So yes­ter­day (Fri­day), my job and my part-time free­lance con­tract both ended at the same time. The pub­lisher I worked for finally suc­cumbed to the eco­nomic pres­sures of the credit freeze after hav­ing made a poor invest­ment. It’s sad too, because the com­pany was finally head­ing into the black after hav­ing a major dip in sales post-9/11. Unfor­tu­nately, the bank was threat­en­ing to call in the loan unless dras­tic mea­sures were taken to curb the spend­ing and to get some cash. So myself and another coworker were let go, and the com­pany will be liq­ui­dat­ing some assets.

Now, I’m just one among the many listed in those dis­mal unem­ploy­ment num­bers you hear dur­ing the evening news. Thank good­ness I got that part-time job to give me some cash to float on. Unfor­tu­nately, that means some of my planned pur­chases will be delayed. I’ll be spend­ing part of this week­end brush­ing up my resumé and read­ing about unem­ploy­ment claims.

I’m in the mar­ket for a new lap­top and I pur­pose­fully waited for the new Mac­Books to be released. I priced out a Dell XPS M1330 and once the fea­tures are matched up as close as I can make them, there’s a $60 price dif­fer­ence in favor of the Dell. $1599 vs $1533. The Mac­Book comes out ahead in GPU, FSB, and oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS X > Vista because of Unix) and the Dell comes out ahead in terms of con­nec­tors (HDMI, Firewire, card reader, Express­Card slot, etc.). I tried to con­fig­ure a com­pa­ra­ble Ubuntu machine, but the proces­sor speed is fixed at 2.0 GHz and eas­ily went over com­pared to the $1299 Mac­Book. The only com­peti­tor now is a late model 15″ Mac­Book Pro which for refurb starts at $1349—a very tasty price indeed. The MBP matches the advan­tages of the m1330 and has a bet­ter GPU, screen size, and res­o­lu­tion than the new Mac­Book. How much bet­ter is the GPU? Let’s see.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Olympics are over. How­ever dur­ing, it annoyed me how the media out­lets ranked the medal totals either count­ing total medals or count­ing total golds. Nei­ther option accounts for the rel­a­tive val­ues of the medals. The for­mer treats all medals as equal, whereas the for­mer dis­re­gards the value of the other two medal col­ors. As oth­ers have pro­posed, a weighted medal count makes the most sense, the sim­plest being gold = 3, sil­ver = 2, and bronze = 1. With that the top five rank­ings are as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

I like to use my iPhone for view­ing pod­casts. How­ever, man­ag­ing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some pod­casts I like to view and then trash them, while oth­ers I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvi­ous way to set this up.

Read the rest of this entry »