This picture has been sitting on my camera for about a month now, and I finally copied it off.
We're visiting my wife's cousins for Thanksgiving. I went on a run this morning, and decided to map it. I discovered that Gmaps Pedometer now has automatic routing, which is beyond awesome. Instead of taking 10 minutes to painstakingly draw my route and match the straight lines to the streets, now the computer does it for me. Awesomeness++.
We're very amused by the Sweet Tomatoes ice cream cones.
I spent two posts drooling over the new HP netbook, and contemplating how awesome it would be to have one. Recently, I was at Costco, and I discovered that they had it for sale. After messing around with it in person, I can say that it does have the best keyboard I've ever seen on a netbook (aside from the HP 2133, which has a nearly identical keyboard). While the 2133 has more solid construction, the Mini 1000 has an easier to read display because of the lower resolution. And of course, the Mini has a better processor.
All that's pretty standard; however, after typing on the keyboard for a little bit, it dawned on me that it reminded me of using the Sony Picturebook, which I had back in the day. The formfactor was awesome, and I could carry it everywhere, but it had one fatal flaw: typing on the keyboard for more than an hour was generally a bad idea. My hands hated me after I spent a good part of a day coding on the thing. Since most of the point of having a computer for me is to actually be able to input information, I think I may have come to the realization that although the HP netbooks are cool and have a decent size keyboard, trying to use one will probably only end in pain. So I think that's the end of my netbook dreams.
Of course, now I'm looking at the EliteBook 2530p. But I can get the 2510p much cheaper (like $900) refurbished via HP's employee plan, so that might be a better idea, despite not being quite as neat as the 2530p.
Only vaguely related: In wandering around looking up details on the 2530p and 2510p, I discovered a a page about HP's laptop naming scheme, which would have been really useful when I was choosing what laptop to be provided with for work. As it is, I ended up with an 8510w, which while really fast, has the main problem of being way too heavy. It also has an insane 1920x1200 resolution on a 15" screen, and with my crappy vision, that's just too much. I have to run it at 1440x900 in order to be able to use it.
I don't want to be too much of an Amazon MP3 store ad, but when I see a deal like this, I've gotta spread the word. If I didn't already own the album, I would cop this in an instant.
I'm amazed at how long it has taken, but they've finally posted the pictures. And while I wasn't really planning on buying them, I am truly amazed at how much they charge for these pictures, especially to actually get the high res originals. At those prices, the low res, watermarked versions are good enough for me.
Every time you hear Old MacDonald, you think Enforce In-order Execution of IO.
Thanks to my brother for the forward.It looks like at least some of the Firefox font issues are fixed in Ubuntu 8.10. The fonts are comparable in size to Opera now, but Opera's fonts still look slightly better. They also seem to have fixed the "use system proxy settings" so that it actually works, which is neat. The thing is, Opera does have a lot of nice features that I do like about it, like the fact that it groups popups in a per-tab basis, and you can configure things like popup blocking and whatnot on a per site basis. If it wasn't for the fact that it seems to have weird issues with flash performance (today I was watching Zero Punctuation, and the audio kept on going fine, but the video would stop and then run really fast and then stop and then run really fast.), and I have had flash actually lock up the browser, so that only one tab locking up thing must have been a fluke. It's really too bad that I actually want to use web content that needs flash, since my life would be so much easier without that plugin. Anyways, I'm contemplating switching back to Firefox, for reasons that are completely not even remotely the fault of Opera. We'll see where this goes.