Personally, I like Barnes & Noble and have no moral qualms with large companies so long as their business practices do not edge on outright coercion or unfairly anti-competitive behaviors. That being said, I really do think Barnes & Noble is one of the last companies that should be using such allusions. I mean, I get that it’s also about the size of the devices, but it just sounds silly.

Anyway, I’ll chalk this up to an advertising fail. But I just had to point this out because seeing the ad first thing this morning literally made me laugh and get water all over the place.

The main thing that made me reluctant to get another phone was that I really like how seamlessly my contacts and gmail work with my current phone, the G1, and I don’t know how well a non-google phone would do the same. I also like that it has a full physical keyboard, as I have no patience for on-screen keyboards, and a lot of the other Android phones on the market don’t have them.

One option was just to get another G1 to replace my broken one, but it seemed wasteful, and the one thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have the storage capacity to handle the latest versions of Android. Luckily, the G2 I’m sure will work equally seamlessly, has a full physical keyboard and I’m guessing it’ll be upgraded to handle the next few versions of Android. I’m excited! I hope they push this thing out before the end of the year; I don’t want to wait that long for a new phone.

Oh, also, I moved to Chicago. It’s great, but more on that later.

In fact, HP has a 3-year manufacturing failure rate (as opposed to accidental damage) of just over 25% compared to Asus, Toshiba and Sony which each have failure rates hoving just above or below 16% over the course of the same three-year period. You can see the results of that study here (PDF file), though, it’s coming from a vendor of warranty protection plans, so take it with a grain of salt.

But aside from discussions of the book value of my laptop and manufacturing failure rates, I have, however, as a result of its shitty hardware, been reading more instead. Here are some of the recent ones.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Loved this. I’ve never been a huge fan of dystopian novels, mostly because anything taken to an extreme is bad, I think, but this world is so carefully constructed and her writing is so readable that it was hard to be such a cynic about it. I think my favorite part was the relationship between Oryx and Sandman. It’s an alternate reality; if you’re into that you should definitely read this (and probably already have). Otherwise, just read it anyway cause it’s good.

Girl’s Poker Night by Jill Davis. Eh. My sister gave this to me a while back. It was better than the average chick lit but not by a lot and not really worth reading unless you particularly are in the mood for that stuff.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. Huh. I liked this book in theory. I liked that it was almost a philosophical (regarding art) mystery. It’s a story about a murder among a group of miniaturists (read: artists), set in the Ottoman Empire (it’s translated from Turkish). The idea is that they are working on book of illustrations that reflects a style that is considered to be sacrilegious in that it is considered idolatry, detracting from the glorification of God, etc. There’s more to the plot line than just this, but the main character, Black, investigates by speaking to the suspects regarding their views on various aspects of art, and at the same time the unidentified murderer discusses his thoughts as well. Theoretically, you should be trying to figure out who is the murderer based on these discussions of art philosophy. It was good in terms of writing, pacing, etc., but I think my appreciation of this book is largely on an academic level. If you think you’d enjoy theoretical discourses on art, for example considering what “is” art and whether things like personal style detracts from art and the representation of “truth,” then you’d probably love this book.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. Always good. I think this was the first Hercule Poirot novel ever. I thought I would be over my Agatha Christie phase by now, but I guess not.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Very Oprah. Obviously unrealistic. But entirely enjoyable. A group of rich important people get kidnapped by terrorists who are good people at heart.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schafer. I liked reading this, minus the romance. Its seems like a solid novel who had an editor who forced in some contrived romantic plot line so there would be was more of a plot arc, but it was just distracting. It’s about the German occupation of Guernsey (not fictional), as told through a conversation in letters (entirely fictional). It begins when a writer receives a letter from someone from the island and ends up conversing with various people to find out about their experiences during the occupation. It’s Hallmark-y in it’s way, but interesting from a historical perspective.

