Anyone who says it's a pipedream for Apple to make a tablet PC for under $1000 should take a look at the $599 ProGear. Granted, they're selling off excess inventory, but given the specs (10.2" LCD screen, 6gig 2.5" hard disk, etc) I think a company with sufficient volume could still make and sell these for under $1000.

The real trick is to make it useful enough to justify the cost, but not so useful as to cannibalize other CPU sales.

The quest for the perfect second computer continues...

Heya! I'm in Malibu for the weekend (traipsing across the country yet again). I'm taking some pictures... There's cloud cover, so it's not the typical Malibu beauty, but it makes for the perfect soft light for portraits.

And to the three or four people who I owe real emails to, I'm working on them... I finally got a real night's sleep, and my brain's starting to work again...

I'm watching a seminar being given by the head of Microsoft's game development, drawing similarities and differences between games and productivity software, and I gleaned teh following realization:

When people beat a game and it was enjoyable, they strive for the next version of that game. People don't sit waiting for the next version of Windows, either because it's not enjoyable, or because they haven't beaten the current version yet (if you view the struggle to create a usable, workable system as a game in and of iteslf).

People lust for OS X 10.2 because 10.1 was enjoyable, and people beat it. It's stable, it does what it's supposed to, and ironically enough, people aren't satisfied with that, because they like the twin challenges of new functionality and troubleshooting.

Well, the geeks, anyhow.

So the Buffy premiere was last night, and naturally I have to post about it.

The episode seems pretty self-explanatory, except for the end, but I'll just take this chance to say again: Spike's human now. He's lost the vampy pallor, and you don't try to claw into your chest to get a soul out.

Last season finale, Spike asked the demon to "make me like I was," meaning, before the chip was implanted in his head. He wants this "to give Buffy what's coming to her."

So the demon gives him back his soul and instantly he's knocked unconscious, end of episode, end of season.

Only Spike was never a vampire with a soul. That's not making him like he was, and it certainly isn't what will give Buffy what's coming to her: Is another tortured love-affair with a look-don't-touch-fragile vampire with a side of soul what anyone thinks Buffy deserves?

Nope. Spike's human, no two ways about it. I mean really, what is a vampire Spike with a soul? Pretty much the same as the vampire Spike we've seen these last two semesters: tortured, not all bad, and in love. Add a soul with only dubious distinctions from the soul-on-chip he already has and you have a rehash of both first and last seasons, this time with extra apathy. No. This is something new. It also sets up the inevitable Spike/Halfrek romance we all know is coming...

All in all a reasonably good ep. I've got to say I must be pretty addicted to this show, because at the end, with the shifting evil, each incarnation sent a new and different shiver down my spine. I do have to say though that Bad Angel should have been one of the incarnations (Hello? Second Season? Finale?)

Still, a good start. I'm not quite sure why, but I was really struck by how perfect Adam's makeup was.

Oh, and a word about Firefly: Loved it, great potential, clearly a middle-of-season non-arc episode thrown in to lead the show off, but entertaining nonetheless. Watching it for the second time last night, I have two bits to add:

First, way to go on the universe layout. I didn't catch it at first, but the Firefly-verse takes place all in a single solar system, but one that happens to have hundreds of planets, some naturally beautiful, others terraformed. This finally does away with the whole warp-drive problem, weird aliens everywhere you turn, and space-time anomalies. An efficient reaction drive and great energy source could create a ship that's reasonably good at interplanetary travel. The only suspension of disbelief here is the luck in finding a solar system that has such a plethora of planets. I can live with that.

Basically, this is a middle-step between 'in-home-system' sets (like Heinlein's belter books, 2001, etc.), and the 'every star is nearby' space-jockey universes (Star Trek, Star Wars, B5, and almost everything else). It's got good potential.

Second, 'Hook', Niska's enforcer, mysteriously lost his heavy German accent and turned white-trash/stick-jock at the end. What's up with that?

Okay. Done now. All you Non-Joss folk can come back now...

TextAds: The most sincere form of flattery.

Someone paid Google good money so that people searching for 'AOLiza' would see their ad for free chat bots.

I'm waiting with baited breath for the first TextAd marriage proposal. "Honey, can you look up 'peruvian lizards' in Google for me?"

