Well I am writing this on my new Thinkpad T61 widescreen.  Since our home got struck by lightning and I lost our home computer I had the opportunity to purchase a new laptop.  So I decided to go with the brand and type  I love best. (Thinkpad)

This new T61 is fantastic. It is so much better than my work machine.  At work we use Dell d820 (I’ve gone through 4 drives in mine).  Over all these are 2 comparable machines (wide screen 15.4, duel core, 2 gig ram) however the think pad wins hands down.

My thoughts

1. price (I priced the dell vs the thinkpad similar components) the dell was about 600 more expensive

2. reliability - this thinkpad created to last, just by feeling the case you can tell.

3. Size - the thinkpad is smaller and lighter

4. Heat - first think I noticed was that the t61 runs quiet and cool.  My dell will fry your lap if you set it there, this t61 is very cool

5. Keyboard - boy oh boy did I miss the feel of an Ibm keyboard.  It is so easy to type.

6. track point - I love the track point, my hands never leave the keys, even to move the mouse.  And Lenovo has it down, three buttons and one is for scrolling

So as you can see I am thrilled with this new box.   I will have to update in a week.

I am testing out using Live writer as my new method of posting to my blog.

The company I work at NusoftSolutions has released it’s Nusoft Framework as open source to Code Plex.  This  is an extensible business and data layer framework.  It uses codesmith templates to generate the code.

Check it out and see the ease of use for starting a project

http://www.codeplex.com/nusoftframework

I saw this post on digg and just had to share my thoughts.  America is negative savings.  Wow, this is a shocker.  I mean in a country where the majority of people are in debt.  The average income in Kent county is 51k and the average new car / suv cost is 30k (http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/press/101245/article.html in 2005).

We live in a country where people spend more then they have. They use Credit cards to cover the rest and banks are more then willing to allow them to do that.  This is not a good thing, at some point people who are in massive debt will not be able to pay and their debt is then passed on to others.   Who themselves already have debt they cannot pay.

Maybe I should think about moving to China or Japan.  Not that life would be better but at least country is better with it’s money

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_account_balance

It seems i’m not the only one who has had some data loss recently.  I read an article this week about a guy who lost his data while moving and had a list of tools and things he used.  Here is an article from lifehacker on the same topic. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Just keep your data backed up.

http://www.yugma.com

 Free webex.

I just got my laptop back. New hard drive, number four. New motherboard. They (the dell team) think that it is a mother board issue (could be power or connections). If this happens again I’m never going to do dell again.

As aways the first thing to do on Vista is to turn off UAC the worst thing ever started on windows.  Let’s just annoy the end user over and over and get people used to just selecting YES at every prompt until someone puts a prompt up that says (format hard drive) the user then selects yes like they always do… and boom hard drive gone.

Here is a great read on this

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000571.html

I was researching a bottle of Rum for a friend and realized that I did not know of any other than “The Captain”.  Even though that is my favorite, I did not know of any better brands.

In the process I found a few lists of what are reported as some the best of each type of spirits.

http://www.tastings.com/spirits/best_bar.html

I have not tried much on this list.  I guess I have some catching up to do.

Here is one of the best freeware lists I have seen in a while. I use a majority of the items on this list. 
I would however prefer notepad2 to any other text editor

http://www.teknobites.com/2007/09/08/40-free-windows-apps-for-you/

I just read this article http://www.physorg.com/news108449464.html 

comcast is turning off people for using too much bandwidth.  I seem to remember the sales pitch to me.  Unlimted bandwidth and some crazy speed (5 MB).  I just remember telling the guy I did not care about the bandwidth since most sites can’t give me 5MB of content.  All I wanted was low latency… the poor kid on the phone did not understand me. 

 What upsets me about this is the fact that I really do use my internet connection, and  do use a lot of bandwidth. 

1. Surf web (download songs, movies, etc)

2. VOIP - this is not a real bandwidth hog all the time but I have QOS and the highest setting to get good calls (more upload than download)

3. Backups - I backup and connect servers and laptops to my systems at home every night. I have my parents stuff and some work stuff that just drop to an ssh share for backup.

4. Streaming tv - I use beyond TV to stream live tv to my computer when I want to watch something on the road (world cup, notre dame games, etc..)

5. Stream Music - I send my MP3’s where ever I go.

So my router / firewall is always telling me I have a lot of traffic coming and going.  I would like to know that comcast is ok with my usage.  However, they do not broadcast what if any is too much usage.  Hey, I purchased a 5MB pipe. Shouldn’t I be able to use all that.  (HE, HE) we all know the real answer.  They don’t expect anyone to use that much and also expect 5MB to server 100’s of people. My mom and dad have high speed.  But mainly for surfing and email.  They just need to quickly surf the web, they are the people who the cable networks make their money off of.  NOT me.

The drive in my Dell d820 went dead again on Friday.  Do I have a backup yes.  Is it recent. NO.  Was I backing it up before it died (yes) just like before.  I hooked up the backup disk (an external usb drive) and started the job.  I noticed I did not have much space on my external drive and started cleaning some stuff.  Then started the backup job.  I stopped the job (it had 2 hours to go) because I had a meeting.  Took my laptop and POOF, after the meeting it died. 

It did not just die as in would not boot, it made the great click click boom sounds.  No recovery for me. 

I am really upset with this box.  I am once again going to say that it is probably something to do with power or the motherboard. 

Thank goodness for MOZY (mozy.com)