Is it wrong that I joined Facebook mostly so I could geek out over the Facebook app on my iPhone? The other reason I joined is even less rational: with a job search imminent, I'm finally about to do something with my LinkedIn account besides accept invitations, so I "might as well" deal with Facebook, too. This declaration of war against ( Read more... )

Once upon a time I decried camera phones as instances of feature creep. Give me several products that fill their niches adeptly, I said, instead of one bloated product that performs every function mediocrely. Perhaps I simply didn't believe that one design could fulfill so many disparate promises. Perhaps I simply lack the imagination to ( Read more... )

Standing in line at the Apple store yesterday I realized my lack of foresight. The store opened at noon, and the midday sun had already burned the back of my neck red as I passed the time with a mission of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. After almost an hour, the line had moved only a couple dozen feet, mostly to the side towards the shade. I ( Read more... )

I almost went to Wal-Mart. You see, I finally received my government coupon for a DTV converter this afternoon. My extensive on-line research (I visited cnet.com) suggested that the RCA box was the way to go, but then I found that Wal-Mart seems to be the only retailer in town carrying it. What's a liberal nutjob to do ( Read more... )

Argh. When I got my PowerBook back, I brought my data up to date by copying (well, rsyncing) everything from my external backup hard drive. I had formatted this hard drive using FAT16 for compatibility with our Windows machines. In hindsight, it's obvious that my backups wouldn't preserve my file permissions. In the absence of hindsight, I didn ( Read more... )

I just received my trusty PowerBook back from the IT guy in our department. It looks so big now. I was getting accustomed to the portability of the 12" model, but the extra three inches really does make a difference. Compared to the loaner laptop I had, I regained 40% more pixels, 50% more CPU cycles per second, and 33% more RAM. And my sorely ( Read more... )

My once trusty PowerBook fell asleep again, and no amount of button pressing, lid opening, chassis shaking, salt smelling, or prince kissing will rouse it. So now I am using the clone that our department's tech guru made for me. He just copied the contents of my hard drive onto some other PowerBook' hard drive. Despite losing 0.5 GHz, 256 MB, ( Read more... )

Gah! My three-years-old-in-April PowerBook chose this week to crap out on me. I really just wanted it to last until my last lecture of the semester tomorrow, but its case of narcolepsy progressed to the point where I couldn't awaken it at the beginning of class yesterday. At least I managed to get through the lecture using slides from last year' ( Read more... )

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My acquisition of a brand new XBox 360 has inspired an ironic resurgence in my Playstation 2 usage. Sarah is playing Oblivion, but I can't afford to buy new games until after my holiday shopping and travel clear my credit card. So now I have this irrational urge to play my backlog of PS2 games before they "expire" when I start building my 360 ( Read more... )