For that matter, it might be interesting to place a TextAd correlated to your own name, something like: "Yo, I'm the best Kevin Fox. Dis those wannabes. I'm the one you're looking for." that is, unless you already have first billing.

Are you the first google hit for your name? Are you feeling lucky?

Walking off to class this morning, I almost tripped over this guy on my porch:

Here's lookin' at you, kid.

I got another picture of him in prayer, but I like this one because I can't tell what he's thinking.

It's 63 degrees in my apartment and it feels so good, after weeks of warm-to-hot and varying humidity. It just feels so crisp. Okay, enough rambling. I just have the kind of general optimisim this morning that only a good night's sleep can grant you (and it's been weeks since I got a good night's sleep. In fact, I only got 6 hours last night as well, but I went to sleep before I was exhausted, so I suppose that has something to do with it. Interesting...)

Heya, time for a browser check: Can you see the @ below? It's a .png file that should support an alpha channel, making for the nifty drop-shadow on to the post's beige background.

I'd like to know, so I can better judge whether I can start using png files when needed.

Can you see the picture above? Post a comment either way, and be sure to say what browser and OS you use!

We all make our own pockets of space, through sheer force of will.

By one perspective, Pittsburgh, or at least my personal existence in it, is a pocket, grown from a mental void into a small life bounded by dwelling, school, and nascent social structures forming in much the same way as must have happened in the big bang, with particles forming, exploding, reforming; eventually cooling into stable states.

My own 'real-world' pocket, which I feared would be too small for me, has turned comforting. Not so big as to be cavernous, not so cramped as to be claustrophobia-inducing.

But of course that's only one of the pockets I live in.

Fury's grown from a tiny pocket that I and a very small number of other people frequent now and again, to a larger room, anchored by the ley lines of regular visitors. It has conduits to other pockets: when someone leaves a comment it gets pushed into email, in itself a bridge between an ether-formed pocket and the physical. SMS messaging punches straight through to the physical pocket directly (to my literal pocket, if you will.) Geographically removed from most of what I would call my life, I share an individual pocket with each person whom I'm close to.

For Ammy, it exists as an instant messaging window, where semantic meaning is laid bare through conversational text, or flat innuendo that is none the less subtle for the medium, but perhaps too subtle, as a ';)' of acknowledgement can be as coarse as a bursting laugh arising from a whispered comment during a movie.

For my mom, the pocket exists between my ear and my closed eyes. As I talk to her on the cellphone, thee's a part of me that concentrates on making the signal stronger by sheer force of attention and attenuation, while the rest is acutely aware of the narrowness and length of this pocket, shouting across a long, but ultimately thin, cavern.

For each friend there is a different pocket, unique in both texture and timbre. The characteristic they share is the geographic disparity responsible for their existence. Were I local, the person in question would live in real-world pocket, and any other pocket would be of the moment, and not the salient characteristic.

As it is, I'm amazed at the diversity of pockets I've found, made, and maintained in the past six weeks. Be it instant messaging, short email pingpongs, heart-to-heart phone calls, or emails so rare yet beautiful as to be works of art, their very nature calling for a commiserate work of art in response, they are all pockets, and they all hold jewels most valuable. Who could have known that the things I most lamented leaving on the left coast would be my most precious possessions here?

I know: Everyone but me.

Thank you.

Today G. W. Bush announced America's new strike-first military foreign policy ([pdf] linked from the white house home page. Apparently these guys aren't too big on HTML.)

Ending a long-time defensive posture, the mandate of the armed forces now is to stop people who are perceived to be enemies of the United States, before they get the capability to strike.

It amazes me that we can have a government so xenophobic as to have a 'do unto you before you can do unto me' military policy, and still be anti-gun-control within our own borders.

More and more I've been thinking about how the US world power is resembling that of the Roman Empire, for better or worse.

On a slightly related note, in October of 1945, President Truman altered the Seal of the President so that the eagle's head faced the olive branch, not the arrows (incidentally, the eagle has always faced the olive branch on the Seal of the United States, and on the one dollar bill). Truman said the office of the presidency should be devoted to the practice of peace.

Visiting Truman a few months later, Winston Churchill quipped that perhaps the eagle's head should be mounted on a swivel. (thanks snopes)