After almost 9 years, I finally bought a new laptop as a birthday present to myself. I tried making due with an Asus Eee PC netbook, and while it was light weight and had great battery life, I kept finding myself wanting to see more on the screen.

When I friend told me about a deal with Lenovo to get employee pricing through Borders Rewards. I hopped on Lenovo's site and configured a Thinkpad T500 for myself. At my last company, all engineers were issued Thinkpads and I was really impressed with their design, quality and features. Since I was more interested in long battery life versus high end performance, I chose the 2.26GHz Centrino2, 4GB of RAM, integrated graphics and the 9-cell battery. Even with the 15.4” screen I can get upwards of 6 hours of use.

Once home, I formatted the drive and proceeded to install the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 9.04 and Windows 7. I use Ubuntu as my main day to day use OS. It has all the utilities I need and use on a daily basis. I use Windows 7 for managing my iPhone with iTunes and some light development in Visual Studio.

I installed Ubuntu first and setup my root, home and Windows partition, following these instructions. One fact I discovered is that a hard drive can only have four primary partitions, so partition editors will suggest you make one partition an logical partition and then further divide that into extended partitions. This is all well except that Windows will not let you install to an extended partition. I discovered this after creating the linux partitions so I had to wipe the drive and start again to get Windows it's own primary partition, located after the root Ubuntu partition.

Installing Windows to it's parition will overwrite the GRUB bootloader preventing you from booting Ubuntu. You can fix that by following the instructions here. The example has the 'boot menu' option. This will make the boot menu appear each time you power on the PC. I chose to exclude that option so the PC will boot into Ubuntu by default. Note: when editing menu.lst, place the new stanza at the bottom of the file after the AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST.

Once I had Ubuntu installed and booting reliably and started installing my favorite applications. A new one that a friend told me about is Powertop (sudo apt-get install powertop). This app will poll your hardware every five seconds to determine power draw and then make suggestions on how to reduce it by turning on or off features. It shows you in near real time how disabling hardware will reduce your power draw and extend battery life. A must have for all road warriors to acheive the afore mentioned 6 hours of battery life.

The last thing I needed was a good way to access files and services on my home network. To access my desktop I had been using SSH to securly connect to the computer and then tunneling VNC traffic over that SSH connection. But what I really wanted was a VPN solution. So I bought an inexpensive PC off craigslist, put in two gigabit NIC's and installed Smoothwall, a dedicated linux based firewall package with SSL VPN. I'll post about that later as I'm still fiddling with the VPN configuration to get it working just so.

I was really impressed with how easy the Ubuntu install was. It was as easy as following the bouncing ball. No convoluted console jockying, arcane Unix commands or mumbo jumbo. And the best part is that all the hardware just worked. Even all the hot key buttons, with the exceptoin of the mute button, and the signature Thinkpad track point scroll button. But that is easily enabled following these instructions.

I've been an AT&T customer for just over a year now and an iPhone user for just over 6 months. First off let me make it clear that I'm very happy with the device itself. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. The icons they chose make it obvious, even to the technology challenged how to make a call or look up an address. And the app store is awesome. So many choices for apps from Bejeweled to currency converters to language learning applications. With over 54,000 applications to choose from, there is plenty of opportunity to customize your iPhone experience.

The major downfall of the iPhone was the network it was tied to. I didn't notice it until I got an iPhone, but I started experiencing connectivity issues with both data and voice. I was experiencing dropped calls several times per week and sometimes a few times a day, or sometimes I wouldn't be able to initiate the call at all. Fearing the phone had an issue Apple replaced it under warrenty, but that didn't fix my problems. So my worst fears were confirmed, AT&T's network can't handle the iPhone. Some people at Apple had hinted 3G issues with AT&T, but of course AT&T would never cop to the fact that their network was straining to keep up with the iPhone usage.

Well, now even AT&T has admitted to what most iPhone users already know. They can't handle it. The interesting part of the article is that AT&T is the largest wireless carrier political contributor, spending over $40 million dollars gaining favor in Washington, DC. They state that they never anticipated people to use their handsets that way. So rather than spend their money to upgrade their network resources, they give politicians large sums of money to protect their interests.

I really hope the rumor mills are true and that Verizon will have a 4G iPhone by late next year or early 2011. Due to the fact that Verizon's 4G network and AT&T's 4G network are based on the same technology, it makes a certain amount of sense.

