I have been using laptops primarily for the past few years and now I am planning to return to desktops.  Why?  Because laptops are difficult to upgrade and I am tired of paying too much to replace broken parts or batteries dying over time.  The control key on my current laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8000, is sticky and I can't fix it without sending my laptop off.  Fans (yup, it has two) and hard drives turning on and off is annoying too.

I have been eyeing the 17-inch PowerBook but Windows is my primary target environment so I can't just replace my laptop with the PowerBook.  So I am going to get a desktop, not the most powerful one available, but one that hits the Sweet Spot.  I think that means 3.2 GHz Pentium 4.  So far I am looking at Dell Dimension 8300 with 2 gig of memory, 400G disk.  Since I am addicted to 1600×1200 resolution and LCD (read ClearType), I'll have to get one of those 20-inch LCD and match that with Radeon 9800 GPU.  Even with fastest optical drives (CD/DVD-RW), total cost is around $2400 which is pretty good deal I think.

Only problem is that the price keeps dropping.  Longer I hold off on getting it, the cheaper it gets.  It's amazing that with such a strong incentive not to press the submit button, the computer industry still humms along.  How crazy is that?

After I finish making the transition to the desktop, maybe I'll get the PowerBook (why the heck does it support only 1440×900?) with the excuse that I'll be writing some OS X software.  At least that's the line I am going to use on my wife.  OS X software market is going to explode, honey!

Dave wrote:

What really gets to me is how people who say they're my friend, stand by, and say nothing.

Oops.  Sorry, Dave.  When read about your shutting down of weblogs.com, I thought it didn't seem like something you would do without a good reason.  So I went and listened to your MP3 chat.  You did have a good reason which was that you tried to do the good thing but things got complicated and there weren't many options to choose from.  While it's easy to think there must have been better alternatives, it's just not the same as being the man on the spot.

Why didn't I say anything when the hounds were at your heels?  I thought you would just take it all in stride.  After all, you must have expected the hounds would come after you.  Would the hounds listen to opinions contrary to their smell of blood?  I didn't think so.  I thought they would just look foolish afterward since they chose to misinterpret what you said and misunderstand your motives.

Inside me is a scared kid as well but I have been all right ever since I accepted death as a side door with a glowing Exit sign over it instead of a gate to hell and eternal pain.  My apology is for not seeing that you might think differently and that you might misinterpret silence as a sign of abandonment.  I will speak up next time.

I just got back home from SFO after watching my wife and son enter the passenger gate.  They are going to Korea to visit family and friends for a month.  This means I'll be on a vacation from family life for the next month.  Heeehaaaw!  So far I got a private poker tourney scheduled for Saturday.  I should do well enough to beat most of the players, but I doubt I'll be taking the big pot home because trying to win the tourney takes too much fun out of the game.

When WinAmp came out, it became my default MP3 player and assigned to the task of drowning out noise from outside my office.  I was happy and kept upgrading it, but along the way I notice that WinAmp was starting to get rather big.  Do I need all that fancy graphics and features?  Not really.  I usually just turn it on and let it play while I am working or I hop from tune to tune while relaxing with a glass of wine in my hand.

Anyway, I got curious enough to see what other choices were out there and found Coolplayer, a tiny open source MP3 player for Win32.  It's written in C and it's binary consists of just one 300K EXE file.  Installation?  What installation?  Just run the EXE.  It still has too much unnecessary graphics and I think its memory footprint should stay below 5mb instead of popping up to 9mb while playing (probably to load the active MP3 file into memory) but it basically fits my needs.

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi recently said:

Iran will not give up its rights to the peaceful use of atomic energy as well as its right to supply nuclear fuel to its power plants.

OPEC's second largest oil producing nation needs nuclear power plants?  Note that Iran also has the world's second largest natural gas reserve.  Hmm.  Maybe they have the world's largest BS reserves they are dying to export.

According to a survey commissioned by Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 2.5% of jobs lost are due to offshoring.  AFL-CIO thinks the survey is faulty.  My own experience suggests the number is bigger, at least in the Silicon Valley where I work.  At one company I have worked with for many years, it's engineering department was downsized to barebones and replaced with a large growing team of engineers in India.  2.5%?  Not even close

Maciej Ceglowski has an amusing tilt to his writing style.  Despite being a staunch Francophile, he trounces French army colorfully:

Right – with the most powerful army in Europe, you stood idle and let Germany rearm in explicit contravention of a treaty signed with you just a dozen years before. And then you did nothing when Germany began an unprovoked war with Poland, preferring to dig in to your fortifications rather than strike the weakly defended German industrial heartland with your ninety seven combat divisions. When the decisive attack finally came, almost a year after the start of hostilities, you disintegrated with stunning celerity. Your greatest living war hero completely discredited his country serving as the leader of a collaborationist rump wartime state, and your conduct during and after the war was ambiguous at best. You brought shame upon your country in Algeria and Indochina. You conducted nuclear tests in the South Pacific way after that had gone completely out of style.

You sank a fucking Greenpeace ship.

NO CITADELS FOR YOU!

Orkut is now a spam-filled waste and inappropriate for professional use.  What a waste of a good opportunity.  I am now starting to appreciate LinkedIn's more conservative approach.

Read Les Earnest's hillarious story about how his secret decoder ring got FBI on his tail when he was 12 years old.  That was in 1943 but it shows what can happen when paranoia grips a nation.  It could be now if you are related in anyway to the Middle East. [via Gagetopia via Espen Adersen].