The Return Of Mechasmack

So I found this listing of free hotspots in town and I thought I'd share:

• Map Room
  1949 N. Hoyne
  773-252-7636
  Apparently, they serve breakfast here. Who knew?
• Argo Tea
  958 W. Armitage
  312-873-4123
  Close to the Brown Line
• Jerry's Sandwiches
  1045 W. Madison
  312-563-1008
  They've got a large selection of gourmet sandwiches. But just wait until my friends open up their sandwich shop with wi-fi and a skeeball parlor!
• Cafe Dada
  1507 W. Foster
  773-907-0727
  They have Nutella crepes. And it's BYOB
• Kaffechino
  6441 N. Sheridan
  773-508-1888
  Besides the obvious, they have sandwiches and couches.
• Tea Leaf Cafe
  2334 S. Wentworth #105
  312-808-3668
  Catering to the late night Chinatown peeps, this joint stays open until midnight during the week and 2am on weekends. And they gots the bubble tea.
• Pizza Metro
  1707 W. Division
  773-278-1753
  Nothing goes better with computers than pizza. Especially late at night. You can munch and surf until 4am on the weekends here.
• Art Gallery Kafe
  1907 N. Milwaukee
  773-235-2351
  Art works and a piano to keep you inspired. Tea, sandwiches, and salads to keep you alive.
• West Gate Coffeehouse
  924 W. Madison
  312-829-9378
  Good for breakfast and essert. BYOB
• Darwin's
  1935 N. Damen
  773-772-3719
  Microbrews in Bucktown. Nuff said.

So just when I'm getting ready to finally buy a Mac, they go and announce they're switching to Intel chips. What!? I certainly can understand if the PowerPC architecture is reaching it's limits, but is the Pentium any better? Or is it just a matter of being able to get more power into their laptops, cuz it doesn't look like they'll get a G5 in a PowerBook anytime soon.

Well, the switch is a ways off. So I'm still gonna get my PowerBook. I wonder how long it will be before someone ports the Mac GUI to Linux.

Wow! I am impressed. Google Earth is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Makes you looks at the planet in a whole different light. If you have the processing power and the bandwidth I highly recommend you check in out. Unfortunately it's only for Windows right now. but I'm sure they'll have in on Mac and Linux soon.

desktop.google.com/download/earth/

Imagine a keyboard with a dynamic layout - the letters and symbols on the keys along with their functions could be switched at will without messing around with stickers or overlays. The Optimus keyboard does just that. This keyboard uses OLED displays on each key to show letters and functions. I definitely think this is the way to go.

For now this is just a design model. Hopefully someone will push this into production.

Do these jerks really think that people are going to respond to spam on a blog? That's really pushing it. I was little annoyed when I first got blogspam. But I've noticed that only one of my posts gets spam, my
birthday wish to Tina Yothers. What's up with that. I've stopped deleting them and they keep coming. And they're all from hey.com so make sure add it to your blacklist.

I finally made the switch.

Well, maybe not switching completely. Ubuntu is still in the running. But if I'm moving to mostly using a laptop, then I might as well move to this sleek machine. Now where's the Start button?

I don't really like the new series of Mac ads that make Windows look all nerdy. While I love the Mac OS and their laptops are the coolest looking laptops on the market, I feel like the ads are just preaching to the choir. It's not really going to convince most people to switch to a Mac. Most people use computers about as much as they need to. And they don't want to spend time learning how to use software or having to go back and forth between what they use at home and what they use at work. Having said all that, this spoof of those ads is pretty funny.

It could be that it's almost 2 am and I'm still up. What else is new, right?

Since I made the switch to Mac a few months ago, a few things keep popping up just to haunt me. For instance, every one in a while I'll hit some key combo that turns off the delete button. But I can't figure it out because it always happens when I'm typing so fast that I'm probably hitting 2 or 3 keys at once with my big fat thumbs. And this time I just did something that made the two windows I had open in TextEdit slowly separate - kind of like Expose, but just in TextEdit and slow enough to make it seem like my pooter's haunted. Time to go to bed.

Ok, so maybe I was a bit hasty with my distaste for MySpace. I read a very interesting article about the growing pains they went through in order to serve so many users so quickly. I suppose I was just speaking out of frustration. I figured if Yahoo can do it then why can't MySpace, especially after Big Murdoch bought them. As a computer nerd I should know better. So I'll just have to be a bit more patient. And it's not like I need to visit it every day.