Baby Proof by Emily Giffen. This was sitting on my self for, like two years. It’s chick-lit, but I liked the premise of this book, mostly because I liked the idea of exploring the trade-off between decisions about kids and someone you’re into. Oddly enough, it was something I recently had a conversation with someone about so I finally picked it up and went ahead and read it. Overall, it was pretty good as far as this genre goes, but the ending was such a disappointment and waaay cheesy.

The past few weeks have been filled with temporary, but pleasant influxes and outfluxes of people coming in and out of the city — Thomas, then my mom, followed by Chris moving to Jersey and then Ali, Dan and Tina, etc. I am, of course, always happy to see them, but tired of the “please summarize the last X months/years of your life”-type conversations and inevitable partings…

It’s not that I don’t like New York City — I’m actually pretty happy with the job and the living situation, grateful to have people I know here, and I love the museums, the broadway shows and the amazing restaurants, etc. That was all as advertised, I admit.

But each time someone comes and goes from the city, I’m faced with a reminder of the transience of my current lifestyle — an extended, meandering vacation from my actual life: law school, career, family, etc. I have an apartment, yes. But the lease is only until August, and I could always sublet. I also have a job here, fine — except who knows how long that will last (with “these troubled economic times…”) and even if they didn’t lay me off, I could easily walk away; it’s a job and a paycheck, not a career.

I know my plan was always to put my life on hiatus for the time being while I got sorted out, but I don’t think I realized the fungibility of my job and the current components of my life would bother me. In some ways, I know I longed for this — in college, I felt so tied down with commitments, both academic and extra-cirricular, and it was exhausting mentally and emotionally. Now I’m here, and it’s weird to think that everyone I’ve been interacting with on a daily basis will probably be a stranger to me by the time I graduate from law school. I also wonder what else I could have done with these two years; the thought of Mr. Parmer talking about “opportunity costs” crosses my mind right now.

I can’t remember where I read that people are naturally adverse to the idea of decreasing options. I feel like now that I’m a full-fledged adult, the idea that I could potentially run out of time to do the things I want to do is dawning on me in a subtle but entirely unpleasant way.

I’ve been reading a book by Margaret Atwood called Moral Disorders and Other Stories. She writes amazing things, and this one is solid, but probably not my favorite — it’s just the one that is the most relevant to me at this juncture. The entire book is a collection of stories about a female character, Nell, told in a series of short stories at various points in her life. Throughout these stories, she explores what Nell could potentially become, the different types of people, the various female roles and the decisions that are made which determine these things; I’ve had a nagging feeling of discontent, but it didn’t really hit me what it was until I was reading one of the stories on the subway to work — the idea of being scared of being tied down to one option, one lifestyle, but also fearing the other extreme of endless wandering is one that haunts me, just a little, and I worry the reality of it will creep up on me too soon.

Alright, so, when I first got my new computer (the inverter on my previous Pavillion broke), I was really psyched until I found out that despite having nice specs, I was actually worse off in terms of what I could do. There was the file-transfer bug plus compatibility issues plus general unfamiliarity plus that POS user account control. I basically couldn’t play any of the games that I’d gotten this computer in order to play and three out of the seven programs I use most often weren’t compatible. Color me peeved.

Needless to say, being told it was “more secure” did not seem like much of a plus at all. Anyway, it took me at least a week to — begrudingly — configure everything to get to some point where I was able to do what I needed to do.

Flash forward a year: I haven’t noticed anymore bugs, though I won’t vouch for anyone else. Now, before, reformatting on XP was an incredibly arduous process requiring hours of your somewhat undivided attention. On Vista, it took about 20 minutes and I was up and running after about half an hour of installing drivers and updates. Now, I’m not suggesting that people should immediately pick up a copy of Vista because gee, at least it installs quickly, but I really think there’s a number of not insignificant improvements that genuinely make it easier to use. I was pleased to find that all my precious programs are now finally Vista-compatible. w00t. Additionally, when I’m not busy cussing out my computer for compatibility issues, I actually find the interface pretty attractive.

I can completely understand people who were pissed off when it was released and even six months after that. However, honestly, can anyone tell me what’s currently so terrible about Vista? (Preferably someone who has actually used it as opposed to a Mac fanatic that has never spent more that 5 minutes on Vista.) UAC can be turned off in about four clicks after the system is installed, so no that doesn’t count.

