The day was stressful though, as it was looking as if FedEx had dropped the ball and wasn’t going To deliver on time, but by some miraculous gift from god it was delivered.

First impressions are amazing. It took some finagling to get the Rogers sim card working. The issue: don’t install the sim card after you connect with iTunes. The activation button, “View Account” disappears. It took a call to Apple support and being on hold to figure out that if you run into this problem simply power down the iPad and then reconnect with iTunes. You’ll get a prompt that reads: “would you like to download an updated carrier list?” After that the “View Account” button will reappear and you can activate the Rogers 3G.

My first sync uploaded all of my iPhone apps, which do seem to work on the iPad. In fact I just gave Skype a whirl and if connected to wifi and you have the earphones with a microphone you bet it friggin works like a charm. It’s amazing. Have I said amazing enough?

One thing I noticed versus the iPhone is the speed. With the A4 processor this thing is lightning fast. Apps load quickly, websites render in great time and battery life is stellar. I have been working on this for a good hour and it’s still at a fantastic 93%.

The last thing I’ll touch on here is video. First of all, if YouTube the site was anything like YouTube the app the world would be a better place. The videos load seamlessly and even our Meet Brian’s Memory, which is full HD, played without hesitation and looked absolutely beautiful in landscape and portrait mode. Launching video and watching those stored on the iPad is a cinch and flawless.

Initial reaction is incredible and I am so so happy to have this thing. 10/10 so far.

Oh and was I missing Flash because I didn’t even notice

I have a small and nagging problem. It’s my mother, and her utter lack of any expertise with the computer…bless her heart. You see, she’s stuck in the Windows XP world, waiting too many minutes to start up the machine and the constant crashes, bog downs and useless crap. It’s no surprise that many of you have this same problem, the late night calls, the early morning rants – “It said I couldn’t connect to the wireless network?”

“No, Mom, you’re trying to connect to someone else’s.”

So we, as Generation Me (ugh, that’s disgusting isn’t it?) have to come to the rescue and no doubt interrupt our Twittering and Facebooking to solve the complicated issue. How do we do it? As a PC user for all my life, I came to a realization. Now I’m no Apple Fanboy, though I have do have a large love affair with Logic, Final Cut, Soundtrack Pro and Motion. Yet the solution is true…

Get your parents a Mac.

I know, I know, you think I’m crazy. How will they live? How can they survive without right click? How will they know where the buttons are!? Ahhhh! Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria! But really, it’s not that at all. When Apple says they work, they do indeed, just work. I’ve never had my MacBook Pro crash, never had it freeze, have updated seamlessly and run the crap out of it. In fact as I write this I’ve got Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Logic and Dreamweaver open and running as smooth as you can imagine.

Recently Apple released Snow Leopard, the next step in the OSX world. So not only did they go ahead and make something that was already fairly awesome awesomer, they made it cheap. $34 CAD. Here’s a few things Snow Leopard improves on:

1. Malware Protection. If it thinks it’s malware, no dice, it’ll tell you.
2. Better Docks. Yup, no more bendy big long list.
3. Automatic Printer Drivers. No more searching for the elusive driver.
4. Exchange Support. What does this mean? It means all those business guys in the Outlook mail world can do it on a Mac.
5. Faster performance. Applications open faster, work is faster and logging on and shutting down are simple and quick.

With all this in mind, why would anyone stick to Windows? Well, that’s a tough one. A really tough one. They suck, let’s face it and I’m saying this as a life long Windows user.

So it’s time we all got together, prepared for the intervention and got our folks off PC. Not only to save our parents from Windows, but save ourselves. Heck, if they’re so hellbent on Windows, you can get them Parallels, which’ll run Windows on a Mac. Yeah, it’s that good. It may even turn those IT working sessions into a fresh beer and a burger, courtesy of Mom.

I have to admit I was pretty resistant to moving away from PC. I learned on one, have used one and have come to love its quirks and sudden crashes. I had a dance of joy every time that screen went blue, it was glorious. My problems with PC were in all reality quite small, I kept things pretty tight on that machine and it will still be around for…well I’m not sure for what, but I’ll figure it out. Oh, oh, oh when I get a spreadsheet. Really my biggest beef with Microsoft and Vista was the load it carries while you’re idle. No programs running and it felt like it was carrying a heavy load.

So far, so wonderfully good. Everything was excessively easy. Almost uncomfortably easy. I almost felt weird not having to start, restart, download a driver, unplug something, replug it in and more.

So go ahead and snark away, the biggest hold out has become just another fanboy.

Bloated, heavy on resources and introducing the Genius Bar (otherwise known as the Spend More Money Bar).

My biggest pet peeve about iTunes 8 is the inability to play all my songs. All I want in iTunes is a big list of songs of which I can play, but that’s a no go in iTunes 8. I was limited to playing genres and frankly unless I bought the darn song, many of my tunes were not placed in genres.

So? Want to roll back iTunes to the version prior to iTunes 8? Visit FileHippo, and all your nightmares will go away. Download iTunes 7.7 here!

After downloading here are your steps:
1. Uninstall iTunes 8 from the control panel/add-remove programs.
2. You will be asked to restart computer..do.
3. After you’ve restarted, you’ll most likley click on iTunes and be mortified with the “iTunes Library cannot be read because it was created by a newer version”.
4. To get around this, go to your iTunes folder (usually C:\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\) and find the file titled “iTunes Library.itl”. Rename this file “iTunes Library.itl.old”.
5. Start up iTunes and you’ll find that you have nothing there. Uh oh. Click on File, Add Folder to Library and navigate to where your music is.

Cheers,
Ryan for FuddyTV

The Seinfeld commercial experiment was a bomb (though I thought it was clever), Vista is bashed and the Zune is laughed at. It seems the only thing Microsoft hasn’t been lambasted for is the XBOX, and even then the red circle of death is a black mark on that.

With all these perceived failings, nothing Microsoft does nowadays seems to be praised or met with positive feedback. The Apple fanboys and girls poke fun, shrug off and mock the big company. Though when a gaunt looking Steve Jobs hops on stage to introduce the new iPod it is as if God himself has come down from the heavens to bestow upon the world the greatest gadget ever produced. When really, it’s just a repackaged iPod with some fancy new colors and case.

So what can Microsoft do? Change its name.

Spin off a new company, call it something hip and cool, hire the same people, use the same technology, but launch it like you’ve never launched it before. The new kid on the block is really just the old pop on the street, but with a fancy new name and no connection on the surface to Microsoft.

As was evident when Microsoft did its Mojave Experiment, people aren’t dissatisfied with Microsoft products, they watched too many Apple ads and read too many blogs from MS haters.

You see, I’ve never had a problem with Vista…not one. I tried the Zune and its pretty cool. The Seinfeld ads were exactly what they were supposed to be…think about it…a commercial about nothing with Jerry Seinfeld. Come on people! Have we lost our Seinfeld mojo already!?

And just as a shot over the bow to my Apple fanboy friends…people gave Microsoft a hard time for its proprietary software, yet Apple is worse, if not THE worst at this. Oh, and if I buy a damn song I want to play it anywhere, not just iTunes and the iPod.

Cheers,
Ryan for FuddyTV