Derek Hatchard blogs on

I *love* it:

Lots of people don’t, but that was completely predictable.  It’s quirky and funny.  It doesn’t take potshots at Apple.  It doesn’t try to convince you that Vista is more awesome than OS X.  After being entertaining, all it really contains is a promise that the future will be delicious.

Oh, and people are talking about the ad - that in itself makes it pretty successful.

The tricky part will be producing more quality ads.  The Gates-Seinfeld shtick probably won’t work a second time.

Apple’s agency is surely writing furiously today, creating Mac vs. PC scripts that mock this commercial.  They MUST be.  Wonder if they will produce any of them…

Best of luck in the Valley, Dan!

http://nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast.com/journal/article/403937

This is just so sad…  I’ve started getting "laptop fever" again.  Sigh.  There’s clearly something wrong with me.

Rumour has it that Apple will have new laptops coming out next month.  I’m waiting anxiously to see what they release.  My guess is all screens will be at least a full 1080 (HD) resolution with a BlueRay drive option.  Otherwise all bets are off.  There are certainly plenty of rumours circulating.

Currently Dell has a new line of Latitudes out.  I need to touch and see a Dell Latitude E6400.  On paper it is my dream machine:

• 14.1" LED screen @ 1440×900 resolution
• Smaller and lighter than my MacBook Pro
• 5+ hours on the standard 6 cell battery
• Backlit keyboard and ambient light sensor
• USB PowerShare port that lets you charge devices even when the laptop is off
• Wi-Fi Catcher for finding wireless signals even when laptop is off
• TPM (Trusted Platform Module)
• Fingerprint reader

I have always found Dell’s Latitude keyboards to be really nice.  Unfortunately the trackpads often suck and the trackpad on the E6400 is small.  That could be the one thing that kills this dream.  It has a trackpoint as well (like the Thinkpad eraser head).  I’ve never been a fan of the trackpoint but the people I know who really learn how to use them swear by them.  Many people are loyal Thinkpad users because of that little eraser head.  Maybe I should actually try to learn to use one.

Here’s some linkage about the e6400:

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-latitude-e6400/4505-3121_7-33200149.html

http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-with-dell-latitude-e6400

[For the handful of people who will ever read this far into this post:  Dell also has a Precision m2400 that seems to be pretty near identical to the e6400.  Anyone know the difference between the e6400 and the m2400?]

This time I had deleted and purged a message from my inbox without saving the invitation code I needed from it.  Ooops.  Fortunately Xobni still had the message cached in its index.  A lightning fast search got me exactly what I needed.

Xobni is the only thing that keeps me hopelessly hooked on Outlook.  I’m a shameless fanboy:  http://derekh.com/index.php/2008/05/21/i-love-xobni/

Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG. 

The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7583805.stm

I’ve done many stupid things in life but I’ve never taken a virus into space. 

Makes you wonder though:  Where is the promised Trustworthy Computing?

What do you do when you’re looking for something on the Internet?  Turn to a search engine (Google, Live, Yahoo, etc.)?  Probably.  Search engines are the command-line of the Internet (Google in particular).  I don’t remember who coined that phrase but it’s pretty accurate.

If you’re looking for a bite to eat in Canada’s largest city, you’ll pull up http://live.com and type ‘restaurants downtown toronto’.  The search engine does a bit of parsing and figures out what you’re looking for.

Now take that concept and apply it more generally to browser tasks.  You have a bunch of restaurant reviews up and you want to see where the restaurants are on a map.  What do you do?

<shrug>

I know.  It’s a pain to manually map all those addresses.  But imagine if you could type ‘map-these’ in your browser somewhere and a map would pop up with all the choices shown.  That would be cool.

Mozilla has released an initial prototype of a project / experiment called Ubiquity that promises exactly that type of functionality and much, much more.  Check out the video below - it really shows the budding potential of Ubiquity.  It made me mutter, "Holy crap - that’s cool."

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

http://www.themediamall.com/playon

PlayOn enables consumers who own a PLAYSTATION 3, Xbox 360, or HP MediaSmart TV to watch Internet video from sites including Hulu, CBS, YouTube, ESPN and more on their television. We have just released PlayOn Beta. Netflix support is just down the road, and the fully featured release will be coming shortly!

We will also be adding support for Nintendo Wii by the end of 2008. Stay tuned!

Very cool.  Waiting patiently for the Wii version.  Internet video options for my Tivo have been disappointing.

Some amusement for your Friday afternoon… 

I don’t wanna work…  I just wanna bang on this mug all day

If you really stop to look around you, it’s shocking how many small absurdities are out there just because people don’t think things through:

• Web sites with an article’s date in a small font and today’s date in a big prominent font
• Switching from walking to running in front of moving traffic when the light turns green instead of stopping at the median
• Referring friends to work at a startup that has screwed you in the past because you think management has learned its lesson
• Plunging headfirst into the middle of massive rapids on a riverboard
• Not cutting your fingernails when you spend all day typing
• Writing a blog post full of drivel instead of writing inspirational copy for your brave new startup

And that’s just the first 1/3 of the day….

When a futurist or science fiction writer envisions a world without real food, our descendants are eating some form of engineered meal replacement.  Like these Tony’s Turboz from Kelloggs:

These things are awful.  Seriously.  And I enjoy Bran Flakes.

Tony’s Turboz meal replacement is the first and only food designed with kids in mind to provide the balanced nutrients of an entire meal in one bowl. It is a source of 24 vitamins and minerals including an excellent source of calcium and an excellent source of iron; a good source of protein; contains 22 grams of whole grain; and it has a taste that kids love.

Ha!  Even my two year old can tell that this stuff doesn’t taste like real food.

In other news, Pop Tarts continue to be a manufactured food that does not taste like anything real, but I still enjoy them as a guilty pleasure once or twice a year.   Frosting for breakfast…  mmmmmmm……