Surface Minor League?

I really like my new W530, in spite of its bugs (one of the charms of using Windows) I really like my new machine. I like it enough that I don’t want to drag it all over the place with me when I want to work mobile. I could buy another laptop, but what I really want is something with a touch screen, at least Windows 8 Pro 32 bit, and Wacom equipped pen and digitizer that works with Photoshop and Sketchbook Pro.

News broke on Engadget that the Surface Pro lack full pen support for some pretty important applications. I very nearly purchased one, but I’ve had a funny feeling about the device since I made the decision to pull the trigger. I walked out of Best Buy because of that feeling (and their deplorable service) to do a little research.

Lenovo’s Thinkpad Tablet 2 wouldn’t be ideal, but it is supposed to work with everything I want it to. It couldn’t run the WP8 SDK, but I could still work on the visuals for the game. The machine runs on an Atom Processor and only has two GB of RAM. Both of the key applications I’m looking to run on that device might be slow. I’d be slow to get one too as it would take 4+ weeks for it to ship according to Lenovo’s website.

Dell’s Latitude 10 is pretty attractive. It’s less expensive, has a user swappable battery, and it might ship before my beard gets too much longer. Some recent hands-on reviews show it to be a pretty nice device with great build quality. I’m sorely tempted.

There are lots of less than ideal options at this point.

What I can’t figure out is why Microsoft's Surface division would play games with consumers like this. They had to know there would be a ton of creative professionals looking at the Surface Pro as a mobile productivity device. To ship it with a pen digitizer that isn’t ready for prime time was really careless. They’ve basically squandered a great opportunity to pull ahead of other ultra-portables and offer something no one else had yet.

The forums are alive with Stylusgate already and everyone is waiting for either Adobe or Microsoft to blink. I’ve seen a lot of promises that they will “explore the option” of getting the proper functionality onboard which is basically like saying “we got your money suckers” to anyone who already bought one. I guess not every division of Microsoft can just totally rock like Windows Phone.  

Leaving Boise

I'm leaving.

Well, my wife, our guinea pigs, some of our stuff, and hopefully my 71' Oldsmobile are leaving. It's a strange sensation to pledge myself to the task of leaving Boise. It has been my home for almost twenty-five years, a long time to live anywhere.

We'll be moving to Wichita, Kansas sometime in April and we'll be gone at least a year. Why Wichita? The opportunity Liz has, in the form of a job, is too great to pass up. It'll be neat to be closer to some family and friends that live in that end of the country as well.

My goal is to pack really light and head down there with only what I couldn't possibly give away, toss out, or donate to a worthy cause. I'm a pretty minimalistic guy in a lot of ways, and not so much in others. I've already thrown away some things that I've kept for far too long, and rediscovered a few things that I've missed.

The move and the two months preceding it will disrupt my work. However, I should get caught up and well ahead of my current goals by having a year largely unfettered by many of the things that make me happy. It'll be a productive time, but a sad time. I keep telling myself it will only be a year, but life has a way of taking us in directions we can't alway expect. Few of my friends that drifted away from Boise were ever able to return. I hope my situation is different, down the road, and that I'll be able to return and at least visit often.

On the upside, there are two IKEA retail locations along the route I'll be taking to Kansas.

 

Lenovo W530 Review

I think part of me really likes new tech because I get to write about it.

I ordered my Lenovo W530 with great trepidation. I’d done probably 90% of my work on the Mac since late in 2009, even my Windows Phone Development stuff. I still love Apple, but they don’t make a workstation grade laptop anymore, and that’s what I really wanted. Fortunately, that’s just what Lenovo sent me, sort of.

Lenovo does a really good job talking up the machine on their website, ISV Certified, Military Specs, and for the most part the hardware probably is. Quality control on the floor with regard to loading the software initially leaves a lot to be desired. If you aren’t pretty tech savvy, this machine is not for you.

When I started it up, about half the machine didn’t work. The device manager was full of exclamation points and the monitor hadn’t been color calibrated at the factory like they promised. I had to install the color calibration software and work through doing the first calibration. I also had to spend five hours chasing down drivers across both the Lenovo and Intel websites to get the laptop functional. It was pretty harrowing. Harsh departure from starting up a new Mac and just having it work the moment you turn it on.

