Yeah, it’s been a while. I just haven’t been that inspired to write anything. Hopefully I can get back into routine of posting here.

Tonight’s topic: Vista. I finally have an Aero-capable machine in my new T60 2326D7U. The T60 is a great machine, but it shows where Lenovo is going with these….and the trends are disturbing. More on that later.

I installed Vista RC1 build 5600 today on a second HD in the Ultrabay expansion port. I like it overall, it is way more attractive than XP. I had not played around with any install of Vista until today.

It seems to work well, and it auto-installed all of my devices except the CDMA modem.

As I have read, it seems to mimic many of the visual enhancements built into Mac OS X over the years, like transparency and anti-aliased type. There are also things like the Windows Sidebar and its Gadgets (OS X has Widgets, though they aren’t anchored to anything the way the Sidebar is.

IE7 is much nicer than IE6, but it still leaves something to be desired for someone who has been using Firefox 2.0 RC3. The spell check function in FF2 is just too awesome to not be included in all browsers.

There is definately a lot of new, flashy eye-candy, and booting back into XP makes for visual disappointment. It’s interesting, and it will be fun to watch the improvements as MS rushes it to market.

Found via digg.com:

from http://techdirt.com/articles/20060110/1818234_F.shtml

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Unintentionally Geeky Joke in Apple’s Share Price

Unless you’re the sort of person who immediately recognized why the folks at Google originally sought to raise $2,718,281,828 in its IPO, you might want to just pass over this story. A reporter at News.com noticed an extremely unintentional inside joke with Apple’s closing share price today. On the very day the company officially announced its first Intel-based product, Apple’s stock price closed at $80.86. If you don’t get it, it’s time to read up on your computer history. No, there is no way at all that this was intentional. However, that doesn’t make it any less amusing.
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That is totally awesome.

The Intel Macs are here. Okay, actually, on Apple’s site, it says they ship February.

They are touting the 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo (read: dual core) as being 4x faster than the outgoing 1.67GHz G4 PowerBook.

You can get a 256MB Radeon X1600 in them now, that’s pretty sick. It’s the graphics performance that’s the biggest letdown of my TiBook 667.

They are currently only offered in 15.4″ widescreen configurations.

so yesterday, every employee at my office was given a black, 30GB video iPod. Sweet little xmas bonus, indeed.

It is sick. I had planned on buying a 60GB for my xmas present, but they saved me the trouble. 30GB is so much more usable than my 3G 10GB iPod. I loaded it up with music and some podcasts (audio and video), and right now I am copying Delaney photos onto it.

So far I have but one complaint - the lack of FireWire capability. It only hooks up as USB. Perhaps that’s because it’s formatted for Windows, but I’m unsure about that. JFGI, I guess. No big deal, but I have to get a USB2 card for my G4 today, because the 15GB of files I’ve put on it so far took FOREVER to transfer over USB1.1.

Okay, maybe two compaints - the screen is incredibly vulnerable to scratches. Far moreso than my older iPod. Perhaps some screen protection film is in order as well.

If you’re still not watching Diggnation’s podcast with Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, go check out the newest one, #24. You can get it on the site, diggnation.com, or through iTunes.

It’s completely hilarious. It’s a clip show of the best moments from the previous editions, but it’s nicely put together, and it’s damn funny. Like laugh out loud, rewinding parts funny.