Employment 2.0: Business Owner
So this is weird. I own one third of a business.
Back in June of 2009, the repair shop that had employed me for the better part of nine years folded. For some this was good news, for some this was expected, and for the formerly employed this was very sudden (we had in fact just hired a new technician when the news hit). Repair shops tend to have a very polarized client base: some love you, some hate you, and both are usually deserved at some point. Still, myself and the core group of technicians tried our best to make it the most kick-ass Mac repair shop in Toronto, and while there were certainly challenges to overcome (that’s putting it politely), I feel like we succeeded to a degree. Diagnosed by the next business day? Check. Earn Apple’s Top 5% plaque? Check. Make every single person happy?
Well, there’s the point about a very polarized client base, but the number of happy people well outstripped the the unhappy. I never wanted to work in the sort of service centres they portray on TV or in Dilbert comics, or god forbid the actual real life service centres they’re satirizing. You’ve probably seen these, where workers and customers are bitter enemies struggling for dominion and witty remarks. No, we wanted to be awesome. The service industry is unforgiving, so believe me when I say that life is much more pleasant when you’re sending people home happy rather than cursing your name.
So as you can imagine, not being employed put a bit of a kink in things — but we got better.
This week, myself and two colleagues became self-employed. We opened our Mac repair business in the University of Toronto’s Campus Computer Shop inside the downtown Koffler Centre, taking over the repair operations from the former staff. Our philosophy is the same as ever: be awesome, make people happy. As expected, there will be hiccups as we get going, but so far we’re pretty happy with the first few days. So, tell all your friends, and even a few strangers! Despite the shop’s name, our scope is not limited to U of T students and faculty, so anyone at all is welcome to drop off their grievances with us. Ideally you’ll get something nicer back.
[UIImage imageNamed:]
UIImage *myImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"pony.png"];
This is probably one of the most convenient methods I’ve ever come across. Feed it a name and it will return an image. Better yet, it handles caching for you automatically so that you don’t have to. Notice something about it though? There’s no alloc, meaning you shouldn’t call release. If you can’t call release, how do you get your memory back? This isn’t a big deal when using Mac OS X’s older brother, NSImage, since your average computer these days ships with several gigabytes of memory as opposed to the paltry 25MB or so that most iPhone apps are limited to. If you’re dealing with a lot of images on the iPhone though, this hands-off caching approach is going to cause problems.
The first obvious solution is to just avoid the convenience method and manually alloc and load each image with its full path:
UIImage *myImg = [[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/pony.png", [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]]];
That’s not awful for loading an image or two, but if you’re going to load many images, why not encapsulate this in something more elegant? Since such a method would be useful application-wide, it furthermore makes sense for the method to exist in its own application-wide class, rather than just stuffing the method willy-nilly into whatever class you’re working in. Actually, if you’re going to go to the trouble of creating a new class just for a convenience method, why not make it do other neat things? Let’s do that.
Snow Leopard: Defeated
After spending years professionally beating irrational computers into acting rationally again, it’s a humbling experience to almost get beaten by a simple software update. That’s not to say software updates are without their eccentricities, but you can at least count on the problems to begin either after the software has finished installing, or right in the middle (ideally at a critical and irrecoverable point). It’s not often that problems begin before the installation takes place, or so I thought until I was staring down Snow Leopard’s missive that “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” I thought, in my best Kevin Conroy voice.
The problem, it turns out, is somehow related to the destination drive’s partition map, about which a few theories are being floated by others who have been affected. I hear you, PowerPC veterans, exclaiming “Of course! He must have an Apple Partition Table. How 2006.” Not so fast: the issue affects the requisite GUID Partition Table, and while there seems to be a few different causes, you’re more likely to run into this problem if you’ve chopped up your hard drive for a dual or multi-boot machine, or say installed Fedora and added a 2GB swap partition.
At least the solution is simple: pop open Disk Utility and resize your destination partition a couple times. Whatever the reason, most users are back in business after this digital flexing. My computer understands that I’ve made a profession out of fixing far worse nightmares, and would have none of this quick fix nonsense. Disk Utility managed to ratchet up the difficulty level by arbitrarily hating the ext3 file system upon which Fedora was installed, and crashed whenever asked to modify the partition map.