About two months ago, my girlfriend Natalia surprised me with an early valentines Day gift. She had been poking and prodding my brain trying to find out what the perfect gift would be. One day we were having seemingly unrelated conversation about my Golden Retriever, Houston, who died of cancer at the young age of 5, while I was away at college. Not putting two and two together I didn't realize that the light bulb had just clicked on.

On February 1st, which was a Friday, I sat at home waiting for Natalia. She had phoned earlier that day saying she found my present and would be giving it to me that evening. As I anxiously waited her arrival I got another phone call from her, this one summoning me to the animal shelter about a mile away. At that point, the light came on for me too.

When I arrived, she walked out to greet me and gave me a big hug. I followed her inside and there I laid eyes on the most adorable puppy. The volunteer informed us he was a mix of German Sheppard and Labrador. He was part of a litter of 10 which was recently rescued from a house; no one could find the mother. Later that evening, after much searching and thought we settled on the name Rex. And looking back, the name fits him very well. On Rex's first vet visit, the veterinarian informed us that Sheppard's are very intelligent albeit slightly neurotic dogs and Labradors are very personable and loving dogs. A great combination I thought.

Fast forward two months and Rex has become an integral part of our family. On weekends Rex gets plenty of exercise wrestling with Natalia's grandfathers 7 month old basset/coon hound and during the week he tears up and down the stairs in my 3-story townhouse. He has been a lot of fun so far (except maybe those first few weeks spent potty training) and I look forward to many more years with him at our side (and possibly a few other pets as space permits).

It seems every where you turn these days you are encouraged to click. "Click here to apply", "click through to save", "click on the monkey to win an iPod". Since its introduction, the computer mouse has been firmly entrenched in our minds. The mouse has even become a metaphor for the incredibly simple, "setting up the firewall was as easy as point and click."

While this may not even occur to members of the younger generation, I grew up with the tried and true CLI (that's command line interface for you youngin's out there). The only impedance to progress what how fast you could type and how fast the computer could process input. It was natural, efficient. Although with applications like computer games and web browsers, the mouse is indispensable. But some days despite all the utility it provides, some days I don't want to be bothered with pointing and clicking.

For those that feel the same, the IE team has posted on their blog a list of keyboard shortcuts for navigating around in IE6 and IE7. The post lists shortcuts for all the common navigation tasks like going back a page, scrolling, stopping the current request and closing the window. The post also lists a few power user tips, like focusing on the navigation bar and opening the right-click 'context' menu. A handy reference to have around when your feeling not so handy.

Thanksgiving day, November 22nd this year meant a lot of things to a lot of different people. For some it was a time of joyous celebration, for others a time to reflect on their fortunes and misfortunes. I did a little of both. I've been very fortunate thus far in my life and have plenty to be thankful for. I have a loving family, a good job which allows me to pursue many of my interests, a group of great friends and an amazing woman I started dating a little while ago. I spent thanksgiving with my parents and sisters this year at my parents cramped, 1 bedroom apartment. Seven people in a barely 700 square foot apartment and a mother who loves to cook made for a lot of dancing around the kitchen and shuffling items around to make room for everyone.

But it also serves as a reminder that one year ago, on November 27th 2006 my parents house burned down with them narrowly escaping with barely the clothes on their backs. I can still recall that late night phone call from my frantic mother and it still sends chills down my spine. Over the past year the shock of the event has faded and been replaced by a feverish anxiousness to return home. The reconstruction of the house is finally near completion and while displaced, my parents have resumed their normal routine.

Since the house was almost completely destroyed, my mom (who had been wanting a new kitchen) took this opportunity to expand a little bit. In the new house, the kitchen/dining room area had it's back wall pushed an additional ten feet into the back yard, nearly doubling the size of the kitchen. Also, a walk-in pantry and half bath was added off the kitchen into what used to be the first bay in a two car garage. Off the back of the house a deck was built with a gas line run out to fuel the large natural gas grill my dad recently purchased. If I had to choose a phrase to sum up the results of this rebuild/remodel it would be "storage space". The kitchen and pantry have enough storage space to rival some homes I've been in that are twice the size.

These two pictures show the same area of the house, just from opposite vantage points. The first is of the kitchen the day of the fire, taken from the garage. The other was taken about a month ago, from the dining area looking out into the pantry (where the first picture was taken).  

As you can see, the appliances haven't been installed yet and the floor hasn't been varnished yet, but it almost feels like a home again. I'm looking to when the house is completely done and ready to move in.

This has been a very eventful year to say the least. In addition to losing my parents house, I bought a house, started an internet marketing business and started a new job. All things considered, I'm thankful for a great many people and things this holiday season.