More like Logan's Run. I have been Michael's number two guy for about 5 years. And we make a great team. We're like one of those classic famous teams. He's like Mozart and I'm like... Mozart's friend. No. I'm like Butch Cassidy and Michael is like... Mozart. You try and hurt Mozart? You're gonna get a bullet in your head courtesy of Butch Cassidy. - Dwight Schrute

Mmmmmhmmhmmm.... Hot Grits.

Another thing I noticed when I started using the Moleskine: I stopped losing my trashy little notes. This isn't actually confined to the Moleskine, either.

There are three pieces of background information I need to disclose upfront before I go on:

1) I like to smoke
2) I love beer
3) I like fedoras

I used to keep a pen caddy on my desk and had a drawer full of cheap disposable pens. Likewise, I'd have several cheap disposable cigarette lighters all the time. In spite of this, it seemed like I could never keep any of them around, and of the ones that were there when I needed one, I'd find many of them empty or broken when I went to use them. Cheap pens and lighters just grow legs. You lend one to someone and you never see it again. Since they're cheap and ubiquitous, some people think nothing of walking off with them. Even if they do it accidentally, well, it's just a cheap plastic piece of crap, right? Why go to the trouble of returning it? If I'd lose it myself, I wouldn't go to the trouble of hunting it down, either. It's just disposable junk, so I'd get another 12-pack.

I got fed up one day when four consecutive pens I grabbed from my caddy didn't work. I threw them all out and got a couple decent Cross pens, one with a twist barrel containing blue ink, red ink, and a pencil; another I put highlighter refills into. I ditched the Bic lighters and replaced them with a decent Zippo. Nothing extravagant, just nice, and not cheap. I was resolved to use no more disposables. Only decent quality equivalents that are refillable and have enough value that I'd miss them if they vanished.

Guess what? I almost never lose them. I always have a reliable flame and writing instrument. If I lend it, it comes back. If I did lose it, I'd be pissed off, but since each of them cost around $50 (give or take 10), I really try not to and, with the exception of one of the pens, haven't in over three years. My working theory at this point is that honest people will return stuff that has obvious value. I, in turn, take care of stuff I like that costs more than a couple bucks.

When I took notes on odd scraps of paper I could never find them. Since I added a Moleskine to the mix (generally covered by the theory), all my notes are in one place and I keep track of it.

Every year in Brussels, there is a beer festival in the Grand Place. Brewers come from all over Belgium and pour some of the finest beer you can find on the planet. I like beer enough to take notes when I taste something new, so I grabbed a Moleskine I keep just for beer tasting notes, my pen, put on my Fedora, and headed over there. I know a little bit about beer. Enough to talk smack and sound convincing to someone who brews it for a living. I hit this one booth and the guy pouring started talking shop with me and I tasted one of their beers. I started jotting notes and had another. He saw me writing and asked if I was with the press. I answered back that I wasn't and asked him something about the styles of beer they brew, but it was loud and he didn't quite hear me. He gave a couple free beers and asked me to treat his brewery nice in my Style section article. I got mistaken for press at two other tents after that and just played along.

The only thing better than beer is free Belgian beer! Wouldn't have got that with a Bic pen, a baseball cap, and e-mailing notes to myself from my BlackBerry. Yeah, sometimes it pays to not look like the nerd that you really are.

It doesn't need to be charged or synched. The paper is good quality and comes in ruled, plain and graph form. A few sheets at the back are perforated for convenient and neat removal, if you need to give a jotting to someone else. The covers are durable and look stylish (on the reporter-style flip books I favor). Even has a little pocket for keeping a receipt or two... And sometimes it pays for a nerd to not look like a complete nerd. Hey, it was good enough for Indiana Jones and Ernest Hemmingway.

Hmmm...we are to gather from your comments that using a mouse is somehow infantile while learning a bunch of arcane bespeaks of intelligence?

Hmmmmm...no moreso than we should assume from you condescending questions that you are a humorless douchebag, professor. I'm sure you're a barrel of laughs and the life of every party. It's was a joke. Lighten up.

