new machine

At work, I generally get a new desktop machine every two years. We lease computers from Dell, so it doesn’t really cost anything to return my machine at the end of each two-year lease and trade it in for a new one. My lease is up at the end of this month, so I just got a new machine in. Usually, when I get a new machine, there are a few big differences from the last one. This time, not so much. I’ve got more hard drive space, but that’s really the only major difference. The processor is about the same speed. I’ve got twice the RAM (from 2GB to 4GB), but I don’t think the difference there will be especially noticeable. And I’m sticking with Windows XP, so there’s no OS update to worry about and/or enjoy. When I configured this machine at Dell’s site, Windows XP was still the default OS choice in the drop-down. The machine does ship with Vista Business on a DVD in the box, but it’s got XP installed. I’m not sticking with XP purely out of laziness or anything like that. We’re using a number of applications that aren’t supported under Vista. And I just can’t see any real advantage to moving over to Vista yet.

On another front, I tried installing Lotus Notes 8 on the new machine. It worked, but it was pretty slow. It’s got a few interesting new features, and I’d really love to be able to move everyone from Notes 7 to 8, but if I can’t get it running well on a machine with 4 GB of RAM, it’s going to be intolerable on some of our lower-end machines. I uninstalled it and went back to Notes 7.

The point of this story is basically that I’m somewhat disappointed with the progress we’ve made in the computer industry over the last couple of years. Major new software releases, such as Vista, Notes 8, Office 2007, and so on, are interesting but not compelling. And they’re usually bloated and slow on even high-end hardware. And the hardware itself doesn’t seem to have progressed much, expect in a few areas. Processor technology in particular doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last two years.

Well, that’s my two cents. I’m still glad I’m getting a new machine!

backpack

I’ve been fussing around with Backpack some more lately, trying to decide if I want to switch from a free account to a paid one. I think I could get some utility out of having more than 5 available pages to play with. I’m thinking about taking some notes that I have on my old Palm, plus some stuff that I have in OneNote on my PC and/or DevonThink on my Mac, and copying it all up into Backpack. The fact that there’s still no obvious way to sync these notes to my iPod Touch is probably the only thing keeping me from doing that. I can think of some workarounds, but they’re not perfect.

I started playing with the journal feature in Backpack last night. It’s pretty cool, but as I discovered by digging through the forums, there’s a 100 item limit on what you can store in the journal. Past that, stuff just falls off into oblivion. This limit doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I wouldn’t have known about this if I didn’t go looking for it. That’s one of the things that’s frustrating about some of the 37 Signals stuff. They often seem to impose weird limits on things, then fail to document them. I’ve also noticed, for instance, that stuff in the journal doesn’t show up in search results, if you use the search box on the main page.

This stuff makes the Journal a good bit less useful than it could be. I was thinking about using the Journal as a kind of log for some key activities that I might want to come back to later, and see when I started them, when I completed them, or when I last did a certain thing. With the 100-item limit, I’m really not going to be able to use the Journal that way, except for short-term stuff. I had been thinking it might be cool to create a Journal entry every time I had work done on the car, for instance. Then, I could get a full service history on my car by just searching on “car” in the Journal. I can still do that, of course, but the history won’t go back that far, depending on how much other stuff I use the Journal for. I guess I could copy and paste old stuff from the Journal into a regular Backpack page once in a while, but that seems like a kludge.

dead drive

I’ve got two hard drives in my main desktop computer: a 250 GB drive that I’ve got all my stuff on, and an old 100 GB drive that I occasionally use for backups, or experimenting with Linux, or what have you. I turned the computer on last night, and heard an ominous clicking sound coming from one of the drives. Luckily, it was the 100 GB drive, which didn’t currently contain anything important. I could really just throw that drive away and be done with it, but I decided that this was a good opportunity to do some upgrading. I just bought a new 500 GB drive from Newegg for $70. I’m going to use that as my main drive, move the 250 GB drive over to secondary use, and toss the bad 100 GB drive.

I think I’ll probably use this opportunity to do a fresh Vista install on the new drive, and just reinstall all my apps. I’m still running XP on the machine, largely because I’ve been afraid to try an in-place upgrade to Vista, and there was no obvious quick and safe way to do a clean install without having another big drive handy.

I’m still a little worried about putting Vista on this machine. The Vista upgrade advisor indicates that it’ll be OK, and I actually did a test install of Vista on the 100 GB drive a while back, and it did work. My motherboard and video card predate Vista, though, and there were a couple of slightly questionable things that came up when I did that test install. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new mobo and processor right now, if I can avoid it. I might upgrade the RAM in the machine from 2GB to 3GB, though. And a newer video card wouldn’t be out of the question, though I’m not sure that would help much.