After I’d chased all the bugs and found a set of drivers that would work harmoniously together, the workstation really came to life. To the degree that Lenovo failed setting up the software; the hardware on this machine really is a thing of stark utilitarian beauty. The reviews written that criticize the keyboard or the layout are anachronistic tripe to be ignored for sure. I had a 1997 pre-Lenovo Thinkpad, and I much prefer the new over the old.

Everything from the little rubber feet on the bottom to the LED light in the lid by the web camera is very well thought out. I like that they didn’t make me click boxes to get the mid-range battery, Bluetooth functionality, or a backlit keyboard. Lenovo just knew I wanted those things. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to have the Thinkpad logo indicator lights on the palm rest and lid and they just don’t work, or if they just knew I didn’t want those. I liked the dimensions of the machine as well. The laptop even fits in my Crumpler “Considerable Embarrassment” like the bag was made for it, or the laptop made for the bag.

Performance

I’ve yet to find something this machine struggles to do. It runs Photoshop CS6, Sketchbook Pro 6.1, the Windows Phone SDK software, WP8 Emulator, and Starcraft 2 on the “High” graphical setting without breaking a sweat. It does so quietly and without generating much in the way of heat. I can almost hear it say, “Is that all you’ve got?” when I’m running several system intense programs at once.

I get occasional hang ups when running video within a browser. However, I don’t think this is the machine or the wireless drivers. When I run Netflix or a similar app designed to push video from the Internet, it performs extremely well. I like the Internet Explorer, but I can’t help but wonder if it is at fault for the problems.

Screen & Color Calibration

I had low expectations for the color calibration. I expected that I would have to play with it a little to get the right white point and so forth even after it did its work. The fact that this wasn’t done at the factory filled me with equal parts dread and rage. Setting up the software was pretty easy though, and the calibration routine just takes about a minute.

Getting a display to reveal at a standard illuminant is a challenge, and if you like setting color to the monitor so you really see what you get, it’s a big deal. I set the color calibration sensor for D50 and let it do its thing. I’m far from an expert, but it looked exactly how I would expect, no fiddling required. I was totally blown away.

Touchpad & Track Point

I’m a Track Point guy. I like it. I really like a good touchpad too, and I had very low expectations based on how the one on my E420 worked. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the W530 had one that was both sensitive and intuitive. It also had a few gestures I wasn’t expecting.

For instance, if you swipe to scroll with two fingers and hold near the top or bottom of the touchpad the scrolling will persist. This is a really nice addition and prevents me from having to keep running my fingers up or down to scroll quickly. Pinch to zoom works like a charm and I don’t know if it has palm rejection software but I haven’t tripped it while I’ve been typing.

Sound & Speakers

They’re good, for a laptop, which is never that great unless it is that odd gaming-rig with a subwoofer built into the bottom. The Dolby software allows you to tune the not that great sound to decent sound and even pretty good sound if you’re just watching TV or a movie. Classical music sounds really good, but progressive death metal sounds a little off. As with nearly all laptops, get a decent set of headphones.

Speaking of which, the headphone jack pushes some decent power. I have to turn the volume down to about 10% or my headphones are too loud. Hooking the laptop up to a set of speakers yielded really loud and very clear sound. I did a little looking around and found a forum of musically inclined people that hook up instruments and sound equipment to the W520 and W530. Apparently, it’s a decent laptop for that purpose, but I haven’t tried anything like that out myself.

Windows 8

Some of the trouble at Lenovo getting the software set up correctly may have been as a result of Windows 8 being relatively new. Windows does not boot as quickly on my W530 as it does on my E420, and in a way I’m sort of glad. I do need to get to the BIOS on occasion and while a quick boot time is nice, Lenovo has a screen that pops up previous to loading that allows you to hit enter and head to the BIOS settings.

If you need to enable virtualization to run VMs and such, this is a nice feature. If you just want the laptop to boot really fast, there’s probably a way to turn it off. In every other way Windows 8 runs just fine. Once you’ve learned to use the screen corners and Windows key the touch-centric feel quickly begins to dissipate and you can get to work.

