The Ides Of August Update

I’ve been kinda off-the-radar here lately due to a whole lotta life going on.  As I mentioned previously, I’m quite involved with an outdoors club at school and due to some rather, er, abrupt changeover of the executive (of which I’m a part), it’s been taking up a lot of my free time.  But that’s not really a bad thing, as it’s been a blast so far participating and organizing fun activities, as well as meeting tons of cool new people.

So let’s see now… what’s new?

Well, I guess the easiest to remember is… new gear!

You might notice that at the top right of this site there’s a funny little box called "My Zune Card", which links to my profile on the Zune Social.  I bought an 80GB Microsoft Zune a little while back and I love it.  It’s a really neat combination of a great hardware platform (the MP3 player itself), software platform (the Zune software has become my media player of choice) and social networking.  Last.fm did a good job of this last facet, but integrating it with hardware as well as a marketplace (coming soon to Canada, available now in the US) takes it to the next logical level.

Having sold my old laptop (I’ll miss you, li’l buddy), I’ve replaced it with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61.  It’s a tiny little thing, 12.1" screen, and built like a little tank.  I’ve always loved ThinkPads for their ruggedness and reliability.  It’s a fine machine, despite some problems I was having with wireless networking.  I suspect the problem is due to the Access Connections Manager software that tries to manage your networking — specifically, it seems to have a little trouble dealing with DHCP.  Having given the PC a fixed IP both in my router and in a custom Access Connections location profile, the link to my home network has been rock solid.  I’ve had it about a week now and will give a full review at a later date.

Also, I’ve now set up a profile at Twitter.  I’m not quite sure why.  I think it’s one of those services that’s meant for people that are obsessive-compulsive about changing their Facebook status updates — which, in fact, I have linked to my ‘tweets’.  I’m looking into setting up a little widget that will show that on this site as well; maybe Jaiku.  Their account are currently by invite only, so we’ll see how that turns out.  I’m also playing around with a new theme because, as much as I like this one, it’s a little too common around the net.

I’ve got some other news and reviews as well, but I’ll leave that for another post.