Posts from — January 2009

I didn’t think it was his greatest speech, but it still gave me the chills.

Reason.tv talked with Bourdain about foie gras bans, smoking bans, and other nanny state interventions.

I got home from my annual winter vacation and booted up my custom-built Shuttle Windows PC.  Normally I keep the computer on 24/7, but there had been a sudden power outage when I was away.  After the computer started up it was extremely slow.  It took about 5 minutes for Firefox to start up, and then, it wouldn’t recognize my digital camera.  Extremely annoyed at this point, I rebooted, did a Windows Update, did a virus scan, shut down some unneeded processes, but to no avail.  Windows did me dirty again.  I’m not a big Microsoft basher normally, but at this point I was just fed up.  Windows is just too unreliable and I need my PC to be rock-solid.  I had been thinking about going to a Mac for a while, but this event has definitely given me all the impetus I need.

Since I’m a bit of a cheapskate, I’ve been looking into the $599 Mac mini, the cheapest computer from Apple.  But it’s been out for a couple years, and there was a boatload of rumors of an updated mini to be announced at this week’s MacWorld Expo.  I might have paid a little more for the updated mini, or bought a used one at the new price point.  Unfortunately, there was no announcement!  What’s going on?  So now I’m stuck with my suboptimal Windows machine, waiting impatiently for a new mini.  I am not alone.