I went on a long trip recently -- something around 5000 miles worth.  During this traveling I ended up at JFK, one of the LARGEST airports.  There's something like 8 terminals that are all huge and tons of people coming and going in every single direction. 

But thats not my reason for the post.  I was banking on this HUGE airport having a wireless connection ...BERNT!  wrong.  I spent about half and hour looking for one.  Turning on/off my wireless, randomly picking one and trying to get on the net.  Now, before I go further, let me specify -- FREE wireless is what I was looking for.  I managed to find one that wanted 8 bucks an hour or 25 for the whole day...I think not.  I land in Vienna hours later and guess what they have?  Free.  Wireless.  Internet.  And it works, first time.  I was happy.  By the way, Vienna is about 1/10th the size of the airport at JFK.

On my way back, I go over to JetBlue's terminal which touts free internet! free hotspot!  Not where I was sitting, and nor could the people sitting next to me.  At least they had power outlets.  (All over JFK there's "Samsung recharging stations", warning you of 2amps max with a 4amp breaker next to it ...my laptop worked fine in these outlets at full power while recharging so don't believe the 4amp hype)

Moral of the story -- if you plan on going to JFK, do NOT plan on internet connection (for free) that works ...anywhere.

I saw this and couldn't help but laugh.  Credit - John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

After thinking, complaining, considering and debating buying a new laptop, I've finally bit the bullet.  I have now a nice new Asus F3SV with a duo T7500 (2.2ghz), a 15.4 display (1680x1050 native), a geforce 8600gs (plays games great, dx10 no less), 160g hd, 1gb of mem (upgraded to 2 already) and a slew of other stuff (bluetooth, wireless 802.11everything, built in 1.3m camera, dvd burner with light scribe, etc) but I am really geeked by the uber cool fingerprint reader -- my laptop now requires two factor authentication!  Sweet.  And all for under 1300.  No really!  Did I mention it came with a laptop bag and a mobile mouse?  Yea, no kiddin!  Comes with a 2 year warranty -- I priced the same thing out over @ dell's website ...came in at over 1800.  I love my old dell, it's been good to me but ...500$?  No.

First thing I did was nuke the OS and resintall the barebones OS -- which required a phone call to microsoft.  After the -no crapware- install, although Asus didn't REALLY add a lot of it (norton being the ONLY annoying guilty party) it was time to re-do the drivers.  They send you this sweetness driver CD with EVERYTHING on it -- all the way down to the touchpad drivers, thank you very much, so that was easy.  The vista performance assesment came in at 4.5 (mem being the lowest) until I added the 2nd gig, now the video is the lowest at 4.6.  I've installed thea lot of my dev stuff and a variety of other necessities and -damn- this thing is fast.  The comp on my desk at work is a 2.6ghz with 3 gigs of mem (stupid 32bit limit) and I think this could keep up nicely, and if it wasn't for the pair of raptor drives on my home desktop, it would leave it in the dust.

I transfered over my music over to it - something I couldn't do with my old one (40g total), that took a while.  Nice thing about big data transfers is the "fire and forget" methodology.  Copy, paste or click install, don't bother looking at it for hours because it won't be done.  Just listen for the drive to shut up a bit.  Anyway, I think I'm going to like this new laptop.  It's a nice upgrade over my 2ghz p4M cpu with 512m of ram and 40g drive

As with my normal ritual, I come across articles that make me want to scream -- not in a bad way, more like "I've been saying this for years!!!" kind of scream.  This article screams it to the T.  IT that is.

My usual "computer on" ritual probably doesn't differ all that much from yours.  I checka the email, look for my reminders, look at cnn and msn, sometimes asp.net, wired, popular science or tomshardware and I usually glance over a few articles, nothing too involved but required moring crud.  I've been seeing a lot of articles about new cars.  Maybe the car gods are attempting to speak to me, maybe they're planning on taking my car(s) away somehow.  Oh well, regardless, I'm not big on dropping 30, 40, 50, 100, 150, or 250k on a car, I just can't (I mauled over a 1200 laptop for 2 weeks ok?).  And a bigger question, WHY?!  There's so many awesome, uber cool USED cars out there for under 30k, WELL under.  Cars are made (or rather, have been made) better than ever, so they last longer. 

My 96 is still doing just fine, 120k+ miles and all and yes, I am guilty, I have been looking for a new car (more like a suppliment).  Probably something around 2000-2005 and I don't mean those econo box "throw away" car that no one wants -- no, you get something that WAS majorly expensive and -had- to have been taken care of ...like luxuary cars.  A wonderful case in point ...what if you could have a convertable, 2 seater, v12 (!!) with around 400 horse for under 30k?  You know, mercedes has been making this little gem called an SL600 since 1992 ...and they recently changed body styles so paching! cheaper!  Brand new ones peak at 187k ...used ones in the old body ...38k.  Of course there's differences but so what!?  I'd kill for one of these.  Aw, a v12, how cool is that.