Aldoblog

Just a few tournament predictions…

In The Mac mini: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Dan Frakes breaks down the pricing for Apple’s low-cost system and a “comparable” $399 Dell system that journalists all over the planet seem to think is a fair comparison. Unlike all those other journalists, he actually compares everything that comes in the box or pre-installed on the hard drive.

Like a lot of other Mac aficionados, I followed yesterday’s announcements by Apple quite closely. A lot of people are writing about them, so I’m just going to jot down a couple of thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the Sunday magazine, in a travel article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.”

I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.

After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.

Over Xmas, in conversation with my brother about various movies that have come out in the last year, I found myself wondering why I haven’t been to the movies more often in 2004. Today I was reminded why: it’s expensive.

Well, OK, I won’t tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what I just did: I cancelled my Friendster account (Friendster is a social networking company), because they fired an employee for blogging (participating in social networks).

Through the grace of a friend of a friend, I am now a Gmail user. I am only posting that so I can also rant on the so-called “privacy issues” that people have raised regarding Gmail, especially the moronic state senator Liz Figueroa, who this past week introduced legislation to ban Gmail.

Rochelle and I were mentioned, and Rochelle quoted, in this Sunday’s New York Times.

From a recent interview with Bruce Schneier, one of the U.S.‘s premiere security experts, comes one of the most understandable and insightful comments on recent security changes that I’ve read: “Of all the measures instituted to improve airline security, only two have had any positive effect: Reinforcing the cockpit door and teaching the passengers to fight back. Everything else is window dressing.”