nexus 7 so i got a nexus 7. it's the 2012 model. i bought it on the cheap. it didn't come with a charger. just the charging cable. fortunately it seems to work just fine with the iphone charger. so far. the device is pretty. especially for a used device purchased sight unseen over the intertubes. but that's where pretty ends and ugly begins immediately as soon as you turn it on. you *must* join a wi-fi network. which is seriously inconvenient if you use mac address filtering. i had to temporarily disable mac address filtering on the router. which was super inconvenient. the beautiful and talented alisa's mac doesn't like that. its wireless must be reset too. stupid dumbass thing. anywho, after it boots i could get the mac address from the following intuitive procedure: tap the funny white circle with six white dots. tap the white gear icon, settings. tap wi-fi. tap the three vertically stacked little boxes in the upper right. tap advanced. mac address is listed. awesome. now since this is a working device and not a play device it needs to rooted. step the zeroth, download the android sdk. step the first, enable developer: go back to settings. swipe to the bottom of the list. tap about tablet. tap build number seven times. no, i'm not making this up. congratulations, you're a developer! go back to settings. tap developer options right above about tablet. tap usb debugging to enable it. now you need to reboot in fastboot mode. so you have to power off. and this is another stupid feature. you must remove the usb cable. there are three buttons on the right hand side. the two together are volume up and down. the third is the power button. hold the power button for a second. tap power off. tap ok. wait for the screen to go dark. plug in the usb cable. push and hold all three buttons until the dead green android appears on the screen. and that's as far i'm going to get in one day. try again tomorrow.  ¶ 8:00 AM