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A lot of people dismiss New Year’s celebrations. “It’s just another day,” they say, and that’s true. However life is just like good project management, it requires firm starts and deadlines. Otherwise you’ll never know when you’re finished or need to move on to the next phase in life. Reviewing is what keeps us from endlessly living in a rut. With that in mind, here are some notable things from this year that I experienced. (more…)

So I’ve been living with the Dell Mini 9 for about two weeks now, and I have to say I’m more than pleased with it. It’s actually turned into a really useful tool. I primarily use it for three things, web browsing, cli terminal, and remote desktop.

There are a lot of mini 9 reviews out there and I agree with most of them, so no need to repeat unboxing shots or gripes about the location of the ‘ key. What I will do is tell you how I use it in my everyday life (more…)

I’ve been following the netbook revolution, and I’ve been very tempted to get one. The first EEE PC’s looked promising but useless. The dinky 7″ screen and micro keyboard seemed only useful for kids and perhaps hobbits with perfect eyesight. Plus, as useful as Linux is in the server closet, it’s useless on a notebook. I’ve been looking for a quick and easy way to RDP, ssh, and console into servers and routers. A netbook seems like a good way of doing this. I don’t need much, simply an OS, kbd, lcd, and ethernet. With that in mind the Dell mini-9 is looking really tempting. I’m not sure if 8.9″ screen is too small, but I think it could be useful for doing small quick tasks. I could also see it as being useful for travel as an uber PDA. So what do you think?

I’d like to get a USB wall charger for my iPod. I don’t want to buy the Apple one because I think it’s overpriced. Ideally I’d love a powered USB hub that would charge my USB devices even when the PC is turned off. If that doesn’t exist, any good reliable USB iPod charger would be nice.

So GM is betting the company on their plug-in hybrid concept. Meanwhile the press fawns over how “green” this all is. California is also pushing a big initiative to have recharging stations available all over the place so folks can charge their hybrid. The thing that drives me nuts about all this talk of moving to electric is that it doesn’t really solve our energy problem. It just pushes it from petroleum to electric. Sure right now it’s cheaper per mile to run your car on electricity than gas, but what happens when everyone starts doing this? The law of supply and demand will tell you what’s going to happen next. In addition has anyone done a study to find out if our current electricity infrastructure can handle this demand? What will the grid do when everyone wants to plug in their cars. Couple this with the increased demand from all the server farms, cell phones, laptops, etc that are being thrust into the market everyday. Think of how many things you own that you had to plug-in a decade ago vs. the things that have to plug-in today. Everyone forgets about the blackout that took out all of northeast America a few years ago. Will our aging electric grid be able to handle everyone’s car? Not to mention the waste. More then half of the electric energy is wasted just getting it from the generator to your house. How green is that? The real path to being green is using less and expecting less. The real problem is how do you sell that?

In the past two days I’ve put the new macbook in my shopping cart and chickened out pulling the trigger. I couldn’t figure out what my hang up was, until I listened to episode 79 of MacBreak Weekly. I think Scott Bourne is correct and that the last speed bump is a tie-over until a significant upgrade happens later this year. So what am I waiting for? I think Intel is going to upgrade the chipset sometime this summer and hopefully upgrades the GMA graphics. I also think it’s only a matter a time before all the laptops have LED backlights. So this is my pledge, I will buy the next macbook with an LED screen. I’ve just setup a savings account, with the money I would have spent on the laptop. Are you listening Jobs? My money is just sitting there waiting for you to get moving on my challenge.

I’m no Luddite. Infotech pays my bills and puts food on my table, but lately I have to say I’m really unimpressed with what’s new out there in IT land. It seems we’re at the top of the S curve of what Infotech can do to enhance our lives. New stuff is being created just to be created. It doesn’t solve any problems it just adds to the cacophony of what’s already out there. Do we really need another social networking site, another search engine, another map application, another twitter clone, another IM client, another Office Suite, another OS, etc? Does Vista or Leopard actually help you DO anything better, faster, easier? (more…)

A few months ago my Motorola v330 met it’s demise after slipping out of my bike bag and meeting the asphalt at high speed. I secretly had hoped this would happen for quite some time. I can’t replace a piece of tech until it dies because I’m thrifty that way. With the v330 dead, I was free to look for a new phone. I hated the v330, but it was the cheapest phone that would sync with Apple iSync at the time. I regarded it as a holdover until phones got better. At the time smartphone selection was pretty dismal. Almost two years later the smartphone selection is still pretty dismal.
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So I’ve waited for over two years to get a new Mac laptop so I could get Leopard for free, and now I think I might not want it. The new interface with it’s super transparency seems to fly in the face of usability and is just showing off to show off a la Vista. (Remember Apple, Redmond’s supposed to copy you not vice versa). Multiple desktops ooohh… I think Enlightenment had that back in 1999 (go ahead linux weenies and correct me). Plus being almost over a year delayed can only mean they’ll be squashing bugs up until release date with probably a big service update to download immediately. Time machine is a nice idea, but not really well thought out. Yes we have oodles of high capacity external HD’s at home to make infinite backups of all our stuff at home. Right, if people took backup that seriously, they wouldn’t need time machine in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an Apple hater by any means. I faithfully apply the white sticker to my car and have three iPods. You’ll tear my OSX laptop from my cold dead hands, and that’s exactly my problem. OSX is great, don’t start messing it up now. Sure Finder stinks, but that’s why we have Quicksilver. Don’t ruin a good thing.

If I were to isolate the precise jump the shark moment, it would be coverflow. It’s not that coverflow is so egregious, but it was right around the time when Apple started really stretching to innovate, not because it was better, but because they couldn’t think of anything new to do. Coverflow is useless for most people and it’s not even good eye candy (especially when you’re missing most of your album art). The Fat Nano, Apple TV, Numbers, Pages, new iMovie, and especially the iPhone just keeps the dismal wave of ho-hum Apple junk coming our way.

I blame the iPhone for all of this. Can you imagine how bad the press would have been if Samsung or Nokia released the exact same product? Everyone would say, “It doesn’t support 3rd party apps” or “You can’t even dial by touch” and “This thing is way overpriced for not being a very good PDA.” It seems to get more and more dismal all the time, and it’s hard to get excited about a product that you’re not allowed to develop for, can’t use with your carrier (unless you’re with AT&T), and at the end of the day is yet another crappy camera+phone+contact list+music player.

So Apple get back to what you used to do well and start doing it again. Or at least start leaving well enough alone.

We’re redesigning our WAN at work and what a headache. Well you can’t mention WAN without having to deal with Cisco somehow. I’m just amazed at how they continue to dominate the switching/routing/security market even though their stuff is so ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming. Which got me thinking, what if Cisco made cars? Here’s an excerpt from an imaginary Cisco car lot. (more…)