I got sick of the ejection mechanism in my current panniers so I went to REI to buy a new set this weekend. Unfortunately, I met the bicycle hardware equivalent of the twitter fail whale. I brought my backpack laden with my new laptop, a largish textbook, and some misc. crap I usually carry with me.

I tried a bunch of messenger bags--one even had a laptop pouch, but they all felt unnatural and held onto too much of my back. I fear arriving at school drenched in sweat, something that is double bad as the weather gets colder. I moved on to panniers. I looked for one that could comfortably and safely fit all my school crap. Unlike my current slip-on models, all the ones available right now seen to have a snazzy locking mechanism that hooks tightly around the rear rack. I secured a pair of Detours Transit Tour Panniers after discovering that I could fit my whole backpack inside of one. The pannier seemed perfect at the store, and it had a cute little shower cap you could pull over it for instant waterproofing during wet weather.

FAIL WHALE ONE: I brought home the panniers and realized the locking mechanism wouldn't fit on my particular rack because it has a double-tube reinforcement design. DAMN YOUSE!!! OK, I went back to REI and bought a new rack. Because the locks don't hold tight, just around the rack bars, I had to find one with a crossbar strategically located to hold the pannier far back enough to avoid touching the back of my shoes while riding. I tried the pannier on a bunch of them, and settled on the Blackburn EX-1 Expedition--not my favorite because it didn't look as sturdy as the others and was about 50% more expensive.

FAIL WHALE TWO: I brought the new rack home and spent an hour removing my old crap and installing the new crap, only to find out that the pannier wasn't as straight-backed as my old ones, and the fricken things bend toward the wheel on the backside. I figured that the first time I hit a big bump, the pannier would swing right into my wheel and wreck something. I chanced it anyway and loaded up for a test right around the block. Sure enough, the first bump almost brought me to a screeching halt. A couple of twists of the spoke wrench later, I disassembled the whole thing and put my old crap back on.

Dang. This is harder than I thought. Those ugly monolithic panniers are looking better and better because they have a lot of space and ride a lot ride higher on the rack, preventing them from having floppy spots that might touch the wheel during high-speed bumps (sorry, these are technical terms only cyclists understand). Next stop REI to return the rack and panniers. I will look more seriously at the messenger bags and monolithic panniers, but the outlook is grim at this point.

I've really been missing Thailand lately, and it's not just that it's getting colder here already. It's the little things. A really simple example is that Thai shopkeepers act like the customer is the most important person in the world. At the Chiang Mai Wawee on Nimmanhemin Road near Soy 6, they would take our order and bring everything to wherever we were sitting as soon as it was ready. Not just when it was slow, but all the time--it's just how they work.

Today at Caribou, I was the only person in the shop, and two chatty college students were behind the counter. One took my order, thanked me for the tip, and disappeared. A minute later, the other one yelled out the name of my drink, set it on the counter, and also disappeared. Ironically, when I went to grab my drink, I could hear them engaged in a deeply philosophical conversation about how our society seems to have a disproportionate sense of entitlement. If these kids ever went to Thailand, they'd probably feel guilty for expecting tips just for running the espresso machine, because even the most rinky-dink shops bend over backwards to shower their customers with attention.

Interesting correlation: when drug and alcohol offenses are high, burglaries are down, when drug and alcohol offenses are low, burglaries skyrocket. I guess you just can't win. Actually though, burglaries were either at a historic low in 2005, or at historic highs in 2006/2007--these offenses more than quadrupled in a single year (2006) and remained high in 2007. Next time I get a chance, I'm going to ask a UMPD officer their thoughts on that one...

UM Police Department, Public Safety, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

I wrote before about how my TC1100 has survived several...falls. Not one, but two falls from ~6ft above the ground. Onto concrete. It definitely has the scratches to prove it, but the luckily it never landed on anything oddly shaped enough to smash the glass digitzer cover or really wrench the innards too badly. Yes, one of those falls killed the hard drive, and the other fall broke a support that holds one corner of the case together--but nothing killed it dead so far ;) Since I was unable to keep myself from dropping the poor thing on the ground so much, I decided to build a flash drive for it, instead, so I could at least protect my data.

