Dear Bill Gates,

I am very sorry I shoveled so much ire on Windows Vista over the last few years, both privately and publically.  I approach with hat in hand and offer an apology.

Recently I decided to buy a new computer.  Because of being such a raving fan of my iPhone, I thought I would switch to a Mac.  Mac computers are very elegant.  Macs are beautiful.

But for me, ultimately, a Mac didn’t make any sense.  Not after I saw, and fell in love with, an HP Quad Core desktop machine with 8 gigs of RAM, and a huge and beautiful 23 inch wide screen monitor … for 2/3 the price of a Mac which, by tech specs alone, was only half the computer.

The only drawback, I thought, was that the HP came preloaded with Windows Vista.  Every experience I’ve had with Vista has been negative.  But, I thought, I’ll just uninstall it, put XP on it, and then upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out.

That’s not what happened, though.  It turns out with a powerful computer, 64-bit Windows Vista rocks.  It rocks hard.  Software I thought had been buggy (Firefox 3, which I had all but given up on) and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate (don’t try and say that with only one breath) both of them are rock solid on Vista.

On this computer, Vista runs effortlessly, and it multitasks like a supercomputer of yore.

It’s beautiful, elegant, and solid.  The operating system I thought I would hate, I have found I actually love.  Sure, it may suck on a lesser computer.  On hardware that is not worthy.  But on this machine?  Dare I say it?  It’s downright sexy.

And my apologies to Steve Jobs and Apple, and all the Apple fans out there, but this HP desktop kicks ass.  Vista kicks ass.

AND, something that people don’t figure in until it’s too late, I didn’t have to re-purchase all my software for the Mac platform.  That was really the nail in the coffin when I was teetering between choosing a Mac and a PC.  I have a significant investment in software.

So once again, Mr. Gates I am sorry for the loads of ire.  That is in the past.

And take heart Mr. Jobs, you still get a chunk of my money, as I pick up my new iPhone 3Gs tomorrow.

Here’s a lesson I’ve learned, not just in this instance but in many instances, and it holds true.  Brand loyalty is stupid.  It fosters complacency.  It even harms the companies you love, because what drives companies to continuously improve is competition.  If you’ve become a brand-loyal cash cow to your favorite company, you’re undermining the system of competition – and that actually ends up hurting the company you support.

I still like Apple better than I do Microsoft, and certainly more than I like HP (and I used to work for HP), but Mac computers are too expensive and too underpowered.  I don’t care how elegant they are.

Vista is pretty damn elegant if you give it a chance.  And I can’t wait to put Windows 7 on this thing.

But, I’ve decided, only after Windows 7 gets its SP1.

I couldn’t resist. I tried but ultimately, no. I gave in to desire.

I ordered the 32gig 3GS.

Check out the Netalyzer from the International Computer Science Institute … it gives you all sorts of interesting details about your Net connection.

I just noticed, though, just before posting this link, that it’s “still in friends and family mode” and they ask you to please not spread this link.

Too late.  I got it off of GMSV.  Cat’s out of the bag, it’s already being spread.

Please be gentle with it.

[Updated Link - Thanks Nicholas!]

I have one of those Western Digital "MyBook" external USB hard disks that turns itself off when the computer shuts down.  Well, I noticed after I upgraded my iTunes that it had done just that.  It shut down and wouldn’t come back on.

I unplugged it and plugged it back in again, in a different USB port.  I rebooted the computer.  It would turn on and then, at one point while XP booted, it shut itself off.

I connected it to my laptop and it worked fine.

Too tired to mess with it anymore, I went to bed.

This morning I woke up knowing what to do.  Weird how that happens.  I went into the hardware manager and looked at the USB section.  Lo and behold, the USB drive was there, and it had been disabled.

Right-click, enable.  OK.  Fixed.  No problem.

But why did it happen in the first place?  Did the iTunes 8.2 install script need to disable other USB hard drives during the install, and then in a forgetful moment, neglect to re-enable it when it was done?

Anyway, if any of you are having the same problem, here’s a possible solution.

This is one of the reasons I totally love Google’s “Chrome” web browser.

Fast, more stable that both IE 8 and the current buggy Firefox (seriously, I love Firefox, but it crashes so often now I’m ready to abandon it entirely), and it protects you, too.  Neither IE8 or Firefox warned me that this site hosted malware … and even if it turns out to be a false alarm, I don’t care.  Better safe than sorry.

Griffin’s Clarifi is the best iPhone case I have ever seen.

As nice as the iPhone’s little camera is, it’s a bit farsighted.  Close-ups of people’s faces, objects, and especially text, all end up being blurry.

Paul Griffin at Griffin Technology noticed this and asked one of his case designers to see if a corrective lens would help.

Thus the Griffin Clarifi iPhone case was born.

Not only is it a really sleek, tough polycarbonate case for the iPhone, but it has a little monocle that you can slide over the top of the iPhone camera lens, and suddenly the things closer to you become nice and sharp.

Now, here’s the thing.  If this were just any camera phone , the story would end there, and most people would yawn and say, "So what?  Big deal."  But the iPhone is not just another camera phone — it’s a full blown computer in your hand with all sorts of ingenious, web-connected, distributed-processing applications just a screen-touch away.  So not only are your close-up portraits now clear, and the trinkets you sell on eBay now sharply in focus, but the iPhone has — thanks to the Clarifi — become a powerful text scanning device.

