SxSW

The 2008 South by Southwest continues for the next 3 days in Austin, Texas. Enjoy music, films, and more. A big hit with people attending the conferences and festivals is Sched.org. It displays the entire conference and festival calendars and all the music, films, and interactive events. It has been a huge help to overwhelmed SxSW attendees.

The simple-to-use yet elegant web application uses a straightforward Ajax interface, and was created by 24 year-old Taylor McKnight and 27 year-old Chirag Mehta. McKnight is a web designer, and Mehta is an IT consultant. They whipped the site up in a mere 24 hours, and have helped more than 2,000 people conquer the confusion of all the official and unofficial conferences, parties, and festivals.

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Review: Macbook Air

If you don't have time to read this whole article, in short, the Macbook Air is great for users looking for a small, light computer for simple tasks and travel.  However, it is NOT for power users or people who will be behind a desk often.

As Apple describes their new product, it is "Thinnovation", and it certainly is at 0.76" at its widest, and it tapers to an amazing 0.16"!  However, it gives up many key things to achieve such portability.  You have an option of an 80GB 4200 RPM PATA Hard Drive, or a 64GB solid-state drive.  It comes standard with 2GB of RAM in all models, but the RAM is soldered to the logic board, so it is impossible to add more.  Apple boasts that the Macbook Air's battery lasts 5 hours, but in my tests, it lasted 3:05 at maximum.  Unfortunately, the battery is also not user-serviceable, so people looking to use this on long car/planes trips will be disappointed.

Another plus which I encourage Apple to work on with their other notebooks is temperature.  The Macbook Air does not get as hot as either of Apple's other notebooks.  In fact, after being on for 1 hour, the Macbook Air was 22.4% cooler than the Macbook Pro, and 13.8% cooler than the Macbook.

* tests were done with a Macbook Air (1.8Ghz, 80GB Hard Drive @4200RPM, 2GB RAM) a black Macbook (2.16Ghz, 200GB Hard Drive @5400 RPM, 4GB RAM) and a 15" Macbook Pro (2.6Ghz, 250GB Hard Drive @5400 RPM, 4GB RAM)

The Macbook Air weighs 3 pounds, has a gorgeous 13" LED-backlit display, and surprisingly, it has a full-sized backlit keyboard.  Instead of becoming part of the Macbook or Macbook Pro families, it creates its own category in Apple's growing notebook family.  Another impressive feature is the trackpad.  The trackpad is full-sized, and even bigger than the Macbook's!  A new feature Apple introduced with the Macbook Air is multi-touch gestures.  Although the Macbook and Macbook Pro already supported 2-finger scrolling, the Macbook Air took after the iPhone in that it supports pinching, rotating, and more using up to 3 fingers.

As I sit here in my office, typing this article on my macbook, I wish that I had my new Macbook Air booted up...

Elliot Spitzer

Two days ago New York governor Elliot Spitzer was caught on federal wiretap arranging to meet an expensive prostitute at a hotel in Washington.  This was a terrible blow to his reputation because he had just begun to pull out from a difficult first year where he had faced much opposition from within the New York Legislature.  Although he made many formidable enemies in his relentless pursuit of wall street wrongdoing, he was supposedly doing it "for the greater good of the public".

He resigned on wednesday, delighting the public, and has apologized for his actions.  Before this incident he was a strong backer of  ethics in life, and this helped his political rise to power.  However, going against his own words, he has destroyed any positive elements in in his public and private images.

Elliot Spitzer is the first New York governor to resign since 1973.  He is also the first to be forced out of office since 1913 when William Sulzer was impeached over a campaign contribution fraud.