Morning

It's a sunny morning on Thursday, and like before I haven't caught a wink of sleep. Will I be able to look sick enough to get out of work early today as well? I don't know. At least I finally manages to be productive in this particular insomniac binge. 

I'm in a very complex love-hate relationship with my laptop. I like it for being retro in a strangely stylish way. I like it's awesome keyboard that's actually a step above pratically all the competition out there. I like how the thing had been running on battery power since one in the morning and now it's... 7:30 in the morning. Pretty darn durable for a laptop with dedicated graphics card. 
But then there are some serious issues with this machine. Like the irrational behavior of some of the lenovo patched drivers in sleep-wake cycle. Or how my wallpaper disappears whenever I use the battery stretch mode. Most of all, I hate how flaky the ATI driver for the dedicated graphics card on this machine is. It gave me two BSoD last night due to amdkmp driver crash (that Lenovo's been 'working on' since last year at least) and another one as a sort of graphics driver related cascading failure showing the dreaded NMI/memory parity error. The same exact BSoD message I received before my last dell's motherboard fried to a crisp due to faulty die casting of the GPU. I never get any errors when I'm using the intel integrated graphics mode which probably uses 4500HD chipset, but why should I settle for the crappy integrated chip when I paid good money for dedicated graphics solution? If I wanted a laptop that will just run off of intel IGP I would have bought much cheaper, and light laptop... Though to be fair cheap/light laptop with 1440x900 resolution is a rarity these days for some reason. The manufacturers including Apple are still sticking with crummy 1280x800 resolution for ~13in screen solutions. Way behind the times those people. 

Ok, I'll be honest. This laptop's still pretty good running on intel IGP. Things I do for work don't usually need dedicated GPU unit with separate ram. They need processing power, and this 2.5GHz core 2 duo machine packs enough wallop to blast most consumer class desktops out of the water. I'm just pissed that I can't play any games on this machine without risking the whole OS going down in blue flames... To be fair I haven't been playing much of anything these days, and I certainly haven't been playing anything that would actually need the punch offered by a dedicated graphics card, but still, I'd like to keep my options open. In fact, only three reasons stopped me from purchasing a new Aluminum MacBook instead of a thinkpad. Screen resolution, lack of SD card drive, and dedicated graphics solution. Well since the macbooks coming out right now have much better GPU with SD card drives to boot, not to mention phenomenal battery life estimated at around 6~7 work hours, the only thing Thinkpads have going for them is the screen resolution, something that can be managed if you're an external monitor kind of person. 

With the unstable graphics card giving me grief, I keep on thinking about bringing another gadget into my life. Maybe a new netbook (the ones on the market today lasts for upto 10.5 hours per charge). The 701's getting really old and it's a real pain to type up a full report on that keyboard. I can manage, but it makes my fingers feel like I've been playing on the piano for hours. While a new netbook would certainly be nice (especially since even the worst netbook out there can run starcraft on it, thus satiating some of my entertainment needs), I'm not sure this is a good time to buy a new system though. The Nvidia ION is just around the corner and there is the disturbing rumor of the Apple tablet coming out as early as September or possibly this winter season. 

Oh yes, the Apple tablet. People had been dreaming of it for a few decades now, ever since the Newton died. If Apple pulls it off there's a very good chance that I'll end up with one of those things, especially considering the wealth of science applications on iTunes Store at the moment. Some of the applications like the Papers are a godsend to anyone in academic profession. And I know for certain that Drew Endy et al are planning an iPhone-OS based mobile version of the biobuilder platform, which is a beginner friendly yet heavy duty synthetic biology CAD program that integrates into regular computer based distributions... Yeah, even speaking without gadget lust there's a good chance I'll get a touch or a tablet in the near future, since my professin almost seem to require having it for some reason these days. Kind of understandable when you think about it. The last time academic profession saw some mobile platform that was reliable and consistent enough for field/lab deployment was close to ten years ago, when the term PDA was new and Palm ruled the Earth.

On the other note (what are rant posts without multiple number of topics to dazzle the readers' minds?), only 95 days until Nanowrimo. I'm definitely participating this year, with my trusty laptop and all. I even have most of the rough draft and settings lined out in clean text based wiki format. I didn't expect myself to be able to come up with such awesome ideas, but I think I might have hit the real jackpot. I haven't read anything even remotely close to it for years. Very hundred-years-of-solitude-y. With some undeniable influence from all the Japanese light novels I've been force fed over the years. 

I'm really looking forward to it.

Well, time to get to work!