Anyway, maybe I just really dislike Apple, I dunno. I just think people are taking one look, saying OMG IT’S NOT THE SAME!! and deciding they hate it. Then again, I’m also the only person that likes Office 2007, haha. Change is good! Go with it, people!

Here’s my setup now. In all, I have 5 drives (one of them has an extra partition so it appears as an additional drive) and almost 1TB of space. My computer actually has a second HD bay that is currently empty; I might get another HD but probably not any time soon:

As you can see, I name my drives after classical economists. Adam Smith is my C drive, cause he’s the father of economics and my primary drive (boot drive, OS, etc.). Malthus is Mr. Doom and Gloom, so he’s the system restore drive. David Ricardo has actually been with me since middle school (he’s been re-named many times; last iteration he was Cheddar Cheese) — but anyway, since he’s been all over the place with me I thought it was fitting to name him after the international trade guy.

Jeremy Bentham is my mini-HD. Small but important, which reminds me of Bentham because, let’s face it, he’s really only known for one thing: utilitarianism. So yeah, something small but important. Finally, John Stuart Mill is one of my favorite economists, but since he’s like en expanded version of Bentham (utilitarianism + much more!), I thought the connection between the two made sense — they’re the same size drives, but Mill is physically larger than Bentham. (I think in real life Mill was probably a lot skinnier than Bentham.)

If I get a second internal HD, I think I’ll name it after Marx — it’ll probably contain odds and ends that are interesting enough for me to keep, but not important enough to be stored on the primary HD. Kind of how I think about Marxism: interesting to learn about, not important enough to be considered relevant economic theory.

Finally, I’m saving the best for last: Milton Friedman. He’s tres cool, so I’m waiting to use that name after I get something equally cool like a the new 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor or a sufficiently large solid state flash drive (this probably won’t happen for years, seeing as how the largest is only 64GB right now).

Alright, I’m off to shove more stuff into my new HD. Tschuss!

For starters, I got this computer (HP Pavillion zd7000 line) a little before my freshman year at college and I really love it. However, a lot of the letter keys are rubbing off at this point, the left screen hinge has begun to crack, and now my optical drive is acting up. But fine. I can deal with all those things. Afterall, I’ve basically left this thing on for about 3 years straight with the exception of carting it around on about 15-20 plane flights, going through about 3 complete reformats, installing all number of programs and downloading at a rate of probably I’d guess 1.5-2 gigs of data per day for various reasons.

Unfortunately, the graphics card it’s equipped with is this NVIDIA GeForce4 Go bullshit that is compatible with absolutely nothing. The only thing it can handle are games designed prior to, like, 2000 (I’m guesstimating, but you get what I mean). I actually like a lot of old games though. So, fine. However, the OS does not like trying to play those games that were designed for Windows 95 or anytime before that. It makes it kind of unstable and there’s a lot of crashing, restarting, debugging, running emulators, setting profiles, setting CPU cycles, etc. etc. So basically, there’s rarely a game that actually plays all that nicely on my computer. Grr.

Anyway, so I mentioned previously that I bought Psychonauts, and I found out after spending 3 hours getting it to install (my CD-ROM drive kept screwing up – I think the lens may be a little wonky) that I couldn’t play it because it’s incompatible with my stupid graphics card. Grr. Furthermore, my third favorite game of all time (Curse of Money Island comes in second) is Civilizations III. I was very, very excited about and following the development of Civs IV up until the point that I discovered my graphics card could, once again, not handle it.

So fine, I wouldn’t mind shelling out some cash for a new computer except — I don’t want to get another computer with XP because in a couple of years I’ll wish I had Vista. Secondly, I don’t want Vista until Service Pack 1 comes out because I don’t want to mess with the general buggy-ness that is Windows. SP1 is slated for the end of 2007, which means no matter what I have to wait until then.

That’s where I am. Honestly, I’m not that upset except I really wanted to play my game. :( Woe is me. What do I do?