Was the most absolutely beautiful night in my life, until the moon came up anyway. I can't number how many friends looked up at the sky for the first time and realized the beauty that was always hidden away.

Really rather wish they didn't fix it so damn fast. Should make these blackouts a yearly thing, Earth hour is nothing in comparison.

Seriously, why is this listed as a fault these days? Optical discs are big, slow, have lots of DRM and are easily damaged. Give me something that I can plug a big ESATA drive or USB key into and play movies directly off of and I'm happy. I don't want to waste space and battery life on an optical drive.

True road warriors really ought not be carrying a 17" laptop around anyway. Airport waiting areas and airline seats barely have room for your elbows as it is, you want to fill up what little space you have with a gigantic 17" laptop? yikes.

I recently set up a computer for an aunt who'd never owned a computer. She'd used them at public kiosks and work, but that's it. Her primary use was just web browsing, email and occasional letter typing. I was originally going to put Windows on it, but then thought I'd try an experiment.

So instead I installed Ubuntu (Intrepid) on an old machine (Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB RAM), set up my admin account and her limited account, and set up SSH on it so I could remotely administer it if I needed to. Total installation, updates and configuration took maybe 2 hours

So far it's been a month and I've never even had to go help her with...well, anything! She's been using it daily, and I've not had to fix anything.

I saved time from having to install antivirus/spyware-scans, installing updates and service packs (I only have a slipstreamed copy of SP2, I haven't had a reason to bother slipstreaming SP3 yet), it's nice and snappy even with just 1GB RAM (certainly helps to not have to run an on-access virus scanner!) and it literally does everything she needs.

Forget Windows. Seriously, what's the point for someone who just wants to go online? Letting the "average user" go online with Windows is walking into a high-school with a kick-me sign on their back.

Rogers Cable high-speed internet has been doing that for the past couple months now too. URL typos get redirected to their own search.rogers.yahoo.com or something like that, disabling toolbar search functions in browsers.

The kicker is that I also think they're actively blocking access to other search engines periodically in order to increase usage of their own. www.Google.com will sometimes time-out while trying to load, but works fine when accessed through Dogpile meta-search.

Since I've moved off of Rogers already, I can't do more experiments to test, but if anyone else is on it, I suggest you keep an eye out.