Anyhow, I think the X61 may have topped these other falls: I was riding my bike in rush-hour traffic when the saddle bag with my X61 in it fell off and barely missed being run over. A good samaritan rushed from the sidewalk to scoop it up for me out of traffic--thanks dude! Anyhow, the X61 was asleep at the time. I needed to be at school really quickly, so I didn't have time to check if it survived. When I got to scool, I noticed that the black surface on one corner of the X61 was scratched off, exposing the metal inside, but the laptop was fine and woke up and worked like normal.

In fairness, this also happened to my TC1100 earlier this summer (my back fender came loose and was swallowed whole by my rear spokes, simultaneously ejecting a saddle bag into traffic). Key differences: I wasn't going nearly as fast, and the TC1100 was wrapped in the relative safety of my backpack and stuffed into the saddle bag with a jacket. Unfortunately, the extended battery on the X61 prevents it from fitting inside the backpack while in the saddlebag. Why don't I just wear the backpack? It's 8 miles to school. If I wear it there, both it and my shirt will be soaked with sweat (trust me, it's not a pretty sight). I need better saddle bags or a messenger bag that doesn't suck.

Wow, nobody gave a shit about Somali pirates until they hijacked a Ukranian boat flying a Belize flag that was delivering Russian arms to Kenya. Now suddenly it's "a global security problem". Pirates nabbed "33 Russian T-72 tanks and 'a substantial quantity of ammunition'". Lesson learned: kidnapping and pillaging is totally acceptable, as long as you don't mess with Russia, the US or Europe when they want to sell guns and tanks to 3rd world governments.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Somalia's pirates seize 33 tanks

I've been using SharedView since early 2007. It's a really smooth app-sharing conference tool. The client is a ~3mb download, and it lets up to 15 people simultaneously connect and share separate apps and easily transfer control to one another. Any participant's moving mouse cursors appears on shared screens, and anyone can click to generate a gesture animation. It also has a handouts feature for sharing files and a simple chat system, but I typically only use the desktop sharing component. It's firewall-friendly--particular as compared to NetMeeting (which isn't even available on Vista anymore). It's a little bandwidth-hungry, but lack of bandwidth has only caused problems for me on one occasion. The person initiating the conference needs to have a Live ID, but all other participants can just click a link to join.

I know there are many free or cheap conferencing apps, but if you just want to supplement an IM conversation or phone call with simple app sharing, this is definitely a winner. It's still in beta after more than a year, and I'm not sure if MS plans to make this part of Office or Windows or just abandon it. As long as it's still works when I start it up, I'll definitely keep using it.

Welcome to Microsoft SharedView

There is no question that Lenovo bundles way too many crappy little apps with their Thinkpads--more so on tablets. Of the 22(!!) that came on mine, I think four of them are useful: Power Manager (highly customizable power control vs. the Vista Power Options control panel), Presentation Director (quick display config switcher), Rescue and Recovery (4.0+, anyway), and Access Connections.

Access Connections lets you create profiles so you can automatically switch between various network connections at home or at the office, and even use different settings depending on which location you're at. For example, it automatically switches between Ethernet and wifi at my house; when I plug in an Ethernet cable, it automatically disables the wireless radio and I get a GigE link. When I unplug, it enables the wifi radio again and tries to connect to my home network. If it can't connect after a few minutes, it shuts off the radio to save power. If you have different printers at home and work, you can set which one you want to be default at each location. You can also assign a VPN connection or app to start when you switch locations.

By default, Vista has nothing like this. You need to switch wifi radios on and off yourself to make sure you're always using the most optimal link, and Vista is sometimes slow to connect via wifi when left to its own devices (so to speak). Access Connections forces the issue for you, so it's usually extremely quick to go from docked and connected to undocked and wirelessly connected.