Battery Life

It comes with a 9 cell battery that gives it about six hours of battery life, provided you aren’t doing anything crazy. Only certain programs will kick the machine into high gear and run with the discrete graphics card. For regular computing, you’ll get 6-7 hours of life. System intensive tasks cut that time in half. Running the WP8 Phone Emulator while working in Photoshop CS6 will garner you just a little over three hours of operation.

They do have a battery on the Lenovo site that boasts 24 hours of productivity. If I planned to take this laptop out and about more, I might think about it. Given how powerful the W530 is, getting 6 hours of battery life is pretty miraculous. Intel has really outdone themselves in getting this laptop to literally ‘sip’ power when performing more mundane tasks.

 

Aesthetics & Build Quality

I’d talked a little bit before about this, but it bears mentioning that the W530 is like an armored personnel carrier for your digital workspace. It has the heft and feel of something that could take a terrible beating and persist to operate in the aftermath. It’s heavy and quiet for a laptop making it less than fun to carry around, but fantastic when working in a quiet room.

Buyer's Anxiety

I've spent the last couple of days ponder a new workstation with which to take my projects to the next level. It's a strange ritual that has been easy in the past because I just needed something that can make text. A $250 Netbook worked fine for what I needed with a little oomph for games, but only maybe. 

In 2009, I sprung for a MacBook Pro and a Cinema Display. They have, and continue to, serve me very well. My Lenovo E420 worked in tandem with them for most of my work on the Windows Phone 7 platform, but visual rendering and color sync between all the various platforms in which I worked had been a real challenge. I spent a lot of time getting that as right as I could with my only minimal amount of self training. 

Fast forward to the last couple of months and I'm suddenly serious as a heart attack about Windows Phone 8 development, far more than I had been about 7. I want to build beautiful things for the platform and my old partner in crime is similarly afflicted. Working 8-5 M-F on my novels leaves only nights and weekends to work on Windows Phone, and my time is more constrained even though I need more of it. 

My gracious wife has allowed me, in the past, to pull long hours, after hours, because she was working on her Master's. Now that she has her various degrees (I framed them a couple days ago), she will probably want to actually spend time with me again. At least that's my working theory. 

It was fine to spend time juggling Windows Phone development between platforms before because it was more of a side project and I had time in the evenings to burn. Normally I'm so sure about gear when I make a purchase, but this feels like I'm making a bigger decision than just buying a new workstation. 

I feel like I am committing to a path. I felt like Windows Phone development was just a fun thing before, and it still is, but to commit to several hundred frames of animation, and probably a thousand still images, all as good as I can possibly produce is the minimum investment I can make. 

I need a workstation that can let me write, render visuals with accurate color, stand up the WP8 SDK & Emulator, run Photoshop, Office, and a host of other applications that are part of my workflow. I've tried looking at HP's Probooks, but their site is unnavigable and none of the models seem to have any customization. Dell's site is a lot better, but none of the models have a color sensor built in and calibrated at the factory like Lenovo's W530. No one else even manufactures a contender from what I've seen. 

These machines do not appeal to my technological vanity. I love my iPad, and the MacBook Air, and Microsoft's Surface. Sadly, none of those have the horsepower or all the capabilities I'm looking for in a mobile workstation. The one thing the W530 lacks, I'll be able to add when Lenovo's mobile touchscreen monitor is released in the spring. I really thought I would always be a Mac guy after my bitter battle with Asus in the Fall of 2009. 

I've looked at new MacBook Pros (my current one won't work, no SLAT support) as a possibility, and they offer some pretty nice options in that regard. The retina display models are pointless for anything but video or photo editing. Building visuals for video games just works better (for me) with a 1:1 pixel mapping, which can be simulated in most apps, but I like seeing things as they would probably be seen on the target device, without scaling, etcetera. 

However, from what I've read online, there may be no way to (currently) get the Windows Phone 8 development tools to run on a Mac. Parallels and BootCamp don't work (near as I can tell), so I'm buying a Windows machine most likely. I'd be okay with waiting for a workaround if I thought one was on the horizon, but I doubt there's a bunch of Windows Phone 8 devs beating on Apple's door to produce one. 