Who's the leader of the band that made for you and me? M-I-C-K-EY M-O-U-S-E! Mickey Mouse. KEYBOARDS SUCK! Mickey Mouse. WTF?! Forever we will point until we die. HI HI HI! HEY there! HI there! HO there you're as welcome as can be. M-I-C-K-EY M-O-U-S-E!

F5 will refreshes everything.... except Notes. F9? WTF? It's the keyboarding equivalent of being the only airplane where yanking back on the yoke makes a nose dive.

It used to be, most journalist exercised some judgment with respect to what and when something should be printed. Apparently, Classified NOFORN documents no longer fall within the umbrella of things that common sense would dictate should not be published for general consumption.

I'm all for freedom of speech, but this is just not helpful, or a good idea. If our allies suddenly can't trust our foreign service to keep classified information, well, classified, how likely do you think it is they will continue to trust our diplomats? These so-called journalists just made the job of the fine folks in our State Department that much harder. When diplomacy becomes a more difficult or unworkable option, The Man may decide it's time to resort to a more forceful form of dispute resolution.

The guys behind wikileaks are not heroes. They are idiots. I hope they get caught, and if they do, they get the prison sentences they deserve.

but I think the cup of hot java my 2-yr. old daughter poured into my MBP had something to do with it. So I guess I failed as a parent, moreso than hardware failed me.

My mother-in-law always said, "you can have nice things, or you can have children." Damn, I hate it when she's right.

C'mon, this has HISTORY behind it.

If you haven't reprogrammed the media keys to do something useful, and if you aren't using all the keys -- by themselves or in cominations with others ones -- then you must must some sort of dirty-luser mouseketeer. :^P

IBM has been spending millions of dollars lobbying for governments to mandate the use of Open Office, and yet they couldn't internally dogfood their own products? Sorry, but that's just too funny.

Maybe they thought those government types were going to turn in good bug reports so they wouldn't have to!

As an Apple guy, I can tell you this is completely wrong. WebKit (the engine powering Safari) is a shared framework. it can be found here: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework. This framework is key to the "help" Display system and Dictionary. In fact, the new safari 4 engine replaces the webkit framework.

You can check out more information at developers.apple.com

I don't want anyone to strip out the underlying code on either system - having someone else do all the work for building a Help system is a relief.

My wife is a Veterinarian, and her practice has gone digital for all radiology. But the office and all radiology is PC only whereas our house is Mac (with some Linux server stuff - not important here).

I'd love to know what vendors are considering mac products for anything in the vet field. Ideally, my wife would love to be able to look at film on the mac, or even better on her iPhone.

Plums is now on the iPhone, as are a few other apps, looking at film would be the bees knees.

There are some good points there, but I'll offer another possibility; maybe the "end" college provides is more significant than just the goal portion.

I hire people, and generally I treat a college degree as a prerequisite. Not because of specific coursework, but because the fact someone has completed a degree demonstrates an ability to keep on task for an extended period of time regardless of distractions. I don't mind major switchers, and I'm not looking for someone who did it in three years to the exclusion of life. Rather, I want to see that someone figured out how to navigate the always Byzantine requirements to get the right class into your schedule in the right order within a time limit.

Additionally, the social skills from college become pretty important - it's pretty hard to make it out of college without some kind of lab class that involves working with classmates on a group project. And everyone had someone in that project who didn't do what everyone wanted, or at least didn't pull their fair share. I want to know how you dealt with that, how did you feel about it, and what did you learn from it.

Finally, and MOST critically, I am always on the lookout for people who can write well on deadline. regardless of the technical nature of the project, the ability to explain what you are doing and why is just essential.

So yes, it's great if you can see your path in college as stepping stones to specific knowledge, but you shouldn't ignore the ancillary benefits that employers count on.

Step 1. Download UNetBootin from SourceForge (2 minutes)

Step 2. Stick in a blank USB thumb drive and use UNetBootin to install Linux Mint version 6 or Puppy Linux version 4 onto the drive. (3 to 30 minutes depending on network speed)

Step 3. Reboot and tell your BIOS to make your newly bootable USB thumb drive the boot drive. (2 minutes)