Archive for April, 2009

To my TV junkies

Monday, April 27th, 2009

There are so few good shows out in TV land that step away from the forumalic crime or medical dramas.  Don’t get me wrong, I love crime and medical dramas, but we have plenty.  There are a handful of shows that are a little quirky, or a little different, or a little too badass, but are absolutely amazing.

Chuck.  It’s a great show with a lot of heart about a computer geek who gets turned into a spy.  For a better recap of why you should watch, click here.  Please watch Chuck tonight!  If you haven’t had lunch already–go buy Subway and support a sponsor of the show.  You can get more information at twitter.com/savechuck.

Dollhouse.  It’s getting so good, and is one of my favorites this season.  I’m not quite sure how to summarize this one.  I suppose it’s about programmable people, which lends itself to great episodic shows, but Joss Whedon has created such a wonderful and rich universe.  Check out www.watchdollhouseweek.com for more information.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  This one needs to be saved!  If you are a fan of the Terminator movies, you will totally love this show.  This deserves another season to explore what happened to John in the season finale!  Check out www.savethescc.com (although I think it may be down right now) or twitter.com/saveterminator.

A quick thought on new laptops

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

My uncle had recently asked me to help him purchase a budget laptop.  His requirements were a big screen to watch DVDs, a webcam to chat with friends, and lots of space to store movies and pictures, all for under $600.

After searching the deal sites for a couple weeks, I found a decent deal for a Lenovo IdeaPad Y530.  Spec wise, it is a decent system; 2.0GHz Intel Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive, quite similar to my MacBook Pro.

After a couple days with the Lenovo, what I discoverd was this brand new laptop was mysteriously slow.  It had problems connecting to my wifi network, and it hangs on shutdown.  I thought about reformatting it, but it didn’t come with any media.  So I was left to uninstall the bloatware, and do my best to speed up the user experience.  Disabling Aero transparency and removing unnecessary startup items helped out a lot.  But during this process, I wondered how my uncle would have fared if he had to be the one to configure his new computer.

I think this Lenovo experience was the first time I used the factory installation of Windows.  What struck me most was that compared to my MacBook Pro, the Lenovo user experience was not very pleasant.  When I first booted my Mac, I answered a few questions, and I was ready to go.  No uninstalling bloatware, no problems with connecting to wifi networks, no weird issues to diagnose.

The Lenovo is in pretty good shape now and runs pretty smoothly, it’s pretty pleasant to use.  What wasn’t very pleasant was getting it to this state.