Author: Andrew Huey

good news

Some random good news today:

  • I got new bed sheets today!
  • I got the renewal letter for my apartment lease today, and the landlord isn’t raising the rent!
  • I got a hotel room for San Diego! This might not sound like a big deal, but it’s gotten harder and harder to get a room for San Diego over the past few years. They opened up the hotel reservation system at noon (Eastern) today. I tried getting to their web site right then, but the site was getting hammered so much, there was really no chance of getting in. I went off to eat lunch and came back at 12:30 and tried again. It took awhile for pages to load, but they did come up, and I did eventually manage to make it through the system and came out on the other end with a valid hotel reservation. I’ll be in the Westin Horton Plaza this year, which is probably a pretty good hotel, and not too far from the convention center. I’ve never stayed there before, but it looks nice.

Vista laptops

I’m thinking about picking up a new laptop with Vista on it. I’ve been been looking at some of the oddball ones like the Toshiba Portege R400 or the Asus W5Fe. Those suckers are expensive, though. It’s looking like the Toshiba A135-S4499 might be a good choice for me. It’s only $1500, and has pretty much everything I need, including two 120 GB hard drives. There’s a write-up on it in the NY Times today. I think it goes on sale February 20.

sick

I’ve been fighting a cold all this week. I guess I’m mostly over it, but I had a really sore throat today. I think I drank about 9 cups of herbal tea today. I think I picked up the cold when I was in the city last weekend. That seems to be the pattern now; every time I get a cold, it’s right after I’ve been in Manhattan for something. Maybe I need to start taking Airborne before I go into NYC from now on. Or maybe not.

WonderCon 2007

I registered for WonderCon today, and made my travel arrangements. This will be the third year I’ve gone out to SF for WonderCon. I was originally going to skip it this year, mostly due to financial considerations, but then I realized that I’m turning 40 about a week after the con, so this will be my very last vacation before I hit 40! (Not that my birthday has any real bearing on anything, but it seemed like a good excuse for going.)

Five Minutes to Midnight

Well, I just finished re-reading Watchmen last night. One of the recurring motifs in Watchmen is a clock that’s counting down the minutes until midnight. It is, of course, a reference to the doomsday clock that indicates how close we are to nuclear armegeddon. (This is also the inspiration for one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs, “2 Minutes to Midnight“.) I haven’t seen the doomsday clock mentioned much in the news since the Reagan years. In fact, I’d mostly forgotten about it until re-reading Watchmen. Today, out of the blue, I stumbled across an article announcing that we’re now at five minutes to midnight, the closest we’ve been to “certain doom” since the eighties. The last time the minute hand was moved was back in 2002. On the one hand, I should probably be seriously depressed that we’ve regressed so much, in so many ways, over the last few years. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel somewhat nostalgic for the good old days of the Reagan administration. There’s something bracing about being a mere hair’s breadth away from oblivion.

iPhone FAQ

David Pogue has an iPhone FAQ up on his blog.
A few disappointing items, assuming he’s correct:

Can it run Mac OS X programs? –No.
Can I add new programs to it? –No. Apple wants to control the look and feel and behavior of every aspect of the phone.
Does it have games? –No.
Does it have GPS? –No.

I was pretty sure it *did* have GPS, so that’s a bit of a bummer. And the idea that it’s not open to third-party development is pretty disappointing too, assuming it’s correct. Oh well, maybe I should start thinking smartphone!

iPhone

I have to admit I’m pretty interested in the iPhone. When it first started looking like the rumors were true, and this was really going to be coming out, I got pretty hopeful that it would be a decent PDA in addition to being a phone, and it looks like it is. I haven’t really been 100% satisfied with any PDA I’ve owned since the Newton. The iPhone seems to have most of the stuff I’d want in a PDA: a touch-screen, a decent contact manager (and, presumably, calendar), and a robust OS that can (probably) do a decent job of running games and miscellaneous third-party software. I don’t really *need* it to be a decent music and video player, but if it is, then that’s OK. And if I can do a decent job of browsing the web with it, then that’s great too.

I’m a little concerned about the fact that it’s only going to be available through Cingular. I’m currently with Verizon, and I don’t have any problems with them, so I’m not enthusiastic about switching carriers. Looking at Cingular’s web site, it looks like they charge a minimum of $40/month for voice and $20/month for data, under their current plans. Assuming the iPhone plans with be similar, that’d be $60/month for service, minimum. Right now, I’m only paying about $20/month, though of course I’m getting very limited access to the internet on my current phone, and I have a very limited voice plan. Jobs didn’t talk at all about monthly pricing during his keynote. I’m hoping that maybe there will be a special monthly plan for the iPhone that gets you voice and data together for a reasonable sum, maybe $40 or $50 per month total.

There’s a somewhat interesting article on the iPhone over at Time.com, by the way, with a bit of history on the development of the device and some of the reasoning that went into the design.

Asus Not-So-Splendid

My Asus video card has a feature called “Splendid” which is supposed to enhance video quality. Well, some time recently, I lost the ability to watch most videos in Windows Media Player. It took me awhile to figure it out, but the culprit is apparently Splendid. I disabled it, and all is well now. For the record, I found out how to disable it here.

Here’s the instructions:
– Right click on your desktop and select “Properties” to bring up your display properties;
– Select the “Settings” tab and click on “Advanced” on the bottom right;
– Select the “ASUS” tab on the top right and then the “ASUS Splendid” tab;
– Unselect the check box next to “Enable ASUS Splendid”.

I’m not sure if this is a problem in the most recent driver set that’s going to be corrected at some point. Either way, I never noticed “Splendid” really doing much for me anyway.