there are many things that i am thankful for. but beyond the usual, here is what i am thankful for in this time of thesising:
1) cool toys that bring the fun back into using a computer: i am talking about my new acer aspire one, a 2.2 lb marvel of a netbook. my configuration comes with a 160 gb HD, 1 gb RAM, and the powersaving 1.6 ghz Intel Atom CPU which allows me to get ~5 hrs of battery life. typing on the lilliputian keyboard may be a little painful and putting the touchpad buttons on the left and the right of the touchpad is a numbskull move. but the beautiful, bright (glossy) 8.9" screen runs circles around my thinkpad t60's 15.4" matte screen. and this laptop is an actual laptop: it doesn't run hot, and you can actually use it as a _lap_top without feeling like you have a 300 pound tombstone on your lap. plus, it totally makes me feel like a hacker (think john connor in terminator 2 hacking the ATM). i removed the default XP home installation, and am now dual booting XP pro and...
2) windows vista: don't laugh. i tried it out way back years ago when it first came out and was immediately turned off by its bloatitude, lack of driver support, sleep/hibernation problems (putting your computer to sleep in vista was like what you did to your sick dog at the vet), application incompatibility, and overall slowness. but just for kicks, to see what my little netbook could handle, i installed vista ultimate SP1 on it. with aero. and i was pleasantly surprised. the netbook runs everything with ease! plus, my computer actually wakes up from sleep mode (in about 2 seconds). given that vista in its current state seems to perform similarly to XP but is way prettier to look at, it is now the default OS on my netbook. i'll try experimenting with hackintosh later but for now, vista it is.
3) foxit reader pro 2.3.3309: i hate bloatware. and adobe acrobat is the epitome of bloatware. do i really need speech to text recognition? or security certificates? my acrobat 8.0 installation is 542 mb. my foxit reader install is 14 mb. foxit opens up PDFs blazingly fast and best of all: it has tabs, which is critical when i have around 20 PDFs open at any given moment.
4) and finally, dropbox. i use 4 computers, and synchronizing files has always been painful. i've resorted to using gmail as storage or USB keys. never again. after installing it on all of my computers, i get automatic, incremental synchronization of any file i save, on any internet-connected computer. plus, i also get storage on amazon's servers, just in case all of my computers crash. i found dropbox can't define its own sync folders, so i used this workaround to autopoint certain folders to be "dropboxed". the free service is 2 gb but i am using the paid version, which gets you 50 gb. as evidenced by posterous and dropbox, good things come out of the y combinator :)
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