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Tag Archives: best

The Best Part

Installing Microsoft Office 2011 on a MacBook Air

At its peak, the Australian Apple Premium Reseller known as Next Byte had more than 20 stores around the country, and I spent most of my earliest possible employment years at just one: Next Byte Hobart. Today, the Apple landscape in Australia is a lot different to what it was over a decade ago. Thanks mostly to the iPhone, Apple is the largest company in the world. Apple owned-and-operated retail locations don’t so much compete with general electronics retailers as much as they offer an experience of their own. But as any reseller will tell you, slim profits on Apple products means it’s extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to match Apple when it comes to the unparalleled customer experience that Apple Retail can offer. Any third-party Apple presence is either small enough to fly under the radar, or niche enough to carve out a market of their own. For the rest of us, Apple retail stores in every capital city CBD besides Melbourne, Darwin, and Hobart means our in-person sales and service needs are fulfilled, with any gaps covered by Apple’s online store and mail-in repair programs. I have plenty of stories from my time at Next Byte. Maybe one day I’ll even write about a few of them, once I’m a little more comfortable the statute of limitations has passed. The one I’m telling you about today is not really about anything in particular, but it’s also about all the things I found great about working at Next Byte Hobart.

It’s January 2nd, 2025. Sometime around ten years ago, in December 2015, Vita Group announced the closure of Next Byte stores Australia-wide.

By that time, I was almost a year into my first real corporate job; an IT Service Desk gig where I was, theoretically, putting my degree to some use. At that stage, I had no real idea what I was doing, or how things would turn out, but I was helping! (I hope.)

During my time at Next Byte I was lucky enough to work in both sales and service. Both sides of the fence, so to speak; both figuratively and literally, as sales and service were physically separated by a dividing partition in our building. Sales and service were the two main pillars of the business, and because I was really the only person that worked in both parts, I was often asked which side I preferred. Sales, or service?

My answer, honestly, was both.

I liked sales because it put me in front of customers where I was given the opportunity to impart some Mac knowledge onto them, or help them find some kind of solution to their problems, and occasionally, if the situation called for it, maybe even make a sale. While service didn’t have as much of the face-to-face aspect of customer service, performing repairs on machines let me roll up my sleeves and get something done that benefitted everyone; the customer, the business, and the satisfaction I got from fixing hardware or software issues.

Because as much as I enjoyed talking with customers, it was just as satisfying to focus on one thing at a time and smash out some repairs. Just zone out, twiddle some screws, and get some repairs out of the way. Service was methodical, organised. Parts would come in the morning, we’d do the repairs during the day, and ship all the broken parts back at the end of the day. This routine was only interrupted by customers picking up their fixed machines, or customers bringing in their broken machines for us to repair.

Sales, by comparison, was anarchy. As anyone who has ever worked retail will tell you, it was entirely random whether it was busy or not. Sometimes it would be dead, with nary a soul to be seen. Sometimes it would be chaos, absolute bedlam, and you’d never know which was which until you were right in the thick of it.

But as much as I enjoyed working in both sales and service, if you asked me what the best part about working at Next Byte was, I’m not sure I could decide on one specific thing.

Because most of the time I worked weekends, some of the best times were when I was working full time. Usually in school holidays, or in between uni semesters. I liked being the full-time casual, and the permanent Saturday shifts were great, but with only sales staff working on the weekend, it often felt like part of the business was missing. Working during the week made me feel like I was part of a real team, doing real work, with everyone having their own responsibilities and their own work to do. Myself included.

One of my favourite things about Next Byte were the good times that we shared between colleagues. Whether it was inside joke, or just something funny someone had found on the internet — never mind that we weren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to use the internet for non-work purposes, a policy almost impossible to police — the best times were when we approached customers to ask them if they needed anything with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard. They say retail jobs are hard, but as a naïve teenager, I thought retail was great.

And it was those mood-setting moments, however fleeting, that made it the best part.

The Goruck GR1 — The Best Backpack

The Goruck GR1 backpack

The best backpack, the Goruck GR1

I’ve wanted a Goruck GR1 for a long, long time. The first mention of it on this very blog was all the way back in 2016, although at that time I had probably known about it for a year or two prior to that. It’s been a while.

But every time I was in the market for a new backpack — which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be a couple of times over the past 10 years or so — and my gaze once again fell on the GR1 as a potential candidate, I told myself that I didn’t need such an extreme durability backpack, given my generally less-extreme nature. Or that it was too expensive for what it was, or that the USD exchange rate was too awful right now. Or that it was crazy to spend that much on a backpack without having seen or touched it in person, despite being universally praised wherever and whenever I read about it online. All valid enough points, but for the longest time, it was easy to look past a Goruck GR1 for cheaper and more locally-available alternatives, even if they had other compromises and weren’t as durable. Even if I had to buy multiple backpacks after successively running each previous one into the ground, the chances were good that I’d still come out ahead than if I had picked up a GR1.

And as the years came and went, I still found myself glancing at the GR1 occasionally, like an old crush that I never quite got over. As much as Instagram tried to tempt me with “ultimate travel backpacks” or whatever other flavour of the month was being marketed by influencers, the GR1 lived entirely rent-free in my head. I might not have ever owned one, but I had never forgotten it, either.

And then I saw it. The first-ever Goruck GR1 I’ve seen in the flesh. It was in Tokyo, between the flagship 12-storey Uniqlo and heading back home for the night, a lovely Steel-coloured version that had a nice “this is fine” patch. In that moment, I decided that I needed to have one, and after many years spent coveting the most durable backpack, I purchased my first Goruck in November 2023: a GR1 in Wolf Grey and Black.