December 2012

Working a 'regular' job generally means that you do a little bit of work for incremental rewards that sync up with time spent at daily endeavors. Working as an independent or self-published writer provides the opposite experience. You will work long hours and you won't see any reward until the process is complete. The incremental rewards lie within the task and the feelings one acquires as they grow as a person and a creative. 

The most obvious reward is the content one creates. When you look over at a stack of manuscripts, thoughts, world building, designs, poems, and impressions you've collected, there's a feeling. It is more than a pile of printouts and moleskines you've filled with things that came from your own mind, or through the observances of your own senses. 

It is validation of your own creativity, proof you exist, and echoes of that existence. Like no other animal or organism on earth, we make a record of things that allow us to proceed as a species. I still don't think that it is the calling of a few. Everyone should write.  

There's a difference when reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a video game when one has learned to appreciate the content and work that went into it. To create is to appreciate the creation of others and to connect with those people. This isn't to say you must paint with oils to appreciate a painting done in that medium, but it certainly enhances your understanding of all that went into a particular work. 

I fight the urge to give things intrinsic value, but I can never deny the same to the person or people behind what created those things. To have someone, an organization, or yourself benefit from what you create doesn't mean those things were really valuable. It's the creator that is valuable, something that copyright laws and governmental attempts to prevent piracy fails to take into consideration. 

It's the reason some of my favorite creations have been ruined. Not because the creations weren't protected or even appreciated, but because the creator was marginalized and ignored. How many of the greatest creative people have been recognized as such long after their deaths? Old hat.

I think about it more often now, particularly when someone wants to put something I've done on a t-shirt or coffee cup. I get asked to use my dabbler-rank illustration skills to help noble causes only on occasion, but I'm always glad to try and add my own value to things that are already priceless. December was one of those times, and I surprised myself with the work I produced. 

It was good timing. I will need a little extra confidence for what's to come in 2013.

Windows 8, Part 2

Okay, I've had awhile to work with Windows 8 Pro and ponder what Microsoft has done with their new operating system. I'm gonna just start rambling, quit reading when you get bored. 

Near as I can tell there are three versions of the OS for sale. First, there's the version that lets you upgrade to Windows Pro from XP SP3, Vista, and Windows 7. Second, there's a version that lets you upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8 Pro. Finally, there is whatever they ship on new hardware if you buy a device. 

So, if you build your own system, you'll have to buy two operating systems to get Windows 8 installed on the machine. There is no "full" version of the OS allowing for a fresh install on a hand built machine. Feel free to chime in if I'm wrong or missed something. Maybe it's lurking on Microsoft's website somewhere, but I couldn't find it. 

I can only come to one conclusion relative to Microsoft's decision to market the OS this way. Hurrah for Steam coming to Ubuntu! Seriously, if you hand build a gaming machine, being able to download a free OS and play games on Steam is going to be pretty attractive. Not sure why Microsoft would want to give gamers a powerful incentive to go elsewhere, but I'm sure they know what they're doing. 

Yeah, enough about that. 

I've had a chance to use some of the Windows 8 applications. There are some that are quite good. There are some that should be awesome, but are horrible. Every application I used had bugs and felt half finished. 

The most disappointing of the bunch was the SkyDrive App. It's pretty much worthless. It should have been a click or two less for the purpose of accessing full browser functionality of your cloud storage. It's maddening because the browser experience is subpar when working from the Start Menu.

Yes, apps behave differently depending on whether they are launched from the Start Menu or the desktop. I get why they did this, but having the browser less functional in what's supposed to be casual computing mode seems counter intuitive. Maybe it's different with a touch screen? I hope so. 

A common theme among almost all apps is the inability to reliably stream video. Only the Netflix app seemed immune (it's great actually), but all the news and media apps with videos just crash or fail to load. Frustrating!

Most apps behave well when constrained to a third of the screen for better multitasking but a few fail to function properly. I found a keen text editor, but it ceases to function when constrained and some apps just don't work well unless they are windowed or full screen. Frustrating x2!!

