Just jumped on the netbook craze and picked one up from Newegg, who had a good deal on the Asus Eee PC 1000HE.  I loaded it with Windows 7 RC and it runs smoothly, stably, and has quick boot/shutdown times .   It’s been great on the road with it’s built in web-cam; which Jen and I use regularly for long distance chats.   My favorite thing about the netbook is the battery life.  I typically get around 6-8 hours of battery power before I have to recharge, making it great for long road trips.  Also, I tethered my blackberry bold via the built-in bluetooth and achieved download speeds of up to 150kpbs, impressive!  If you looking at getting a netbook, I’d definitely recommend this one..

Lately I’ve become increasingly bored with Windows XP and haven’t been all that excited about upgrading to Vista. Honestly, I haven’t even used Vista yet, but I’ve heard differing opinions on how well it performs. Right now, I’ve got XP running just the way I like it and really haven’t had too many problems since I built the system. Recently, however, I started playing with VMWare server and experimenting with different OS’s. In particular, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I decided to go with Ubuntu since there is so much documentation and community support for those migrating from windows.

Ubuntu is a highly popular Linux OS and I figured I would take the plunge and install it on another box. After a couple of weeks playing around, I’ve pretty much made up my mind that I’m going to switch. First of all, it’s extremely lightweight and fast. Programs that take a long time in windows load so much quicker in Ubuntu. So far I’ve gotten alot of my windows apps working on Ubuntu or have found some other app that can do the same thing. One thing I really like, especially for people new to linux, is the Add/Remove applications feature which allows you to install packages with ease. It’s really nice for those not familiar with the terminal. Don’t get me wrong though, you WILL have to use the terminal at some point. Secondly, it’s free. You can’t beat that. Thirdly, it installed on my system with ease and found most if not all of my hardware. Something that I’ve not had much luck with in the past.

All in all, it’s been a pleasant experience. I wouldn’t say that Ubuntu is for the average windows computer user. However, for geeks like me, I think I’ve found a new home.

Upload a picture and this will convert it into an Image Mosaic. I saw this on Digg a couple of weeks ago and tried it out with pretty neat results. Try it for yourself.

read more | digg story

AMD has just released their new CPU socket, the AM2. The biggest difference in their new socket is the support of DDR2 memory. I’m sure AMD has another winner on their hands, however I can’t justify the cost of a new motherboard, memory, and CPU just to have the latest and greatest. I’m still very pleased with my socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and plan on having it for at least another two years..

I switched web-hosting companies yesterday and have about got everything back to where I had them before.  Finally got “friendly urls” working with the FAlbum plugin.  This was giving me big headaches when I was hosting with Yahoo.  Apparently, their servers do not support files that have ” . ” in front of them i.e. “.htaccess”.  This is important for mod-rewrites and getting things to work how I want them.  Have no clue what I’m talking about?  Doesn’t matter.. I’m happy!  Oh, and thanks Josh for helping me out during the switch.  Always appreciated..

Upgraded wordpress to 2.0.2 today and it was a cinch. Also, backed up the SQL database so I could have exact duplicate of my site for development locally. Xampp is a great little utility for development locally and is very useful if you want to change things around without messing up your site. Still working on a 3-column theme, however I’ve kinda gotten use to my current site and will continue to make improvements to it as I get time.