Cristiano on Tech/Life

I went to see Planet Terror today with Melinda. This is the Robert Rodriquez part of the Grindhouse movie he made with Quentin Tarantino. In the USA people didn’t get the joke of the series (get the explanation here) and they decided to release the films in two separate parts in Europe (too bad). I really loved the movie (I got free tickets, so I’m a bit biased) because of the style, bad special effects, and the way they totally didn’t take themselves serious. It was even extremely funny that next to the “fake” meltdown of the tape, we actually also had a real problem in the cinema. I hope to see the other part soon, and I would like to thank Tweakers.net for the tickets.

I got an invite from Tom Morris a few days back for MailPlane (why do you need an invite to download a beta app? just because it IS an invite?) and I must say I like the tool a lot. MailPlane is basically an Application wrapper for GMail, enabling you to have a Mail like app that allows you to drag and drop attachments into a GMail email and much more. It is still in Beta and definitely not complete, but give it a try. I have 4 invites left, so drop me an email to have me send you one.

Just had a quick view at iWork 08. I like the little updates they made, especially to keynote. Some of the new cool builds are really handy, and exactly what I and many others including Reinier have been hoping for. I had a quick look at Numbers, and yes it is fun, but seriously: it is still a spreadsheet. All and all not much change, but a goo basic alternative to a very expensive Microsoft Office.

Went to the Apple store exactly two weeks ago to have my MacBook fixed. I had a little crack in the topcase (again, third time) and as I was 1 month out of warranty I was hoping to be lucky. Amazingly the Apple Geek was ok with the repair, and even wanted to replace the bottom-case too, which had a very small crack.

As an extra he told me to have a look at my battery, that recently had dropped to a capacity of 59%. After 1.5 week of phoning the Apple Store and complaining about the time it took for them to take care of this “high priority” repair, I was happy to see that they finally managed to repair the topcase, bottom-case, battery and fan on the Sunday before I left for The Netherlands.

Pretty cool how they even decided to replace my battery outside of the warranty. Kudos for Apple again, but please, next time do my repair a bit faster.

Yeah! I managed to get 2 tickets for BarCamp Brighton today. One for Melinda and one for me. I was 13 minutes late and suddenly realized that they opened the give-away, but I was just in time. A few minutes later all tickets were sold out. Looking forward to see Reinier and Alper at the BarCamp.