Today’s laptops remind me of those “bass players” you see with 5, 6 and 7-string basses… Give me a fucking break. If you’re secretly harboring a guitar fetish, learn to play guitar and STFU.

Today, “Netbooks” are all the rage. I’d actually call them “laptops,” since that’s what they seem to be — laptops that know their place. Small, thin, light, powerful enough, wifi… All you need, really, in a laptop.  So when the Asus eee pc came out, I indulged. Nutshell: Fun to look at, maybe play with, but useless for touch typing in any serious way.

Last week I bought a ThinkPad X41. It’s awesome (I happen to love trackpoint navigation, and IBM’s idea of how a keyboard should feel). It’s very thin, very light, with an old-school 1024×768, 12″ LCD… Which I like, ’cause I think the whole “cinema screen” craze is misguided as hell. I don’t use my laptop to watch movies; I use it to write. On vertical, letter-sized pages. WTF. Anyway, netbook schmetbook; it’s a smart laptop that acts like one.

Downside: Can’t run OSX (unless you’re seriously committed)… But I’ve found that with RocketDock, “Cleartype” (is that really the best you could do, M$??) and a nice, minimalist theme installed (and taskbar hidden), I have a superb “netbook” that is also a killer writing machine. Might go for the OSX crack one of these days, we’ll see. In the meantime, I have a wafer-thin happy lappy that weighs less than 3 pounds, has xlnt built-in wifi and is solid as a rock (1.5Ghz CPU/1.5GB RAM/40GBHD).

Total cost? $250. That’s right. I scored extra discount points with the one I bought, as it had wonky keys, so the owner knew he had to go down… $200 out the door, found a new keyboard on eBay for $40+shipping. It even has a fingerprint reader (!?)… So there!

Surprise. Turns out people drinking more expensive wine don’t actually enjoy it more than the cheap crap unless you tell them the secret.

Oh, how many things in life are just like that.

Many firsts for me this year:

• First $$ donations to any political campaign, ever.
• First lawn sign.
• First vote for a presidential candidate younger than me.
• First vote for a black man.
• First time I felt proud, and honored, to vote for anything or anyone.

I love it.

Religion has been getting a bad rap. But it’s not Religion that’s the problem. It’s Faith. Faith extolled as unassailable virtue. Faith in the light of conflicting or even contradictory evidence. That’s actually the psychiatric definition of delusion.

Cling to any other such belief (in light of invalidating evidence), and people will rightfully worry about you. For example, that there is (more…)

How pathetic is it that the guys who own the frickin’ marketplace spend a gajillion dollars to A) hire an aging comedian to prove that they’re “hip,” and B) create an entire campaign that is essentially a response to someone else’s better idea. Gah. And to top it off, the ads were created on a Mac.

Here’s my recut tribute to MSoft and their pure and total awesome.

I recently slid up against the whole Getting Things Done thing. Sites that refer to it often (or are actually all about it) have slowly made their way into my regular visit list for being so damn smart and useful… The idea simply reached critical mass, and I had to check it out.

I didn’t buy the book or anything. Let’s not get crazy. But I did manage to get quite a bit of value just from (more…)

My favorite radio show is Left Right and Center. On last week’s episode, I heard something that has resonated with me ever since. The conversation, at one point, led to the observation that, if one were to simply take “the average American voter” and list the major policy positions of Democrats vs. Republicans for him or her, the majority of people will choose Democratic. And yet — Republicans win. Why? WTF is that about?

Tony Blankley (speaking for The Right) answered simply, and candidly. He said (more…)

One of my regular webstops is the blog of one “Ashley Blue” (real name Oriana Small), porn actress, artist, and barer of mind, body and soul. Ashley/Oriana is a remarkably unremarkable-looking woman whose work apparently includes the kind of porn where girls pretend (one hopes) to be forced to choke and gag and cry. Etc.

Her blog is brilliant, and addictive; nothing more than a simple selection of (more…)

Hearing an artist I respect referred to as “talented” makes me want to scream. Most of the time, that person’s achievements have more to do with hard work than any accidental, inborn attribute. Talent is great; it just doesn’t really deserve praise until someone does something with it.

Ira Glass posted some excellent videos on (more…)

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t tend to hold back when criticizing something, especially movies. Hyperbolic derision is usually followed by gleeful deconstruction, trying to parse out how something that sucked so bad got made (and released). Lately, tho, I’ve tried to put a damper on that behavior, or at least restrict it to chatter among close friends. Why?

First, I’ve learned the hard way that (more…)