Here again, the Netflix app seems to outperform all others working in full screen, constrained, and windowed modes. The app also pauses and restarts where you left off if you jump from Start Menu to Desktop or vice versa. They really (really) did a nice job with their application for Windows 8. 

I'm having some syncing issues with OneNote, but I suspect my working across three computing platforms is probably to blame. It syncs fine to my SkyDrive, my iPad, and Windows Phone 7, but I struggle on my Lenovo. Everything else that is MS Office or that is launched from the Desktop performs admirably. 

Windows 8 Pro is fast. It boots, loads applications, shuts down, and performs tasks very quickly. It out performs just about every operating system I've used, Mac, Microsoft, or Ubuntu. Only iOS on my iPad has the same responsiveness and feel. I really like clicking something and just having it just go, no spinning beach balls or hourglasses. 

I really like the way Windows 8 looks and behaves. However, and I think I said it in my other post, but navigating with a mouse and keyboard isn't ideal. I long for a touchscreen. When I had a chance to use the Surface RT, it must have ruined me because using the cursor to work with apps is nowhere near as smooth or intuitive as using your finger on a touchscreen. 

I'd recommend Windows 8 Pro to people, but definitely as part of purchasing new hardware. I don't recommend the upgrade, particularly if you have a Windows 7 machine you're happy with. Had to do over again, I would have patiently waited for the right Windows 8 hardware to be released and gone that road instead. 

If you are planning on building a new machine for gaming, wait and see what Valve and Nvidia do for Ubuntu or just stick with Windows 7. Windows 8 is a good OS for productivity, casual computing, and portable touchscreen form factors. 

The bad news is that there is little in the way of hardware for Windows 8 Pro so far. There are a handful of tablets and all-in-one devices that look promising but the best of the bunch has yet to be released. Lenovo and Microsoft's Windows Pro tablets aren't out yet and I'm waiting to see how it performs on devices with Atom processors. 

If Paul Thurrott is to be believed, Windows 8 PC sales haven't been all Microsoft hoped for. Personally, I don't see much out there worth buying. The few Windows 8 and Windows RT devices people can actually buy right now aren't that exciting. Microsoft is blaming manufacturers for dropping the ball, and they might be right. 

A short list of RT devices I've been looking at and my accompanying thoughts:

Asus Vivo Tab RT - Nope, don't like it. 

Dell XPS 10 - Nice design, build quality looks good, but it has a Snapdragon processor which makes me nervous. 

Lenovo Yoga (RT) - If I just wanted a standard laptop form factor, yeah, this would be a good choice. I'd never utilize the feature that is it's namesake. 

Microsoft Surface RT - Yep, of you want RT, I'd buy this. 

A short list of Pro devices I've been looking at and my accompanying thoughts:

Asus Vivo Tab - It's gotten a few good reviews, but I'm still holding a grudge over my last couple Asus laptops. 

Dell XPS 12 - Looks like it might be the most powerful of the bunch so far. You gotta pay for performance and the battery life might not be great, but it has nice specs. 

Dell Latitude 10 - It has a user replaceable battery and it's priced to move. This one might be my next depending on what the Surface Pro ends up looking like. 

Lenovo Thinkpad 2 - Beautifully designed, decent specs, and pricing. Might be what I go with if I don't have the patience to wait for Surface Pro. 

Microsoft Surface Pro - Waiting for final specs to be released, but if it is half as nice as the RT version, it'll be the one to buy probably. 

If you buy something through the Microsoft site, you can get an assurance two-year warranty plan for $99. It covers accidental damage and spills as well. I read through the terms looking for a catch, and aside from the usual legalese mumbo-jumbo it looks like a pretty good deal. If I pre-order a Thinkpad Tablet 2, I'll probably get the plan. 

I've been doing a lot of thinking about NFC or near field communications capabilities. A few of these laptops have NFC built in and I'm wondering what sort of capabilities this will grant the devices. I would love it if someone would make a device I could just set down on a charging pad and it would wirelessly charge, hook up to a monitor, keyboard, and other peripherals. I doubt these new devices will do all that, but I think it's coming, the end of cables, ports, and similar.

