My computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates.

Yes, it's dorky to eulogize a computer, but I am a computer geek and one tends to get attached to these things . So please, a brief moment of silence for my old computer, which has served me honorably and well deserves its retirement.

...

ENOUGH! Now, we drink! We feast! We spit on the face of death for another day! BAH!

Here's my first and second impressions of the new MacBook:

The MacBook and MacBook Pro are much closer to each other than the iBook and PowerBook ever were . Both come standard with a built-in iSight camera that can be used for taking dorky pictures of yourself; both have AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth standard, and at 6 hours, the MacBook has better battery life and lower power consumption than the MacBook Pro. In fact, almost everything in the MacBook can be upgraded to bring it in line with the MacBook Pro. <geeky>The MacBook has an integrated video card which, I guess, is bad if you're playing 3D action games. Since the video card mooches off main memory I would recommend a RAM upgrade, but other than that I wouldn't sweat it. The MacBook also lacks a PCMCIA port, but I never used mine on my old computer.</geeky>

The black MacBook costs $150 more than an equally-outfitted white MacBook. I admit it, I paid the Vanity Tax. Much like the Stella , it's less about how fast it is than about how you look when you're pushing it home. Although you can't tell from the pictures , it is finished in a matte black plastic that looks like a post-WallStreet, pre-TiBook prototype, and is very classy in an understated, Little Black Dress kind of way.

The monitor is the perfect size; there are as many pixels as I am used to [1280x800] but they are made to fit on a 13.3" monitor rather than the 15" of my previous laptop. I think this is the ideal size- large enough to use, but small enough to carry around. Much has been made of the glossy, high-saturation [and presumably high-glare] screen coating, as opposed to the traditional matte, low-glare [and presumably low-saturation] screen coating. The colors are, indeed, very deep and saturated. As for the glare, I have not had a problem yet. Yesterday morning, (e:dragonlady7) was using it in a sunny window and, with the brightness turned all the way up, could still read it.

Apple finally put in a widescreen trackpad to go along with the widescreen monitor. They may have gone a little overboard, though, 'cause this thing is enormous. It still only has one button, because Apple are stubborn fucks, but it compares favorably even to the five-button + nub + trackpad that we have on the ThinkPad at work . The new trackpads accept two-fingered input, so a two-fingered tap is like the right button, and a two-fingered drag is like a two-dimensional scrollwheel. If you're used to tapping, this feels very organic and works really well.

I gotta go get ready for work now - more updates as they become available!

- Z

So my computer's been pretty good to me, but lately just weird little crappy things have been going wrong with it. The CD/DVD drive, I think, was a lemon that kind of worked when I first got it, but lately doesn't do jack. Batteries, of course, get old and eventually can't keep a charge. The Airport [11Mbps] card started acting funny and now doesn't really work at all.

So today, I sucked it up and bought a new black 13" MacBook . I haven't even finished installing the updates on it but let me tell you this shit is hot. Now I just gotta get moved in.

- Z

OK, so a socially-conscious hip hop act [The Black Eyed Peas ] goes on tour, underwritten by a major Japanese auto manufacturer [Honda ]. Of course they need an over-the-top promotion.

Since they are a hip-hop act, it would seem to follow that they should give away a custom Civic. But since they're socially-conscious, it would seem to follow that they should give away one of Honda's alternative-fuel vehicles. And thus was begat the Black Eyed Peas Riced Out Honda Civic Hybrid Tour

(e:dragonlady7) imagines a discussion in Marketing where one manager says, 'why don't we give away a custom Civic?' and another manager says, 'make that a Civic Hybrid' and the other manager says, 'done,' and all the underlings groan and make fun of them at the water cooler for having no idea.

I guess I have more faith in the human condition than that. I imagine the ad exec coming in and saying, 'Dude. We gotta give away a riced-out Civic Hybrid. How awesome would that be?' and the manager goes, 'no that's ridiculous,' and the ad exec spells it out real slow, like 'Dude. Riced - out - Civic - Hybrid,' and the manager goes 'yeah, ok, that would be pretty sweet.'

- Z

[New journal music: The Skatalites/James Bond Theme gather:0481374001148138769 ]

I picked up a copy of 'Kepa 3 Gallery News,' v1n1 at lunch today. Very amusing. It is a one-page, front-and-back, 11"x17" xeroxed paper, written and illustrated entirely in laundry marker. I liked the following two articles, which were necessarily short due to the medium:

Mystery of El Greco Christ Revealed

Prado, Madrid- Officials find "trimmed" portion from middle section confirms tighty whitey prototype theory.

Casino to promote fine art using Vegas style. Is it possible to believe that big dollars will finally promote local fine art!? Past mayor Tony said Friday that this and pulled pork are win wins for our city.

It gave me an interesting idea for a concept newspaper: find a dozen interesting people and give them each a page. Content, photos, graphics, design are entirely their responsibility. Use InDesign, Word, paste-up, typewriter, marker, MS Paint, whatever. Collect and publish regularly.

- Z

(e:kara) made an excellent point in my last journal (e:zobar,53) that nobody gives a good God damn what a website looks like as long as it delivers the goods . I couldn't agree more.

So in that spirit, I thrust both middle fingers skyward and wave them defiantly in the direction of the art department and propose: The Best Ugly Local Website Award. Substitute 'utilitarian' if you must, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's that one website that was designed in Netscape Navigator Gold 3.04 about ten years ago that lives in some god-forsaken frameset at greyskull.someancientbbs.net/~skeletor79/Great%20Stuff/default.htm that you still visit all the time because it's the best damn website around. So let's fire up Lynx and get this party started!

At the risk of creating enemies, I nominate Bill Rapaport's ***** INTERACTIVE ***** BUFFALO RESTAURANT GUIDE , which has existed in one form or another since 1988. This guy is a motherfucking machine. Dude's got more restaurants listed than I have any hope of ever going to, and he does it all in HTML3.2. No Quicktime, Flash, AJAX, Javascript, or even CSS, just a huge wealth of information - the World Wide Web as pure as Tim intended *.

So let's hear it! What ugly websites are in your bookmarks?

- Z

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• 'Storage of ASCII text, and display on 24x80 screens, is in the short term sufficient, and essential. Addition of graphics would be an optional extra with very much less penetration for the moment.'