Only after waiting months for the darn thing to be in stock in a colour other than black. I don’t generally mind black backpacks. But if I was going to carry the backpack around for at least the next few decades, then I wanted something a little lighter in colour. I was tempted by the GR2 in a lighter colour while waiting for the GR1 to be restocked in a lighter colour, but stayed strong and made myself wait.

And wait I did while it was shipped from the USA. And while I waited for it to be shipped, doubt started to creep in. What if I had waited all this time, only for the backpack to be entirely mediocre? Or, worse, for it to not meet the exceptionally high standards I had placed upon it after so long? Would I have been better buying something locally for a third of the price that would last a few years? Or was the GR1 really going to the be-all, endgame backpack that I had wanted for years?

I was wrong to doubt. The GR1 is the best backpack I’ve owned, no doubt in my mind. I’m a year into GR1 ownership, have already taken it overseas, and customised it with my own Australian flag patch1. and it has been the ideal backpack in pretty much every situation. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close.

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The best worst keyboard

A Dell QuietKey keyboard from roughly 2010.

The Dell 0T347F QuietKey Keyboard — The Best Worst Keyboard

It’s a fine morning in 2010. I’m sitting in one of the tutorial rooms at uni, in a computer lab setup with rows of computers for students to use. The desk is terribly setup; the screen sits on top of the computer, which takes up so much depth on the desk that there’s basically only room for the keyboard in front of the computer and absolutely nothing else. Even the keyboard is almost hanging off the front edge of the desk. Ergonomics weren’t a thing in those days, it seems, but this was par for the course in this kind of ancient history.

Strangely, the keyboard grabs my attention. It’s a standard Dell keyboard, the kind that comes free with your new Dell computer and if you don’t know any better, the one that you start using with your new Dell computer. It feels surprisingly good to type on. It’s not mechanical, but the half-height keys are responsive in a way that I wouldn’t expect from an OEM keyboard – certainly not any OEM keyboard I’ve used up until that point, not even the white plastic Apple keyboards I used back in high school. The keys don’t have the same solid action or tactile bump that mechanical ones do, but they still feel great to type on, with a bouncy springiness that puts the typing experience leaps and bounds ahead of the lethargic key feel of any other rubber-domed keyboard of its time.

I like the keyboard so much that I end up buying one for the princely sum of $22, or about $30 in today’s money. It’s the cheap and cheerful nature of it that appeals to my frugal sensibilities, back in the days where I was a poor uni student that didn’t have a hundred dollars to spend on a mechanical keyboard, much less two hundred. I don’t end up using it as my daily driver keyboard — that privilege is reserved for the aluminium Apple keyboards of the time, but it’s far better than the rubberised, spill-proof, roll-up keyboard I’m using for my gaming PC at the time, as evidenced by this blurry photo.

The best worst keyboard with my two other keyboards of the time

I’ve had a bit of a storied keyboard history. On the one hand, I’ve been using a mechanical keyboard since about May 2012 or so, with the Das Keyboard being my very first mechanical keyboard. Before that, my setups often featured the standard Apple keyboard, with its instantly recognisable, if divisive, low profile, laptop-style chiclet keys. When I started my first corporate job and had my own desk, I specifically went and purchased a nice mechanical keyboard with macro buttons and RGB so I could have an excellent typing experience at work. That’s not really a thing these days, thanks to workplaces moving to mostly hotdesks in light of Covid and people appreciating the flexibility of working from home, but you can still do it if you’re willing to lug around a keyboard with you, or keep it in a locker or something at work. As much as I enjoy using nice mechanical keyboards, I’ve used plenty of less-than-stellar keyboards as well. There are photos of me with those rubberised, roll-up keyboards at LANs, where all I needed was something that made it possible to WASD around, no matter how mushy it felt, or how awful it was for any typing.

These days, my setup is generally two keyboards on my desk. The further back keyboard is currently a CODE Keyboard which is always connected to my Mac, while the keyboard directly in front of it is whatever keyboard I’m using with my gaming PC. For the last few years, that’s been a Corsair mechanical gaming keyboard with Cherry Red switches. This setup works pretty well. I don’t do that much typing on my Mac anymore, at least nothing like I used to do, but when I do need to type out the odd phrase, sentence, or even paragraph, the CODE Keyboard with its Cherry Green switches provides such a sublime typing experience that I find myself wishing I did. And when I’m in leisure mode and carrying games with Muerta in Dota 2, it’s nice to have a keyboard that I know I can rely on to give me the exact keys that I press, safe in the knowledge that if I accidentally hit a key, or fat-finger a skill in a teamfight, that’s on me.

Unless my keys flat-out doesn’t work, of course.

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The Seven Types Of Employees You Meet At Best Buy

old sales guy

Grizzled Old Home Theater/Computer Sales Lifer

This guy has seen some shit. He’s a refugee from Lechmere or Tweeter or some other now-defunct retail outlet. He knows the most about the products he sells, which is why all the part-time high school employees send customers with actual questions his way. He’s got an air of resigned acceptance about his life, and while he’s all-business with customers, he’s got no filter with fellow employees. He tells inappropriate jokes and talks vulgarly about the managers behind their back. He has a strictly regimented cigarette break every 2.5 hours that he never, ever misses.

via The Seven Types Of Employees You Meet At Best Buy | Gizmodo Australia.

Substitute “Best Buy” for “JB Hi-Fi”, and you’ve got a winner =)