In my humble opinion, Vista took a several steps backward with regard to basic network adapter control:

• XP's Repair menu item on the systray network icon context menu has been neutered down to the useless (as far as I can tell) Diagnose and Repair option in Vista.
• Manually disabling/enabling interfaces requires the only UAC prompts I've actually been annoyed by. Repair used to recycle the adapter as part of the process, but now it takes two manual actions and UAC prompts to do the same thing.
• Enumerating the wireless networks you've saved is a multi-click PITA to access, and is no longer associated with the wireless adapter properties like it was in XP. I'm sure this make sense to someone, but I don't know who.

Granted, they added a huge array of security-specific settings (all of which are guaranteed to baffle the average home user), but the net result was still fewer basic controls for me. Anyhow, Access Connections more than makes up for the Vista missteps, and it's even better than XP due to the automation.

Lenovo - Innovation - Access Connections

So my girl and I were hanging out yesterday at the coffee shop, trying to get some work done, when suddenly she decided to make one of her world-famous scenes. Well, lets back up a little. I'll be honest: I'm in an abusive relationship. It starts with small disagreements: she disables a feature, I apply a hotfix, and before we know it, I'm reinstalling her. I'm not proud. Vista and I are both very passionate, creative individuals, and this is just the latest in a series of missteps in our relationship.

This time, I was just doing my homework like a good boy, annotating some some readings using Windows Journal, when suddenly the stylus went wonky. The digitizer would only register the stylus over a smaller box than the total size of the desktop, and the movement was scaling in an unusable manner; it was accurate at the very top of the screen, but the closer I moved toward the bottom, the farther the stylus traveled from the onscreen tip indicator.

I tried rotating the screen orientation between portrait and landscape. This fixes a Vista bug where desktop icon arrangement can become temporarily bound to a smaller box than the actual desktop size, so I thought the problems might be similar. No affect. I tried logging off. No affect. I rebooted, and got a HUGE affect. The digitizer and the buttons on the tablet bezel no longer worked at all.

True to her hot-headed nature, Vista didn't want to talk about the problem. There was absolutely no indication in the event logs or device manager of a driver or hardware failure. Everything looked great. I searched on various Vista counseling websites, but I didn't find anything more specific than subtle variations on the theme "digitizer stopped working--why does she hate me when I show her nothing but love??" I know the digitizer and tablet buttons are controlled through the Wacom digitizer software, so I tried to appeal to Vista's bottomless vanity by plying her with the latest version of the tablet driver from their site. No affect. Dang.

Vista can be very stubborn sometimes--we both can--so I shut her down so she could have her space (and I could actually get my homework done). When I booted back up later, Vista was finally ready to talk. She showed me a nice, specific error message: access violation in WISPTIS.EXE. We just needed to remind each other that open, honest communication allows our complicated relationship to function smoothly.

I immediately found this sweet baby related to pen service failures. The only symptom described in the article is the access violation, but I downloaded the hotfix anyway. Booyakasha! Me digitiza be workin aftar rebootin. The beauty part? The hotfix is only a few weeks old. Mad props to all you playas who had to reinstall Vista before this hotfix came out.

One thing I noticed about this nonsense is that neither the X61 BIOS nor the recovery OS recognize the digitizer at any point. Until I found that article, I was sure it was a hardware problem. My ancient TC1100, on the other hand, has a beautiful graphical bootscreen and BIOS, both of which support the digitizer. The boot screen even supports right-clicking with the stylus. Seems like the lack of digitizer testing on the stinkpad is a step backwards in tablet technology.

Anyhow, I know I bitch about Vista and the X61, but I reeeeeeeeeally like both of them a lot. An X61 with an extended battery is an absolutely badass workhorse for Visual Studio 2008, and the tablet features in Vista feel like an order of magnitude better (and better integrated) than XP. There are sooooo many nice things you can do with Vista to customize your tablet experience that on XP only existed in vendor-specific applets. I feel like I'm in love...but it might just be Stockholm syndrome. Only time will tell.

An access violation occurs during system startup when the pen service (Wisptis.exe) is configured on a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008

We live in a renovated old-skool warehouse from the 1880s. We have crazy thick concrete and brick everywhere, industrial sound mat insulation added between the floors, and 12" of drywall, framing, and sound batting in the demising walls. Unfortunately, no amount of engineering can stop a truly determined asshole, and this building is full of mid-30s people who have never lived in a condo before (like us!). Some of them act like fricken college students who haven't yet realized that their stomping and loud music is extremely noticeable at 2 AM when everyone else is asleep.