November 2012

Pixel Pokings

Windows 8 Pro, Initial

My initial impressions of Windows 8 Pro leave me mostly bewildered. Installing it on my Lenovo as an upgrade was, I’m certain, not the experience Microsoft wants their users to have. Right away, I would strongly caution anyone upgrading on older equipment, and when I say older, I mean anything eighteen months or older. Even better, get Windows 8 on new hardware already installed.

 

I’ll dispense with the details but after my recovery partition was deleted, I was locked out of the bios, and Windows 8 Pro wouldn’t activate, I was pretty frustrated.

 

First, the partitioning tools that came with Windows 8 installation suite are mostly useless, so if you’re working around Linux, a Linux Swap, System, and Recovery partitions, you’ll be flirting with disaster. Make sure you reset your machine to factory and back up your files before even attempting an upgrade. Windows 8 isn’t advanced enough to handle anything more than that.

 

The packaging on a copy of Windows 8 is pretty deceptive. Near as I can tell there is no such thing as a full version that allows you to do a clean install. You’ll have to re-install your old OS and upgrade regardless of what you purchase. This is counter intuitive to everyone who has been wrestling with Windows for more than a decade. Doing a fresh install is always better than an upgrade, but now you've no choice but to do the latter apparently.

 

Yeah, it’ll let you do the fresh install, but your copy won’t activate forcing you to go through the whole process over again.  

 

Near as a colleague and I can tell, the OS boots in such a way and quickly enough that you’ll be prevented from getting to the BIOS to make adjustments. That’s how it is on my Lenovo anyway. The restart features within the OS that claim to allow you to boot from other sources doesn’t work whatsoever, and I still haven’t found a reliable way to boot from a USB. Most of the advanced features I’ve found in control panel and settings don’t do what they claim and are likewise useless.

 

I found myself wishing I had a copy of Windows Millennium. Seriously, it would have been easier to install.

 

In the end I did a fresh install to try and find some feature that would let me boot Linux or access some sort of disk utility as I had not yet discovered my recovery partition had already been obliterated. Miraculously, the product activated and began to work normally. I have no idea why (from all indication, it shouldn't), and I was able to go in and check out some of the aforementioned “features”.

 

I loaded Office Pro 2010, Sketchbook Pro 2011, Minecraft, Java, and a few other odds and ends like Dropbox and began giving the operating system a try. It’s incredibly fast, intuitive, and elegant once you get it running. The store and handling of applications is great, the ability to organize the Start menu quickly is nice, and the performance is nonpareil. For reference, I'm running it on a Lenovo e420 with an i3-2310 @ 2.1 GHz, and 8 GB Ram, 7200 RPM harddrive. Pretty much stock except for the extra stick of RAM.

I couldn’t say enough great things about it until I discovered something ugly. I clicked on the beautiful weather application and scrolled all the way to the right. Big as life, there’s a shampoo ad or something displayed right in the app. I chuckled not because it was funny, but because it was decidedly not funny. Microsoft put ads in the “Pro” version of the operating system? Really?

Yeah, bewildered is the right word here. I'll write more as I get things figured out.

Being Pro-Life

Being Pro-Life starts with you, as an individual, and the choices you make. From there it spreads out to your friends and family, to your church, and to your community. It has always been about community activism and giving people information and options to make choices. Being Pro-Life is about loving other human beings and respecting not only their innate and biological life, but the metaphysical workings of their agency. 

When life begins isn't important to these beliefs, only what we do is important. If we are allowing others full access to their agency with the knowledge to use it properly, we are being true to the cause. When we stray from that notion, we stumble and fail. 

The moment we believe the Federal Government can do a better job of taking care of our friends and neighbors than we can, is the moment we can no longer lay claim to being Pro-Life. I think John Koster, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and others are probably having to give their anti-choice notions some thought now. Indeed, I hope the entire Republican Party is thinking about it. 

I personally believe it played a role in them losing the Senate and the White House. 

