My hard drive died about a week ago and I've been in limbo. For all that the iPad can do, it is NOT a laptop replacement. It can do about 80% of the things a laptop can do but that other 20% is pretty darn important.

So if you're counting, this is the 2nd hard drive failure I've had in the last 3 months. Each time I was visited by the infamous click of death (hear below). I decided that the aggravation and loss of productivity was not worth the price-to-storage ratio of the standard platter hard drive. I vowed to never again hear the dreaded clicking of my hard drive failing so I upgraded to an solid state drive. Though these things aren't cheap ($400 versus $100 for 500GB of storage), I figured that it was worth it for a more reliable and faster storage solution. Well I can't speak to the reliability since I've only had the drive running for a few hours but the speed is unbelievable. From pressing the power button to being on the desktop took less than 10 seconds. Mac OS X opens all the previous programs I had open before shut down, so that means I'll have anywhere from 6-9 separate programs that need to open before I can really start working. This process usually took about 3 minutes but with this new drive, I'm ready to go in under 30 seconds. Opening Excel or Word would take 20-30 seconds each but now take less than 5 seconds. There is no way I can ever go back and would actually trade off CPU or RAM upgrades in place of an SSD.

So next time you think your computer is slow, the best thing you can do to speed things up is just get an SSD. The performance improvement is dramatic.

Only on a Mac would I have found this out.  The iPhone has so permeated the behaviors of how the Mac works that the rubber-bannding effect allows for some interesting design aesthetics.  Check out the Posterous logo on my blog when I over-scroll.  Very slick!

I went to grab a coffee this afternoon at Blue Bottle in Oakland and the barista let me know a celeb was in the area - Mark Ruffalo. I have no real opinion about him as an actor. I think I've seen two movies he was in and thought he didn't add nor took away from my enjoyment of said movies. However, I'm always curious when movies or TV shows shoot in Oakland (Moneyball, Matrix Reloaded, etc) so I went to rusty-trusty Google and typed in "Mark Ruffalo Oakland". Nothing remotely relevant came up. Tried a few variations, adjusted some search parameters (only searches within 24 hours - one week) but still nothing that explains why Mark Ruffalo was in Oakland. I then popped over to Twitter and typed in the same keywords "Mark Ruffalo" and got these results:

As you can see, the 5th result down mentioned Mark Ruffalo and Sungevity, a solar startup down the street. Clicked on the link and BAM!, Mark Ruffalo sitting in a Tesla Roadster wearing a Sungevity hat. Looks like he was in the area not to shoot a movie but to pop into Sungevity for something or other.

This brings up my second instance where Twitter succeeded where Google (and other methods) failed to solve a problem/query. Over the July 4th holiday, I wanted to know if Blue Bottle was open on Monday, the 4th. Calling their number didn't help because it was a standard phone greeting offering hours of service during normal weeks but not holidays. Same for their website and any search I did about Blue Bottle and the 4th of July yielded no mention of hours. I then went over to Twitter and found Blue Bottle's account and BAM!, there you go.

Now these are just two specific instances and of course, I still do most of my general search on Google but it's been a long time since I last found the answer to a query outside of Google. It's a death by a thousand cuts for them as Facebook, Twitter, and others start chipping away at their defenses. Google looked unassailable, much like Microsoft 10-15 years ago. Today, there's only one product of Microsoft's that I use, Office. I've switched from Windows to Mac for my hardware, Windows Mobile to iPhone for my cell, and even Exchange to Google Apps for my businesses. The endless cycle of rise and fall in tech is unrelenting and no one is immune.

I just setup my mom with a new PC. Ironically it was an old Mac Mini laying around the office. However, I wasn't going to go through the machinations of teaching her Mac OS so I just ran Bootcamp to boot into Windows XP.

Amazingly, this old Mac Mini is perfect for her small desk. She used to store her massive Dell tower below the desk but it still took up too much space. Also, it had a loud fan that accumulated and swirled a ton dust and lint. When I set it up for her, she thought it was a turbo boosting contraption to make her Dell faster. Imagine her surprise when I told her it REPLACES her Dell tower!