We're on the ground level, so we have neighbors on the sides and above. I've heard music and people noise from all three directions at one time or another; however, there is a difference in the pattern. Our 50+ neighbor is scrupulous about being quiet after 10pm on the odd occasions that he plays loud music--but we only notice he lives there maybe three Saturdays a year. On the other hand, our mid-30s neighbors will flatly deny ever making any noise whatsoever, unless you confront them in person, in flagrante delicto, at 2am. Two stories:

When the building was first renovated, the younger of our side-neighbors made a LOT of noise, usually late at night. However, he was certain he was not the source of any late-night ruckus whenever I asked him about it the next day. Then one night he went above and beyond the call of assholery, and had a group of noisy friends cheering their hearts out at 2am. I knocked on the door for like 2 minutes until they finally heard me (I overheard one of his friends inside yell "HEY, I THINK YOUR NEIGHBOR IS BANGING ON THE WALL!" over the music). When they realized it was in fact the door, they shut everything down and answered, extremely apologetic. He said it wouldn't happen again. It did, within a week. All he could muster that time was, "Damnit, it's just...this building..." and sort of trailed off. I pointed out that everyone else in the building was asleep, and thus maybe 2am wasn't the time to be testing the limits of modern soundproofing. Once more, he said it wouldn't happen again.

We did come to find out that some soundproofing was missing from both sides of our demising walls, upstairs and down. After everything was sealed up, we barely heard a peep for the next two years; however, he was always really crusty with us after that, like we were bad people for wanting to sleep at night. Anyhow, he moved out earlier this year, and I came to learn that some other people in the building had nicknames for him based on dickheadery he perpetrated elsewhere in the building and parking garage. Good riddance.

Another time, there was a weird mechanical noise coming from our corner of the building. I asked around, but nobody knew exactly what it was. Seemed like I heard it the most/loudest, so I assumed it was one of my neighbors. It was really hard to tell what direction it was from, and it was really intermittent. I would go out in the hallway to listen for it after it started, and it would literally stop for five minutes until I went back inside, then start again a few minutes later. Recently, it started happening late at night, intermittently (and sometimes loudly) until 2am.

When it was particularly loud on a recent night, I finally thought I reliably tracked it to a particular upstairs neighbor. Since it was 2am, I didn't want to go knocking on doors in case I was wrong. I did the considerate thing and wrote a polite note requesting that he call me if he knew anything about the noise, for which I also included an onomatopoeic description. He did the asshat thing and ignored the note. The sound continued the next night, but my confidence was now shot that it was actually coming from his unit. After all, what kind person would ignore a polite request if he knew he was actually making loud mechanical sounds late at night?

I was already having trouble concentrating on my homework, and that sound was finally pissing me off. I decided he was either totally innocent (and asleep), or was the kind of person who would only relent when catch red-handed. Although I felt like a total jerk for knocking on someone's door at 1am; however, I figured I had my culprit when he answered, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with every light in the house on. We both pretended I'd never left a note, and I asked him if the noise I was hearing downstairs was from his unit.

He said "noise, really, what kind of noise?" I was immediately embarrassed by his dishonesty. I'm like, "Really, we're going there? OK, of all the loud mechanical noises currently audible in this building [there were none], it's the KA-CHUNK, KA-CHUNK noise that was going on immediately before I knocked, and stopped immediately after you walked over to answer the door. That noise." He said, "Oh man, you can hear that? I didn't think anyone could hear that--sorry, I'll knock it off." He was all ready to just shut the door and call it a night when I introduced myself and asked exactly what the noise was. I figured, since he had already so willingly shared the lower 30Hz of his life with everyone, I might as well get to know the upper 3000KHz. Selfishness, thy name is Pete, as it happens, and Pete owns a machine that stamps buttons like Tracy Flick in Election. I briefly imagined he was up there furiously pounding away his frustrations just like her, but he looked a little old for student council.

Anyhow, I'm probably making it sound like it's one cacophony after another around here. It's not. It's usually quiet and boring. However, nobody wants to take responsibility when they actually do make noise.