You can't be anti-choice and a fiscal conservative. It takes money to shake down dealers holding black market oral contraceptives and to kick in the door of every benevolent doctor giving a 12-year-old incest victim an abortion. Worse, this is the last way most police officer want to spend their time. Think! Do you want your community, your church leaders, and yourself responsible for spreading the Pro-Life message? People that really want to be there? Or men with guns that don't? 

Do we really want the Federal Government interfering with a pregnant cancer patient's agency, while she decides whether to fight for her life for her other two kids, or risk all and carry to term? Would you rather have benevolent friends, family, church/community leaders involved, or the Federal Government? 

Hint: The Federal Government tend to deploy heavily armed law enforcement professionals and lawyers with political ambitions to enforce the law. 

The Federal Government can't even balance a checkbook, do we really want them playing doctor with our wives, daughters, aunts, mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens? I think the message to the GOP and the Anti-Choice movement this election cycle was clear. These "Sanctity of Life" and "Personhood" pieces of legislation that have been pushed unsuccessfully since 1995 need to just stop. Put simply, we're wise to it, and we don't want it, push your radical views to your constituency some other way. 

If you want to be Pro-Life, just do it, don't try to legislate it, quantify it, or put it into a legal context. Anyone with a true devotion to their fellow human, derived from their maker or otherwise, knows that doing so is to invite folley and to see one's beliefs cheapened by a soul-blackening political machine. 

If we don't support and love our fellow humans in spite of the choices they make, we are cheapening the significance of having a choice in the first place. Do not erode the greatest gift that comes with life by supporting people who would foster Federal control over the lives of others. These people are not true advocates of the Pro-Life movement, not true fiscal conservatives, and have utterly lost their way. 

Surface RT

I had all sorts of expectations about the Surface device before I had a chance to actually handle one. I marvel at how uniform every review of the iPad is as compared to the Surface device. The iPad seems to be pretty much the same experience for everyone while the Surface obviously produces an array of experiences. People confuse this to mean the Surface must be deficient in some way and that it must certainly lack something as a consequence. 

What it really means is that the device has the ability to be something different to each person that picks it up. That's closer to a real computing experience in my opinion. Maybe I'm just totally immersed in Microsoft's Metro design language and the manner in which it is supposed to reach people, but it's like anything I guess, move or be moved. 

I haven't fallen out of love with my iPad. For someone heavily invested in both Apple and Microsoft's ecosystems I don't see the Surface as a replacement for my tablet. In buying a Surface I would acquire it instead of a MacBook Air, Samsung Series 9, HP Folio 13 or similar. It's what I would get instead of a laptop to run the Windows operating system. 

It's better than an ultrabook because it can pretend to be a tablet when it needs to, while being yet even more portable because of it's battery life and size. I still don't think anyone has made a true Windows tablet device, and maybe no one needs to. The Surface, as it's own form factor has appeal all on it's own without having to plug into the marketing hype Microsoft has tried to foster. 

In truth, I think they would have done better putting it out there with no explanation and no expectations. I think the engineers who engaged a hacker-collective style means of rapid prototyping absolutely won the battle that the marketing department seems determined to lose for them. Yeah, they grabbed headlines and made Marco Arment nervous enough that he had to troll a Microsoft retail location, but they lost a valuable opportunity to stand alone outside of any shadow in the oxymoronic mobile desktop computing world. 

Microsoft could have said that there are two worlds and that they need not collide or compete. People are always going to want the option of a mobile desktop experience, mobile experience and yet even more mobile experience. If you've every traveled and carried three mobile computing devices (laptop, tablet, and smartphone) at once through the airport, you know what I mean. 

Microsoft RT is particularly interesting to me. I think RT will catch on, and being there in the beginning is going to be exciting. Early adopters will watch a whole application ecosystem grow and take advantage of it as it gains diversity. It's something that techies didn't really get to experience with the iPad because iOS had already existed previously on other devices. 

Yes, RT is basically just Windows, but the sort that has no applications outside that which enter the marketplace and were designed for touchscreens. It's like Microsoft is asking what it would have been like to start at the ground level with their OS, in a touch-capable hardware environment. I can't wait to see the answer.