My computer forgets who its dealing with: someone who keeps a full back up and isn’t afraid to erase the partition map. Long story short, the software is installed.
Computer up for Grabs
Several months ago I had some M-Audio hardware break down on me in a way should be hilarious to any tech who worked during the capacitor plague and thought themselves unaffected. The less hilarious result is that the audio hardware needs to be replaced; the catch is that it leverages traditional PCI technology which is now 16-year old and perhaps not the best choice moving forward. So, I’m kicking out my old computer and bringing in a new one. What this means in practical terms for you, the reader, is that I’ve got a computer to give away for free to anyone willing to give it a good home. If it goes unloved, Reboot Canada will get it. Here’s what it is:
- PowerMac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors, year 2003 model)
- 1.25GHz single processor G4
- 167MHz front-side bus
- 768MB PC2700 DDR memory
- One 80GB ATA hard drive and one 40GB ATA hard drive
- One DVD-writer and one DVD-reader/CD-writer combo
- Radeon 9000 video card with 64MB VRAM
- 10/100/1000BaseT ethernet
- Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Tiger)
You’ll have to provide your own mouse, keyboard, and monitor, but that’s about all you’ll need to make it work. Note that this is not the most energy-efficient computer ever made; the power supply is rated for up to 360 watts and there are quite a few moving parts inside. At this stage in its life it’s mostly good for light computing and internet stuff, though it was a beast in its day and will still do multi-tracking if you can get your hands on six-year old software and aforementioned obsolete hardware.
If you’re interested, curious, or have any questions, drop me a line and we can discuss specifics! Bear in mind that there will be no warranty, and this offer is only good to people I know.
UPDATE: The offer is now closed.
Soapbox for the Ungeniused
I stumbled upon an interesting blog earlier today and have spent a few hours consuming what I can. Ungeniused, written by a former Mac Genius, provides some interesting insights into the workings of one of Apple’s best-known customer services, the Genius Bar. The author, Jeremy, apparently worked his way up through several important positions within Apple before landing himself a job as a Genius during Apple’s initial push into the retail scene. Geniuses, like just about anyone in tech support and customer service, get a fair amount of flak, and I’ve even been on the giving end when hearing about a particularly bone-headed diagnosis, but it wasn’t always this way.
Jeremy and a colleague write that the Genius Bar during its genesis was in fact staffed with Apple’s top-tier support professionals, drawing from their large southern campuses at the time. These were no amateur enthusiasts to be sure. I remember that as the Apple Stores expanded, numerous local techs would send resumes in droves for the privileged position of “Mac Genius,” so you can bet that there was a large talent pool to draw from even as Apple’s internal human resources began to dry up. This should have ensured that the Genius Bar would consistently be staffed with the best of the best, as new talent received training from Apple’s elite, so what happened?
Apparently, the iPod.
Pretty soon after the iPod exploded onto the market, the Genius Bar began seeing a lot of appointments for iPods while Mac users had their appointments pushed back. iPods do not present the same technical challenges to the Genius Bar as a Mac; Geniuses don’t have the option to repair broken iPods, only to replace them. Sure, the faulty iPod goes back to Apple where someone repaired and it’s resold as a refurbished product, but the Genius’ entire role is still reduced to making a quick assessment and then filling out some paperwork. Put simply, this is very unfulfilling work for someone exceptionally bright and talented. Faced with a sea of iPods, fewer challenges, and less opportunity to grow and learn, some of the best and brightest left in droves for greener pastures.
I can’t fairly praise or disparage the current generation of Mac Geniuses since my shop rarely deals with them; if our shop needs to communicate with Apple, it’s through other channels. Still, it’s a very interesting and informative article (and blog as a whole) and I’d recommended it to anyone in the tech and customer support industry. It bears keeping in mind that the article is a good two and a half years old and that this is an industry that rarely sits still, but the history is very relevant.