Here are my Vista gripes so far:

1. First, the big one, after installing SP1, I can no longer eject my Lenovo X61 tablet from the X6 docking station without a system freeze. Tried every which way and it's hosed. I guess I'll call Lenovo about that one, but in their defense, SP1 is definitely what caused things to go pear-shaped. [EDIT: It was later revealed that the problem was reproducible on a fresh system restore with no SP1, so I'm calling this one Lenovo's fault.]
2. Then today I was renaming a folder in explorer on a remote server, and *blip*, it disappeared. No, it didn't get dumped to the end of the list like on XP, it looked deleted. I hit undo and it came back. That's weird, because undoing a remote delete isn't supposed to undelete anything.
   The folder name pattern was something like __word_word_##-##_word and I was renaming the numbers in the middle by slow-clicking to enter rename mode, then highlighting with the mouse, then hitting backspace on the keyboard and enter to submit. The 2nd time, I hit F5 to refresh explorer, and there it was. So the undo was just undoing the rename, and, for whatever reason, the rename was causing explore to just drop it off the list of things to display--which is weird because Vista is so much better than previous versions about updating the folder list immediately for renamed stuff. Anyhow, I couldn't replicate using keyboard-only rename commands (F2, etc.), so I assume there's some involvement with mouse interaction that throws the shell off. I also couldn't replicated it by creating a new empty folder on the server, only by playing with older, existing folders. WEIRD.
3. Then tonight, I woke the laptop from sleep, and it refused to accept my typed password. I have a tablet, so I can actually use the virtual keyboard when all else fails, and it would NOT accept my password. Luckily, I have fingerprint authentication turned off, so I could still login by swiping. So I figured, "must have been a fluke", and I locked the workstation and tried to unlock it again. Same problem, password not accepted. So I tried logging off because I just wanted to see if the credential cache got hosed or what. It worked fine and I can lock/unlock fine. F-ING WEIRD. Anyhow, I feel like after the 1000 patches I applied, none of this should be happening, so I assume Vista deserves the terrible reputation it has right now.

I still LOVE THE HELL out of the new Vista tablet support and wouldn't go back for that reason, but between the docking station and turbomemory, anyone else I know would have either returned this machine or installed XP on it, and told all their friends it (and Vista) was a huge POS. Since I can troubleshoot my way out of most of this crap, I'm fine--but deservedly mad at both Microsoft and Lenovo. I'm running all signed/certified WHQL drivers on this bad boy, and that's a terrible sign for Microsoft driver quality if they approve crappy code that can reliably lock my machine just by installing it. After searching for others with docking station problems, I found many, many complaints, some going back to last year. Oiy. Lenovo should have fixed this by now.

PETA has video of another factory farm investigation, this time capturing some really sick, sadistic people encouraging each other to quite literally take out their personal frustrations by physically torturing the pigs they're supposed to be caring for on a factory farm in Iowa. If you think this is a lone psychopath, keep reading. Or don't. It's pretty fricken disturbing. This sums up the obvious conclusion pretty well:

"Abuse on factory farms is the absolute norm, not the exception, and anyone eating factory-farmed meat is paying to support it," [PETA Vice President Bruce] Friedrich said.

Have a nice day, and don't forget to thank the FSM that you weren't born an animal on a planet dominated by humans.

AP Exclusive: Video shows workers abusing pigs - Yahoo! News

I wrote before that I bought a new Lenovo X61 Tablet PC that came with 1gb of Intel TurboMemory, but that I hadn't farted around with all the settings yet. Well, I'll get to that in a sec.

I wasted my Saturday burning system restore CDs and reinstalling Vista because the OS had become ridiculously unstable that day. Everything was fine until I installed a bunch of patches--not from Microsoft, but from the Lenovo system update tool. After the updates, Vista would stay on long enough for me to get invested in some task I was doing, then the UI would slowly lock down until not even the mouse would move. I suspected a hard drive problem because the disk activity dropped to zero during these lock ups. After reinstalling everything, I was stable again, but I was totally paranoid that it would start happening again at any second because I had no idea how things had gone pear-shaped in the first.