E2-E4

I was going to go into NYC on Friday to see Manuel Gottsching perform E2-E4 at Lincoln Center, but I got stuck dealing with some stuff at work, and it was raining on and off, so I kind of lost my enthusiasm for going to an outdoor concert. I probably should have gone anyway, even though I would have got there late. I found some nice pictures from the concert on Flickr. Looks like it was probably cool.

iPhone note-taking apps

There are a couple of new note-taking apps for the iPhone that came out just recently. MagicPad’s key feature is cut and paste, which, sadly isn’t built into the iPhone system software. iNote is fairly straightforward and simple. One interesting feature is the ability to switch to landscape mode, which isn’t present in the built-in notepad app. Sadly, neither of these apps has the capability to sync to the desktop or to the web in any way.

iPod Touch annoyances

The MobileMe syncing stuff has been working fine for my calendar and contacts. I mentioned previously that there was one annoyance with this — there’s no way to get the birthday calendar down to the iPod Touch. I’ve now gotten around this by turning off the normal birthday calendar in iCal, and instead using the ability of MenuCalendarClock to copy birthdays from Address Book into a “normal” iCal calendar. So, long story short, I’ve got all my birthdays on the iPod Touch. MenuCalendarClock costs $20 to register, which is pretty reasonable, given that it does a few other useful things.

I still haven’t found a good note-taking app that syncs between the Touch and either my Mac, PC, or the web. I’m going to keep an eye on the app store and see if anything new and interesting appears.

Comic-Con Sunday

I haven’t gotten around to blogging from San Diego at all this year. It’s just been too busy. I’ve had a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head, though. The con is over now, and I’m back in my hotel room with not much to do, so I thought I’d write a long rambling blog post on a few things that came up during the con.

A lot of people have blogged about how the city of San Diego doesn’t think that the con contributes as much to the local economy as other, smaller, cons that are, shall we say, a bit more upscale. I got into a discussion with a cab driver today, and I can tell you that the cab drivers have loved the past few days. This guy said that the cabbies were making $300 to $500 a day over the last few days, which is apparently a lot more than they usually make. He said things had slowed down today (Sunday), but he was still doing pretty well. And I can say that, just walking around the Gaslamp and Horton Plaza, I’m seeing a heck of a lot of con folks moving around and (presumably) spending money.

The combination of my iPod Touch and having free wifi at the convention center turned out to be a very good thing. There’s always a lot of empty time to fill at the con, sitting in a panel room between panels, or waiting in line for something. I got in the habit of bringing out my iPod Touch at these times, and browsing through a few comics-related newsfeeds through Google Reader. This allowed me to keep up with stuff that was going on elsewhere at the con during the day, rather than having to wait until I got back to the hotel room and my laptop. Very useful, and kind of fun.

Due to the huge size of the con now, I had pretty low expectations about how many panels I would actually be able to get into. I was pleasantly surprised about my success rate in that area. I got into the Fringe preview on Wednesday night, no problem. I got into the Doctor Who and Torchwood panels on Thursday and the Stargate Continuum and Atlantis panels on Friday. The only big problem I had was on Friday afternoon and evening, when they closed off the line for room 6B, so I didn’t see the Venture Bros panel or the MST3K 20th anniversary panel. I wound up leaving the con earlier than I’d really wanted to on Friday, just because I couldn’t really get into any of the nighttime stuff that I was interested in. I spent a little time in one of the anime rooms watching Gurren Lagann, then just took off around 7pm, I think.

I did pretty well on Saturday, though. Saturday is traditionally the most crowded day at the con, but I think the dynamic may have changed a bit on that. Or maybe it’s just me. I plunked myself down in one panel room around 10am, and basically stayed there all day, until around 4:30pm.

Saturday night I went to a live Rifftrax event outside the convention center, at the Balboa Theater downtown. It was a live “riff” on Plan 9 From Outer Space. Not that it’s at all hard to make fun of that movie, but the guys (Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett) did a great job. Very funny.

Today, Sunday, I again went to a bunch of panels, but this time I actually had to get up and switch rooms a few times. I never really had to wait in line for a panel, nor did I fail to get into any panel, though.

I stayed at the Sheraton on Harbor Island this year, which is the farthest I’ve ever been from the convention center. I can’t say I’m happy about that, and it has been a bit of an inconvenience, but it was manageable. The shuttle bus situation was a little problematic. There are two separate towers to the Sheraton, and they’re about a five-minute walk apart from each other. I’m staying in the “Bay Tower” which is basically the secondary one. On the first day of the con, a bunch of us waited in front of our building for the shuttle bus for about an hour. It turned out that the bus was filling up at the main tower, and just wasn’t bothering to come by our tower at all. I wound up taking a cab to the con that day, and I’ve just walked over to the main tower every day since and caught the shuttle there. No big problem, but it just seems like something they could have figured out, maybe by having every other bus (or every third bus) stop at the Bay Tower first.

And I’ve found myself taking cabs on a few other occasions, to get from downtown back to the hotel or vice versa. There’s really no viable mass transit option to get off Harbor Island, as far as I can tell. I’m definitely hoping to get into a downtown hotel next year, assuming I go back.

Overall, a great con. I’ve definitely had a good time, learned a few things, seen some interesting people, had a few good laughs, and discovered a few comics, movies, and books that I hadn’t previously heard of. I’ve got a bunch more stuff I could blog about, but this post is already too long, and I need to pack, so I’ll just save that stuff up for another day.

off to San Diego

I’m off to San Diego tomorrow. I noticed today that Variety has a Comic-Con news page up at http://www.variety.com/comiccon. I guess the con is really in the big leagues now. It still seems kind of weird to be seeing articles about the con in Variety and the New York Times.