I have to stop doing admin tasks when I’m tired and distracted! I just noticed that Six Apart had just released MT 3.11, a bugfix. I had about 15 min before class, and usually upgrades like that are trivial…
But in the rush, I accidentally, once again, blew away my MT install. Thank god I had already converted it to run from a database; otherwise I would have been one sad, sad man.

Anyway, I have a new rule: do not engage in blog administrative tasks when the beginning of torts class is imminent.

I’m in the market for a new laptop. I had a Dell 4150 that I absolutely loved, but it was heavy. Well, not by conventional standards, but by my stringent laptop standards. I have a huge brick of a machine for work, it’s a loaded Dell, which weighs nearly 8lbs. I was considering using that, but the idea of lugging it back and forth to school/home/work, well, that isn’t appealing.

So I’ve been debating about a Sony PCG-TR* but I waffle back and forth. Then I had this idea about a tablet PC… I thought, maybe the convenience of changing the form factor, combined with the svelte design would be cool. As luck would have it, we have two table PCs at work for evaluation, so I checked one out this weekend.

At first, I was really impressed with the versatility of the table, but honestly, the mystique wore off pretty quickly. After you get over the “cool” factor of being able to flip the screen around to any orientation, the little roughness around the edges of the OS start to grate.

There were lots of minor annoyances, which might have been specific to the particular model, so I won’t go into those. There was one major annoyance that would keep me from ever getting one: I type nearly 5x faster than I write.

The handwriting recognition for the Windows XP “Table” Edition, actually works pretty good. But honestly, unless you type painfully slow, it’s just quicker to type. And yes, it was cool to lay in bed with my wife, surfing the web with nothing more than a pen, but that doesn’t make it worth paying a premium for a feature that is nothing more than “cool”. I guess the tablet isn’t for me. I think that if you were in the position where you made a living off of presentations (the thing would rule for PowerPoint warriors) then it might be worth it. Otherwise, it’s a cool idea that isn’t quite there yet.