Anyhow, after reading up on ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost, and realizing that only ReadyBoost (flash-based read-caching) was enabled in my TM console, I enabled ReadyDrive (enhanced read/write caching) to experience Hybrid Disk Nirvana. No such luck...but I was able to find the source of my constant Vista lockups on Saturday ;)

Apparently one of the Lenovo system updates I had installed was a newer Intel matrix storage and TM driver, and it turned on ReadyDrive, which is disabled by default in Lenovo's out-of-box config. Wham! It started locking up again after five minutes of use. With ReadyDrive enabled, the computer does come out of hibernation a little faster, but there are no other noticeable performance or battery benefits. Also, I don't have to worry about shutting down anymore because the machine will lock up shortly after logging in :( I even got all sneaky and manually installed the v1.7 driver update from Intel's site, but all it did was delay the lockups until after I put the machine to sleep once, then it was back on a lockup timer.

Anyhow, Intel TurboMemory is clown shoes. Based on what I'm reading from other Lenovo users, its only real purpose seems to be to remove a few more of your dollars and tarnish the reputation of the already sullied Windows Vista OS. The +5 funny part is that ReadyDrive is enabled by default by the latest drivers, while ReadyBoost is not. TM is engineered for simultaneous use of these features, so even if you disable one, 1/2 the memory just goes unused. Since they are kind enough to put it into the must unstable configuration by default, I have to make sure not to install anymore Intel updates because it reverts to the unstable config every time. Now I know why HP, Dell, and other vendors said "no thanks" to TM--it's a fricken half-baked scam. JUST SAY NO, KIDS!

This is a Wordle word cloud of my blog contents and book reviews from this summer. Molly picked this theme because it looks a little like the current blog theme. Wordle generates a cloud by matching word size and color to frequency of use on a page/feed/block. The magic is in the algorithms that beautifully align the words in a font-specific way to create the clouds. You can see that I like to talk about Japanese, Molly, and Lessons a lot ;)

Wow. It was a hell of a lot easier to install Japanese language support for my Vista Tablet PC than my old XP one, which was a cumbersome and lengthy process. Everyone complains about all the different Vista OS versions, but two nice things they did was get rid of the Media PC and Tablet PC editions by more closely integrating all of their functionality into the main version. If you want to add the Japanese, Chinese, or Korean IMEs and Tablet PC recognizers, just add the keyboard and IME for those languages and you're done. Declan has a nice guide to take you through the steps, and he shows off some of the rudimentary handwriting and kanji-matching features.

Declan's Guide to Installing and Using Microsoft's Japanese IME - Windows Vista, XP & 2000

I promised myself I would run my faithful old HP TC1100 tablet into the ground before replacing it, but I finally decided to get a new one this week. The keyboard and power supply were in need of replacement, and there was some scum building up under the digitizer, and I realized that I've actually resurrected it three or four times already. I really, really love the TC1100. Here are the big pluses:

• Removable keyboard
• Lightweight, perfect for ebook reading
• Ultra-bright screen with a rock-solid, bezel-free glass surface
• Wicked loud full-range built-in speakers
• Simplicity of the slate design:
• only three lighted indicators
• all IO ports hidden away under a moveable plastic cover
• touch-sensitive, programmable tablet icons
• case buttons and snazzy jog dial nested away along the top edge

Unfortunately, it's really showing its age in the horsepower department. I jazzed it up with a homemade SSD drive, but the 1.1GHz PIII has become the primary bottleneck for modern processing. The 32mb video chip is also extremely limited. The display is a very small 10.4", and only does 1024x768. That's great for reading my ebook collection and watching video, but challenging for professional software development. The bright, wide-viewing-angle screen and loud speakers make the TC1100 perfect for watching any resolution MPEG-4 video, the slow CPU means h.264 (HD stuff) is problematic. I installed CoreAVC so I can run 720p videos, but, even with that most wicked of decoders, it usually drops frames and can even completely choke on some of the higher-quality videos I have. Also, running Visual Studio 2008 and compiling large projects (or even basic setup projects which include lots of redistributables) is extremely sluggish, even with 1.5gb of RAM. Add this together with the fact that I'm facing dolling out more cash for replacement parts, and it's TIME FOR A NEW MACHINE...

