For Jillian: The Moral Dilemma

(This was an email response to our friend Jillian. She's considering a new PC or Mac laptop. I cleaned a few lines of thought up and added some missing pieces for posting purposes.)

Mac vs. PC is a matter of personal preference, or a religious war, depending on who you are. :-)

Our iBook occasionally gives us some "spinning beach balls of doom" but partially because it's using old technology and I tax the heck out of it. If you got a new Mac, that wouldn't be an issue. The Macbooks that Apple replaced the iBook with are really nice machines. The default $1099 configuration is reasonably fast, is pretty solid and you wouldn't need to do much customization (and can’t) as you might by going with a PC.

You can get a cheaper PC, definitely, but when you configure a comparable PC to what Apple has to offer it's not much cheaper than the Mac.

The main concern if you switch is that you'll have to shell out for new software (read: Microsoft Office). The other consideration is that if you can wait for a few months (October?), you can get a Mac with the new upcoming OS X "Leopard" operating system, and sometime this fall Microsoft is releasing Office 2008 for Mac. We bought our iBook right before they released OS X “Tiger” and it has burned me up ever since.

As Rachel said, we don't run antivirus software and don't get infected with anything, so if you really just don't want to worry about it, then a Mac would be good too. (Mac = Small Target, Windows = HUGE Target.)

That being said, I'm pretty sure you can get a discount through Dell as a Federal employee also and their new laptop line is pretty nice -- especially if you want one in Pink or Yellow (or Red, Green, Blue, Brown, Black, or White). If you're comfortable sticking with Windows or don't want to learn a new system I think you'd probably be best served by getting a Dell. With Dell you'll definitely get more “bang for your buck,” so to speak. AMD’s “Turion” processor is somewhat cheaper but the Intel Core 2 Duo is much faster than the Turion even at the slowest clock speeds.

Go mess with the Macbooks at the Apple Store if you haven't already and you should get at least a feel for OS X – and the absence of a right mouse button. I’ve gotten pretty proficient with the Ctrl+Click but it isn’t the same. For when you’re at a desk, make sure you get a scroll mouse with 2+ buttons. I recommend Logitech or, oddly enough, a Microsoft mouse.

The new Macs can run Windows these days, but you really need a large amount of RAM (and $$$) to do it.

For me, I'm beginning to lean against the Macintosh, but that's mainly because I'm a geek who likes games and programming. :-D

-Kal

p.s. The next installment in my sermon series is a discussion of the iPhone.

UPDATE: Actually, tech columnist John C. Dvorak (a fairly well known Mac skeptic) actually did a column about his use of the Mac for PC Magazine. Check it out here.

The Good Old Days...

One of my favorite shows on the old TechTV...the best part of this commercial is hearing Leo say "Word!"...



UPDATE: The TSS intro got pulled, so I submit to you instead...Leo Laporte on the Microsoft Zune.

Enjoy!
-Kal

Geek by Day

While usually my inner geek comes out in the evening, the last couple weeks have seen it spring to life during the day while at work!

My primary responsibility is calculating sales commissions. At my company, that means I spend the better part of my day in Microsoft Excel. First off, let me say that I "heart" Excel 2003. However, lately I've been trying to minimize the mindless time I spend using it.

By mindless, I mean doing repetitious tasks that could be just as easily performed by your common college intern or even a trained chimp. Some things aren't that bad, but they just take a long time. The answer, I've found, is to delve completely into the wonderful world of VBA: Visual Basic for Applications.

So for the last several days I've been programming my brains out, to automate - as much as possible - part of our commission calculations. To the large extent, I've been successful. I'd say we're at Beta stage now. It pretty much works, but things like bug squashing and fine tuning what little GUI there needs to be.

I'm such a l33t haXor with my mad Excel skillz. Or just a geek. Yep, that'll do.

-Kal

The Daily Commute

I have the most scenic commute of anyone I know (save for my coworker, Chris -- the "Ninja" -- who practically has the same one).

Traffic in the Washington Metro Area is some of the worst in the country -- second only to Los Angeles, so I'm told. So I think I've lucked out. My daily commute to Bethesda, Maryland is largely opposite the flow of traffic. Most people are headed inside the Capital Beltway from the outside in the morning, and the other way in the evening. The largest distance of my commute, however, is "outbound" in the morning and "inbound" in the evening.

The largest distance is covered on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The GW Parkway (or G-Dub for short) is actually run by the national parks service, and goes right along the Potomac on the Virginia side. It starts (or ends) at the north side of the Capital Beltway and goes south, finally ending (or starting) in front of George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate. I'd say I travel about half -- the northern part between I-395 and the Beltway. The whole northern stretch is green. By green, I mean, teeming with plant life. Adding to the beautiful scenery is the Potomac, and the many sights of DC.

On my trip I get to see:
The Pentagon
The Washington Monument
The Lincoln Memorial
The Kennedy Center
The Air Force Memorial
The Memorial Bridge
The National Cathedral
The Capitol Rotunda
Georgetown

...pretty much every day. It's beautiful in the Spring and in the Winter (when there's snow, at least), especially. Sometimes, depending on the route I can catch a glimpse of the Jefferson Memorial and the "tippy-top" of the White House.

However, particularly in the evening, I get to intimately know every tree and blade of grass, and especially every pothole. But it sure is purdy. I guess if I need to be stuck in a traffic jam, at least I can enjoy the view.

-Kal

Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn"

Do you like free stuff? I do, especially in the form of full-featured operating systems! Ubuntu 7.04 (codenamed "Feisty Fawn") is being released on Thursday, April 19th. Available in a "LiveCD" format, you can try it on your current computer without actually installing it.

Don't misunderstand, this is a complete operating system - a replacement for even Windows, some may say. It has an office suite (OpenOffice.org), a web browser (Firefox), chat client (Gaim), photo management (F-Spot), image editor (the GIMP), and many other programs available -- for free -- along with it. Just download the .iso and burn it to a CD and reboot your machine to try it.

Visit the Ubuntu website for the details. And especially for Ryan, if he's still using that hunk of junk Windows 95 machine, check out Xubuntu - engineered to run on older machines. So resurrect your old computer into something usable with Xubuntu, Ubuntu, or Kubuntu (my flavor of the week) on Thursday. Let me know how it turns out.

-Kal

School Closings...

The schools around here close for snow (of course), they close for ice (ditto), they close for fog, they close a day early in some cases for snow and ice. They close for cold, they close for flood watches/warnings, for bad thunderstorms and even the occasional hurricane.

After two and a half years in the DC area, I really thought I'd heard everything with regards to school closings. Well, I was proven wrong today when Fairfax County schools closed 3 hours early this afternoon because of the wind.

The education funding in this area seems to be degrading so quickly that the patchwork of trailer (park) classrooms that house a significant portion of the desks in the area schools can't protect the kids from the elements. Fairfax County apparently has enough of these makeshift schoolrooms that it's worth closing school early.

When we have kids they are SO going to go to private school.

-Kal

(So there it is. The first post in over a month. Keep reading. I've got more in the queue, just need to put it to words...and Rich, if you want to give us a daily account of your eating habits, the comments remain open!)

New Logo

I've been thinking about trying to make a new logo. At the recommendation of TheMario, I've installed Inkscape and played around with Vector Graphics. This is only the beginning. What do you think?