Cuz We Said So

Good Thing He Wasn't Playing Othello

Actor Playing Brutus Stabs Himself...

Why David Loves Carbonite

I mentioned back in June that I've started using Carbonite online backup to protect the data on my desktop PC.  Rip dropped me an e-mail earlier today asking me how I like it.  My reply, in part: 

"Strong is my love for this Carbonite of which you speak.

The initial backup (which was around 50 GB) took weeks to complete, because my upstream DSL speed is only 512 Kbps, but the process was completely transparent.  Backups now happen several times a day at least, and usually last for under two minutes, but occasionally running as long as 20 minutes when I've changed large files.  Again, I know this only because I checked the log this morning; it's all strictly behind-the-scenes.  The first month I had the program I'd keep popping it open to see how it was progressing.  Now I don't even notice it's there, until I need it.  Ever once in a blue moon I'll lose or accidentally delete a file I want to keep, and it's nice being able to just pop open the Carbonite folder, knowing I can bounce the last backed up copy back down to my local drive...

Bottom line is, I'm still very happy with it.

I wrote that this afternoon.  I didn't mean to have another tale of how Carbonite has bailed me out so soon, but sometimes you're just lucky, I guess.  This evening, I opened Outlook on my desktop machine, to discover that my primary mail file, around 78 MB of data—mail since May, my to do list, all my contacts... had been zeroed out.  Empty.  I don't know how it happened, though I suspect I screwed it up by attempting to open it with the tablet across the network.

If I had no backup, I would be very unhappy right now.  And even with a traditional backup scheme, like the daily or weekly backups I used to run, I could have lost my messages from today, maybe from all this week.

Instead, Carbonite had a backup copy of the mail file from 4:19 pm this evening, not long after I last closed Outlook.  With a click on Restore, the file was streaming back down to the my hard drive.  No lost data at all.

Yeah, I like Carbonite a lot.

The Box

…for returning my work PC to the office just arrived.  Feels like the end of an era.  Nostalgia, and so forth.

...Long Live My Tablet PC

...And my first impression of my new tablet, a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet, is that it's just fantastic.

I knew it was likely to be good; the very similar X60 has been garnering strong reviews for a while, just as the X40, IBM’s pre-Lenovo-sale foray into the tablet biz, did before that.  But it's even better than I hoped.  (Full disclosure, in case you haven't seen me mention it: I work for Lenovo partner IBM... or I do until this Friday, anyway.)

It's light.  It feels rock-solid to the touch, as Thinkpads tend to.  (I haven't dropped it on the floor to see if it will survive better than my Toshiba's did, but I'm optimistic that it might, in the event I ever put it to the test unintentionally.) 

The MultiTouch screen is bright and clear, and I love being able to surf the Web, scroll through documents, and play Bejeweled 2 without having to take the stylus out.  The keyboard is, like that on every Thinkpad I've ever seen, simply spectacular. Really, really good. It took a few days to adjust to the spacing on this machine, which is slightly more cramped than on my T41, but the layout is essentially the same, and very comfortable, something I’ve found all too rare among laptop I've used.  I found the keyboard on the M400, for example, to be its weakest point.  Well, that and the fact that it wasn't engineered to stand a four foot drop onto a hard floor..  Anyway, typing on the X61 is a pleasure.

I do miss giving up the onboard optical drive again (my M400 had one, my earlier M200 did not) since it means I can’t use it as a big DVD player when I'm on the road—but I rarely did that with the Toshiba anyway.  And I bought the matching docking station, with a DVD drive installed, which should be small enough to haul along if I find I just can't do without.

And I did make one terrible error when I bought this thing.  I got it with Vista.  Yes, remembering how negative my beta experience with Vista was, I should have known better.  But because this is a tablet, and I had heard that the tablet input panel on Vista is much improved over XP.  I thought I could overcome my disdain for Vista.  Nope.  It is true that the new TIP is nicer, but it's not enough.  I'm finding Vista to be infuriatingly unstable compared to XP, to the point where I’m considering contacting Lenovo to see if they'll let me pay for a downgrade to XP Tablet Edition.  Hopefully, some time in the next couple of years, Vista will exit beta, and become a decent OS. 

Otherwise, the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 is off to a great start, in my book.