...So I hit eBay hard and got a great deal on a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC. I got it new in the box with a three year warranty and an X6 Ultrabase with a DVDRW. It's a sweet little machine. Finally I have a screen with the res and size for comfortable development. The whole tablet is a little larger than the TC1100, and it does weigh a little more with the larger battery, but it's still <4.5lbs. The bigger battery gets about 7hrs on a charge, and this baby is fast. I still installed CoreAVC, but now it helps me play 1080p h.264 videos! NIIIIIICE! This sweet baby is really fast. It's nice to have a dual core CPU--everything is crazy snappy, even with a 5400rpm drive.

The dark side of this deal is that the X61 is like every other StinkPad: built like a brick and overloaded with stupid lighted indicators and duplicate physical buttons. It also has 4237 applets and drivers between the tablet, the fingerprint reader, and the TPM chip, and it loads them all on the start menu and in the systray by default. After you disable the 15 unnecessary wireless applets and uninstall the 250 crippled (and mostly redundant) security apps and update managers, it's a noticeably smoother ride. Shame on Lenovo for loading all this crap on a business OS. The one app I did agree with was the fingerprint security manager. Logging in with a fingerprint swipe is sweet. I haven't done that in years; I used to have a Targus PCMCIA fingerprint reader and proximity detector for Windows 2000, but it was really poorly integrated and the software was comically over-complicated.

The biggest non-physical difference with the X61 is that it came with Vista Business. Vista is fricken gorgeous, but it's also fricken complicated. I love the security lockdown, but I do NOT like the fact that lots of settings were scattered to the wind. Many of the changes seem outrageously pedantic. The most useful settings on the Programs page in IE/Internet Settings have been moved (along with a bunch of other stuff) to the jumbled mess that is the Default Programs control panel. All video and color settings are now separated into a bunch of single-tabbed applets under Personalization. Printer management is buried in the control panel. Compared to XP, Vista is also quite slow to boot and shutdown. That's the worst of it for me, though. The new tablet features in Vista are really fantastic--worthy of a separate blog entry. I'm really impressed with all of the little extra touches and integration improvements for the tablet functionality. More on that later.

My unit also has the Centrino Pro Intel TurboMemory nonsense option. TurboMemory is a 1gb NAND flash chip on a PCIExpress card, which works marginally better than a USB flash drive for ReadyBoost, and it also supports ReadyDrive. ReadyBoost is a read-caching technology that lets the OS store data on USB drives. ReadyDrive lets Vista exploit hybrid hard drives for optimal write-caching, which TurboMemory can apparently emulate. I need to do some research to see if it will make a difference to turn all that crap on (there is some controversy over whether TurboMemory does anything beneficial). I'm already having some issues with power savings modes in Vista, so I'm not going to push it until I work that out.

Anyhow, it took a while to get all my development warez installed on it, but I've got everything configured just-so, and I'm really happy with it. Yay me!

Ramesh Srinivasan wrote a tool to help register Windows Live mail as the mailto: handler in Vista. This used to be a feature right on the drop down under Internet Settings/Programs for the email handler in Windows XP, but, like most things that are easy in XP, Vista manages to make changing these simple program settings into a huge pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, Hotmail is such a POS that mailto: barely ever works (it's broken right now). Hey Windows Live Team: quite sucking at this!

Register Windows Live Hotmail with the Default Programs tool in Windows Vista

This guy is a friend-of-a-friend (where's my FOAF file??) who I know because he dislocated his hip on a 50k trail race I was watching. The unusual part that made me remember the injury was that he popped it back in himself and finished the race before going to the hospital. His latest feat of transcendent human accomplishment || crazed recklessness was to eat every single item at the fair on a stick. I've heard of carbo-loading before a race, but this isn't the way I would personally go about it ;)

I am sad to see that things are good and f'd up in Bangkok. It's not a good sign when people are demonstrating to ask for a new coup d'état.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Bangkok under state of emergency