Category Archives: Technology

’Bye-Oh to My VAIO

Sony VAIO PCG-SR7KJust a moment to say goodbye to my Sony VAIO PCG-SR7K, which I once called “the best computer I’ve ever owned” Ha! Was I really ever that young?

Seriously, I’ve had this ultra-compact notebook since the fall of 2000 (since the Clinton administration!) and it just passed away this past week when I put it in my bag and took it home from the office. I have no idea why it decided to leave for another plane, because I was gentle with it on the way home. But those VAIOs, as I discovered in my second year of ownership, are exceedingly fragile. In fact, they’re junk, and while 3.5+ years is a decent lifespan for a Windows machine, I find it not a little shameful that the machine, for the past two years, has been pretty much unusable.

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Where’d the Ambition Go?

iMacMy initial thought on Apple’s new iMac, which was announced today at Apple Expo in Paris, is that it’s a nice bit of engineering, but unfortunately it amounts to little more. That the product team seems to have jumped through some nontrivial technical hoops in fitting a G5-based CPU on the back of an LCD screen seems insufficiently impressive to me — I wanted something more groundbreaking. The form factor of the iMac line has, since its inception in 1998, always represented the vanguard of Apple’s consumer thinking; both the net appliance cutesiness of the original and the elegant, sunflower-like articulation of its 2002 successor were new ways of thinking about consumer computing.

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Bluetooth Still Just Over the Verizon

Motorola V710Like at least a few geeks, I’ve been waiting a long time for a Verizon Wireless mobile phone that features a built-in Bluetooth chip. That’s because, first, Verizon’s coverage in the New York metropolitan area is the best by far of any of the mobile carriers — at least in my experience — and second, I’m still enamored of the promise of wireless synchronization and data exchange via Bluetooth (in spite of the imperfect performance of the Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson T608 that I bought last month). And really, it’s just one phone that I’m asking for Verizon to release.

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Square Dancing

Five BoxesHerewith, five boxes drawn with Microsoft PowerPoint on a document Slide Master. All of the boxes are .25-in. square, according to the program’s Format AutoShape dialog box, which allows users to specify these values precisely — in theory. The boxes are also all spaced exactly a quarter of an inch apart from one another and they all reside exactly .3-in. from the top edge, again using Format AutoShape.

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Ecto Plurbius Unum

EctoAlways late to the party, I finally took out some time last night to install the various libraries on my server that make it possible for me to run ecto, the desktop weblog editor and management program. It’s nice, very slick and I can see why it’s gained such a devoted following among advanced weblog authors; it sports some features — like its very handy Upload Manager — that vastly simplify working with Movable Type. Already it looks well worth its US$17.95 price tag, in spite of the fact that its globe icon is so generic I sometimes find myself staring at my Dock, not able to focus enough to identify it.

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Fighting Spam for Money

MailProtectAs a kid, when I would to take out the trash as part of my chores, I remember operating on the assumption that garbage collection was free, that it was a part of city services or something and that no one really payed for it directly, but rather it came out of local taxes or some big garbage collection fund in the sky or something. It seemed so basic and essential that I was surprised, later on, to discover that it most decidedly is not free, that lots of neighborhoods and communities bill you for it directly, and in lots of co-operatives and condominiums, it’s a discrete line item on a resident’s monthly maintenance bill. This is the story that came to mind yesterday when I got an email from my hosting provider, Media Temple, announcing their new MailProtect Anti-Junk Email Service.

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The Real World

RealNetworksIt’s kind of a strange feeling to actually find myself rooting for RealNetworks. For years, they have distinguished themselves with software installation practices that have struck me as… well, as exceedingly impolite, to use civil language. I’ve harbored enough ill will towards them that, when given a choice between using their Real Player software and Microsoft’s not much better Windows Media Player, I’ll always opt for the Redmond solution.

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Long in the ’Tooth

Apart from the initial wow factor of having my Mac OS X Address Book more or less instantly synchronized with my new Sony Ericsson T608 via Bluetooth, I’m not entirely sure I’m completely pleased with this new purchase.

There’s the shortcomings of Apple’s iSync, of course, such as a lack of a report detailing what happens — what changed and what didn’t — each time I perform a sync. The process is slow, too, and to avoid having to manually update the changed contacts on the phone, I pretty much have to do a complete synchronization, wherein every contact is reviewed by iSync; it’s a slow process.

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Moving into a New Office

Microsoft Office 2004 for MacThere have been some bad things written about Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh, as there always are when the Redmond giant releases anything for the Mac OS. But after having upgraded to this latest version of its business productivity suite this morning, I’m not sure I’d be willing to throw in with the often heard assessment that Office is bloated and clumsy. It’s true that none of the revised programs that make up the suite come close to being the most gazelle-like software I’ve ever run. Nevertheless, the one word that keeps running through my head, here at the end of a full day of using them, is ‘elegant.’ Really.

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