So there I was, listening back to the AAC enhanced version of last night’s Mac Geek Gab, when all of a sudden this image appeared in iTunes. Clearly Michael takes John’s interpretation of my new surroundings here in New Hampshire a little TOO literally…

And yeah, sometimes my face doesn’t work so well, but that pales in comparison to being the guy whose GPS unit died the *day* before the factory warranty expired… Garmin replaced the entire thing!

Apple’s Boot Camp documentation is correct: Windows XP SP1 won’t install on my MacBook Pro, so in the morning it’s off to purchase a copy of XP SP2…. So far it works very well — Apple’s partitioner is slick and just does it’s job with little fanfare (if only the lay user appreciated how *much* voodoo has to go on to do what is being done).

As I mentioned on last night’s Mac Geek Gab podcast, one of my long-time wishes has come true… Chax, the popular freeware iChat-enhancement utility, has now added the ability to use a tabbed interface, wherein all your chats are available in one window, with different tabs at the top for each person with whom you’re chatting.

We were out to eat about a week and a half ago (when the power was out) and I noticed this in the parking lot of the local Bugaboo Creek (hey, what can I say? I have kids and they cook a decent steak..

Specifically I changed the hard drive from the 120GB/5400rpm model to the 100GB/7200rpm model.Then I looked Wednesday, and the hard drive was still the 120GB/5400rpm model, but they put me at at 2.16GHz processor and added the requisite $300 to the order…. But they screwed something up in the process and somehow lost my place in line, putting my ship date back to March 16th!!The guy on the phone was *so* apologetic and said he’d give me a discount off the price (plus free 2-day shipping), and we said our goodbyes, mine being a bit more depressed than his.Then late last night an e-mail appears in my box stating that my order has shipped and is en route.

about the USDA’s recently revised food pyramid(s) versus Harvard’s pyramid (a good read, I might add, though it’s only available in print, I believe!)…. With this new-fangled Internet thingy, not to mention cable and satellite television, we can get our news, entertainment, and heck, even tangible goods from just about anywhere on the planet.

I opted for the high end model (at the time, 1.83GHz) and figured I’d better put the 120GB, 5400rpm SATA drive in it. Since then, it’s been “due to ship” sometime by or before February 15th.Today, as you probably know, Apple announced that the whole MacBook Pro line would be given a speedbump (yes, this is prior to them shipping anything!), so I called the Apple Store to see about all this.I chose to wait the extra 30 seconds on hold and actually talk to someone, and she was very helpful in reporting a few things: Yes, it’s true, my 1.83GHz model will be upgraded to a 2.0GHz model without impacting my ship date.My ship date will be impacted anyway, and I’m supposed to get an e-mail from them today or tomorrow indicating my “revised” ship date.If I want to change ANY part of my order, they have to cancel it and put a new order in, meaning my ship date will be pushed back yet another couple of weeks.The interesting thing, of course, is that last point was the only time she indicated anything about a time frame.

My friend, Ron Marks, posted a great note in his blog that really highlights the fact that, as a society, we’re way too over protective and litigious than we used to be (and yes, obviously the two go hand-in-hand)…. protect them TOO much, though, and I truly believe you actually wind up *hurting* them, and in a very big way.

I was reading Dave Slusher’s site this afternoon, and as one of his new year’s “resolutions”, he said that he would be removing sites from his RSS aggregator that didn’t offer the full text of articles in their RSS feed…. This way people get to peruse the site in their aggregator and, if they find something interesting, come to the site to participate more and, “pay” for the content they’re reading (by “pay” I mean “allow us to show them advertisements of our choice”).