Nothing like coming into work and unexpectedly finding a brand new Dell Latitude 600 w/ integrated Wi-Fi waiting on my arrival.
My work laptop has been in use (by me) since October 1998 – this for a guy who typically lives on the cutting edge of technology. So the new laptop (and now new PDA) is quite welcome.
It’s certainly not going to replace my Apple Powerbook for general day to day usage, but it’s certainly going to help while I’m in the office.
We are now mostly moved over to a new home – a Dual Xeon 2.4ghz Server with 2GB of RAM and 160GB of HD Space from Layered Technologies – quite happy with their service. Check them out if you’re looking for a new place to hang your hat.
In my previous What’s in my Bag entry, I wrote about my golf clubs – this entry is about my gadgets.
The bag itself is a Brenthaven Mobility Backpack, purchased at The Apple Store in Peabody, MA. It’s a great backpack that safely carries my Apple Powerbook G4 and work related materials without a hitch. I used to use something more like a messenger bag, but when I purchased the Powerbook I wanted something more protective. And it’s far easier to carry than my old work bags were.
So, the gadgets:
Enjoy 😉
One cool thing from Steve Job’s keynote at the WWDC yesterday was the release of information about Tiger, the next generation Mac OS, but specifically the Dashboard widget application.
I’ve long been interested in dashboards and other knowledge management tools and am currently involved in a major project ending in late July along these same lines for my real job.
Reading about Dashboard in Tiger led me to Konfabulator, which I had never heard of, and does almost exactly the same thing as Tiger’s Dashboard will do.
So here I sit, on my powerbook at work, with widgets open in Konfabulator showing me the current weather, the days left until the startup of this project’s active phase, and the current stock price of my employer. Absolutely fantastic.
I can’t wait to get it home and try it out on the big screen.
Apple has released new Cinema displays including a hot 30″ display.
I need that like a need a hole in my head, but wow, that’s a sexy display. I have the older 23″ model now and I love it dearly. But these new ones are something else!
Ron Bell writes today of Al Qaeda and SpaceShipOne:
What a difference a day makes.
Less than a week after Al Qaeda beheaded American Paul Johnson in its continuing effort to restore the Middle East to a medieval caliphate ruled by religious fiat comes the successful suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne, a private initiative that represents the best of which humankind is capable.
Could there be a starker study in contrasts?
On the one hand, murderous religious zealots caught up in the imagined glories of a bygone era, dedicated to the proposition that all learning must be filtered and all understanding tempered by the repressive flame of orthodoxy; on the other, individuals committed to opening new frontiers of knowledge, not because it is easy or certain but because it is hard.
Outer space embodies freedom. It is the final frontier, the last unclimbed mountain in an era that has seen more accelerated technological and social change than any that came before. Such rapid metamorphosis can’t help but frighten those who take comfort in certitude. So it is not surprising that some would demand that the world slow down, rest apace, even rewind its historical clock.
Ron’s post reminds me of something that Victor Davis Hanson might write. A fascinating comparison between western civilization and the fundamentalists clinging to a past that they can’t hope to save.
As I watched the news reports of SpaceShipOne yesterday, I was reminded of President Kennedy’s speech:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is the one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intended to win, and the others, too.
Burt Rutan and his team have chosen to do the other thing – because it is hard.
And the world has changed, yet again…
It appears that I already have updates to my “essentials” list below.
I’m now using Mozilla’s Firefox as my web browser – this appears to be a good workaround to the memory issues that I was having before with Safari – and I was able to import my bookmarks, so we’ll see how well this works.
I’ve also switched from Microsoft Entourage over to Apple’s Mail.app – with SpamSieve continuing as my mail filter for Spam. Hopefully this will do the trick.
I’ll post an update in a week or so.