My Tablet PC is Dead...

There's no denying it.  I am merciless with tablet computers.  Ruthless.  Unrelenting.  I'm a business consultant, so I'm highly mobile, usually with the tablet close at hand.  I am also... let us say less than gifted in matters of hand-eye coordination.  As a result, the life of a handheld computer in my possession tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

I bought a Toshiba M400 tablet in April 2006, just two short years after buying—and then battering to death—a Toshiba M200 tablet, as I recounted here.

Nearly six months passed before I broke it.  While on a cruise in Asia, I left it sitting on an table, with the cord strung across to the nearest outlet, some few feet away.  Someone walked by, didn't see the cord, and pulled it to the floor, the power supply connection yanked half way out of the frame.  Tablet: dead. 

Fortunately, having anticipating the abuse that tablets in my vicinity mysteriously attract, I had invested in an Accidental Damage and Stupidity Plan (might not be what Toshiba calls it), and the local Toshiba depot had repaired and ready to go in a couple of weeks.  New power connector.  New motherboard.

Two weeks passed.  This time I was in a team meeting, with the tablet sitting on the conference table in front of me.  As I was packing up at the end of the session, I somehow snagged the cord as I was turning to pick the tablet up.  Again, it landed on the ground.  Tablet: dead.  Again, the Toshiba dealer fixed it, this time replacing the motherboard, the power hardware, and the display.

The final blow for the M400 was again on a cruise, last month, when I fumbled the machine picking it up, and dropped it to the deck.  It responded in exactly the same way as the previous times when the motherboard was broken.  Tablet... dead.

At this point, some people might have said to themselves, "“Perhaps I need to stop dropping my tablet PC,” or “Maybe I need to think about giving up on carrying a tablet.”

I, instead, thought, “Maybe Toshiba's just doesn't make their motherboards tough enough."  After all, I’ve had terrible luck with my Toshiba’s, but both of my work-issue Thinkpads, a T21 and a T41, performed with minimal ill-effect through the worst I could dish out, each for more than three years.

And so it was I came to buy yet another new tablet PC.

What a Month

Hey, remember me? Yes, I do still post here, at least in theory.  After a summer that started out extraordinarily slow at work, things took off in August, with some long hours on a client project, longer hours on an RFP response and finally, to top it all, a job offer from another consulting firm, which I've decided to accept.  Someone asked me the other day if, with this being my last week with IBM, I was enjoying a few days off.  A nice thought, but—no!  Things have really been going like gangbusters right up to the last minute.

Anyway, most of my work is finally put to bed, the projects I've been working on are wrapping up simultaneously, which lends itself to a nice sense of closure, and I can finally attend to the details of the transition, and maybe actually get some writing in on the side.

I Am Not Gay

Poor Larry Craig, the latest victim in this nation's obsession with sexual deviance.  I find the whole sordid affair to be absurd, and long for a return to the bygone era when people accepted the fact that, for the most part, everyone has some sort of sexual fetish, and unless it involves goats or little children, it really isn't anyone's business at all.

It's hard to imagine that in this post-60s, post-sexual-liberation, post-AIDS world, we somehow are now more sexually hung-up than at any time since perhaps Victorian Britain.

Follow-up post to come....

Sky

Announcing Sky, the latest ridiculously cool offering from the propellerheads at Google.

Like Google Earth, Sky will enable users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. Users will view the sky as seen from earth.

It has created different layers which will show the life of a star, constellations, high-resolution images provided by the Hubble Space Telescope and a users guide to galaxies.

A backyard astronomy layer lets users click through stars, galaxies and nebulae visible to the eye, binoculars and small telescopes.

Perhaps, somehow, this will enable Russell to find his bag.

       

Sunshine

In a film titled remarkably similarly to "Stardust", "Sunshine" has a very different kind of mood and asthetic.

This new film from Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting", "28 Days Later") posits that the sun is dying, shedding less and less light on Earth, dipping the planet into a deadly winter. The Icarus II is a space vessel, sent as a last ditch effort to reignite the portion of the sun which is at sub-par radiance. The cast is a potpourri of Asians and Europeans, each carrying on his or her grim visage the terrifying pain of trying to save all of humanity.

The Science is Settled

Or not.