Day: May 17, 2006

I started a new gig today, and a very pleasant part of the day was spent setting up a spanking new MacBook.

(Yes, more on the new gig soon… not meaning to be cryptic, just trying to gather my thoughts semi-intelligently. And it’s late. And I want to watch the Champion’s League final from earlier today before I inadvertently hear the score.)

Anyway, the day after the product was released, I’m using a white version as my work machine. Seamless describes the experience, and I’m looking forward to applying my years of home Mac usage towards my day job, too. Outlook’s calendaring was the hook which made a Mac not worth the effort in the past, but Exchange isn’t the company standard for me anymore. Not missing it.

More to come in the future on bits and pieces of this computing experience. The web was all over this product, as you might expect. Here’s the CNET coverage:

• An early, pre-rating CNET review
• Photos of the introductory experience
• Photos of an arrest outside the San Francisco Apple store
• The story behind the arrest photos, from Scott Ard

I travelled this weekend, which meant I got to start and finish Robert Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment. In a fun combination of two technology sectors, the story follows the impact of EEGs taken at a nanoscale level and software constructs of human brains/personalities. Call it a mashup, even…with an evil genius AI committing real-world murder along the way.

Sawyer, I’ve learned over a few novels, like Factoring Humanity, likes to linger on the spiritual implications inherent in technological advances. The method? The super EEG finds the physical expression of the soul (!), dubbed the “soulwave.” Huh.

These books aren’t quite redundant, but the style and story feels consistent with the few Sawyer books I’ve read. Fortunately, that’s a good thing.