. I happily use my iPad as a substitute for my new laptop and I really like my new laptop.

When the new CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, took the stage 10 days ago to formally introduce the new iPad I followed the presentation through real-time bloggers on my iPad 2. While I was doing that I had the Apple Store webpage up on my PC and I refreshed the screen about every 30 seconds as the banner said the store was closed while new products were being prepared.

After the rollout was over I continue to refresh the page and, about 90 minutes (and 23,872 page refreshes) later, I got the opportunity to order an iPad 3.

Since then I have been tracking the progress of my device from Shenzhen, China, to Chek Lap Kok, to Hong Kong, to Anchorage, to Louisville where it sat from last Friday until yesterday afternoon when it started on the last leg of its trip to my desk in downtown Your Nation's Capital.

I have been tracking it every 20 minutes or so every waking hour. I'm surprised I haven't been arrested for attempting a denial of service attack on the UPS tracking page.

The Mullings Director of Standards & Practices will get my iPad 2 and my younger brother will get the iPad 1 that she has been using.

Recycling iPads is an old Galen family tradition.

Don't bother me this weekend. I'll be � you know what I'll be doing.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: An article on where to buy the new iPad, and the Wikipedia entries for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Also a Mullfoto showing how far the District of Columbia will go to protect my safety and a non-PC (and I don't mean computers) Catchy Caption of the Day.

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