So what?  Why is that a big deal?

Add the application Evernote to the picture.  I love Evernote.

Evernote is an external peripheral for your brain.  Not joking — that’s what it is.  It’s a database to help you remember everything, with several ways to enter things into it — from keyboard, via copy-and-paste, via voice, and (here’s where Clarifi comes in) via pictures.  Load the free app up in your iPhone, connect to their website, and start taking pictures.  Every picture is run through very powerful and accurate Optical Character Recognition that can even read your handwriting, so the text is scanned and put into your personal database, where it can be sorted and searched.

Imagine it.  Every business card you come across … every ingredients label … all your napkin-idea scribbles … every recipe … all of it scanned, stored, and available for instant recall.

But not without the corrective lens on the Clarifi.

Another iPhone application that exists only because of Clarifi is the 1D barcode reader produced by Snapper.net.  This fledgling service allows you to snap a picture of a product’s barcode while standing in a store, and it returns comparative pricing information.

According to Jackie Ballinger at Griffin Technologies, the Clarifi is selling really well, and feedback from customers indicate they would be interested in more Clarifi models.  "Many people have requested color options other than black, and a zoom model," she says.  "We’re certainly investigating these ideas, the concept of a case like Clarifi that adds functionality and is more than just a fashion accessory is really appealing to us and something we’re continuing to explore."

Final word: this is one awesome case, adding functionality to the iPhone that greatly expands its capabilities.  I’m a raving fan, and I hereby officially declare the Clarifi a Groovy Gizmo.

How nerdy-furry cool is this?  A digital camera that takes timed exposures from your pet’s eye view so that, at the end of the day, you can plug it into your computer and check out — from your pet’s own point of view — what they did all day.

You can set it to take a picture every 5, 10, or 15 minutes.

Is it just me, or is there a TV show idea in this somewhere?  Fido burying a bone, chasing a cat, snapping at the mailman’s heels and … what’s this?  Smoking cigars and playing pool with the other neighborhood dogs?

Get it for a mere $49 over at ThinkGeek.

Having just bought a Kindle 2, I kind of freaked when I learned it would soon be replaced by a newer model.

That happened when I bought my first iPod – it was obsolete within a week.  The bitterness I felt toward Apple because of that was both ironic and silly, but it was undeniably there.  I wanted to kick Steve Jobs in the balls.  I was pissed.  It didn’t keep me from buying the iPhone, though.

Thankfully Amazon didn’t do that to me.  This isn’t a replacement, it’s just a newer, bigger model.  I have the sports car, and this is the luxury sedan.

And for nearly $500 for the Kindle DX, I don’t feel any kind of buyer’s remorse for having the smaller model.

This is cool, but I remain happy with the DX’s little brother.  Though hopefully the Kindle 2 will have a OS upgrade soon and get native PDF support.

That would make me really happy.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle.  I figured that I could keep it for a week and if I don’t like it, send it back within Amazon’s 30 day window.

I’m not sending it back.  I’m keeping it. 

It’s awesome. 

And not just because you can buy my novel on it – though you can, and of course I encourage you to do so – but because this has done for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music.

Reading on the device is not a superior experience to reading a traditional paper book.  The background of the screen is a grey that should actually be a brilliant white – technology is going to have to catch up here – but I did find I was able to read comfortably enough to forget I was holding a device instead of paper.

Where the device is superior is the fact that it’s connected, on demand and for free, to the Internet through a build-in cellular link.  And it’s not that surfing the Internet on it is wonderful (I’d much rather do that on my iPhone if I’m out and about) but it’s that you can peruse and read the first chapters of thousand upon thousands of books, at a whim, searching for something that grabs you enough to read the whole book.

That is the genius of this device.

It will never completely replace a paper book, just like a iPod never replaced something with external speakers.  It won’t kill book stores, especially places like Borders (my favorite) because people will always love to go and hang out there.

However, it may force them to evolve.  A book store ten years from now may be a completely different place than what you find today.  It may be more like a Starbucks, more like a hangout, where people who love to read come together and congregate, discuss, and fondle expensive collector’s editions with fancy binding and acid-free paper.

Perhaps customers will buy eBooks for their Kindle (or equivalent) on little cards that have codes on the back.  Or maybe there will be big wall-mounted touch screens where you scroll through them and press “Buy Now” – after which it gets downloaded immediately to your device.

One thing for sure, is that with the advent of the Kindle 2, the eBook reader has finally become a fixture instead of a curiosity.  One can only guess at the improvements on the Kindle 3, and also the rumors are flying that Apple will be coming out with something that, while not a dedicated eBook reader, can be used as one. 

Here’s a bit of irony.  High praise for the Kindle coming from none other than Bill Gates:  "Lately, Jeff’s [Bezos] pioneering spirit has taken him in some new directions. He would like nothing more than to be the first to provide a cheap and safe way for anyone to fly into space and started a company called Blue Origin to devise the technology. That’s pretty cool, but his biggest legacy of all might be more down to earth — a modest-looking white-and-silver digital device called the Kindle. This electronic book is Jeff’s brainchild and may well revolutionize not only how we acquire books and periodicals but also how bookworms like me actually read them. That would put him in the same ranks as Johannes Gutenberg."

Why is this ironic?  Because under the hood, the Kindle is running Linux.