> The more competent military leaders, like Lee... FYI, the podcast ["Behind the Bastards"](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661) is currently doing a 4 part deep dive on "Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure." I'm only up to the middle of part 3 with him starting the war as commander of Viginian forces (the Confederacy is still being formed) but the general vibe so far is "he is definitely not the genius the Lost Cause makes him out to be, but he's smart enough to pull back Jackson from invading Maryland and provoking the Union because they have no army yet." Worth a listen.

Regarding the apocalyptic mindset, I'd like to propose that if anyone ever makes a public claim of such they are required to read the [Wikipedia list of predicted apocalyptic events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events?wprov=sfla1) and write a 5 page essay about why they're right but all the hundreds of other folks were wrong. I'm sure it wouldn't change a single mind, but it'd generate some hilarious content. Aside: If you have a few minutes, check out the list. It actually comforts me that this is an intrinsic facet of human stupidity and not something new.

It's good that there were no injuries in last night's incident out of Portland. I'm not sure if the timing makes Boeing's request look horrible or hilarious. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...

> Imagine that every time you pay for a beer you let the bartender rifle through your wallet and see everything you're involved with. We all have our kinks and if I like playing "You're a naughty consumer," that's my business.

I used to keep very detailed spiral notebooks for work and a lined notebook to plan and track personal stuff via a simplified version of Franklin Planning. I still use the hard copy notebook for planning but personal notes go into Evernote now. Since I'm stuck behind a firewall and some horrible IT policies at my work now I use MS OneNote for my job specific stuff (my only option) and explicitly send copies of generically useful technical stuff I want later ("How to do XYZ in Linux...") to Evernote via the email interface. A silver lining to this is that when I leave this job there will be no question about what are my personal notes and what is my employer's - everything goes through the email filter and I've already confirmed its non-proprietary.

I find OneNote to be like most MS products - a bucket of features that feel half done because once it got launched MS felt it gave a "good enough" alternative to stop bleeding to competition and thus back burnered it. I particularly miss Evernote's tags and the ability to easily clip web items in different formats (caveat: perhaps plug ins exist for Chrome/Firefox but our IT policies don't let us use any plug ins). I also like that you can capture/download all your notes into an XML file in case the company disappears (although I've been bad about doing this on a regular basis). I *don't* like the Android app for it as it is very slow and the clipping options are lame - they seem to think I *always* want to copy the HTML on a web page as opposed to just copying a URL. Those minor issues aside, I like Evernote enough to pay the annual fee for it - big praise form a cheap bastard like myself.

You know, ego surfing isn't anywhere near as fun when you can't even find your own website. Until their indexing database is more developed, it's kinda the equivalent of waiting for waves in a public pool. I wonder if instead of webmasters throwing out meaningless pride behind their Google pagerank we might soon see bragging rights to "Well, Cuil found my site on such & such date"

With repsect to both you, and the original poster, it's not IBM specifically, but battery technology and how people use them. The issue is not limited specifically to TP 600's or IBM in general.

Batteries just are not going to last forever. They're a chemical reaction, and it is not going to release energy infinetly. It's not a pure reaction, there is some impurities in the process, I'm sure, that also limit maximum energy and life. (FYI, ask you friendly neighbourhood chemist about reversible reactions.)

The more charging cycles you send the battery through, the sooner it will die. Good battery usage habits are just as important as the technology put into the battery. If you're not going to do your part by trying to get the most out of your battery, I don't want to hear you b*tch and complain about how your battery life sucks.

I use to work the front lines for these laptops, and of everyone that called in that complained about short battery life, less than 1% actually had good battery usage habits. Of those that were unavoidable failures, most were replaced free -- even the ones that were past their 1 year battery warranty period.

IBM doesn't make the batteries, someone else makes them. My sister's T22 has a LiON battery made by Sanyo. As with every manufacturing process, some bad lots get through and make it to the customer. This explains why some would see a whole bunch of laptops "go bad" within a week or two of eachother, especially if they were all ordered together. They made amends for these, even past warranty of the machine.

That's not to say that there may not be issues with the machine. Take a look at the BIOS fixes for the 600 (or any Thinkpad for that matter) and I'll bet that battery charging "optimizations" are listed. The TP600 seemed to be a victim of questionable quality parts at times.

My friend got 2.5 years out of his battery in his A21m under fairly heavy usage. Why? Because he was smart about it took my suggestions.

• Don't use the battery unless you have to. It's a backup power source, not the primary.
• Take out the battery when you're on AC. While the charging circuit will trickle charge it once it drops below a threshold, it's still wear and tear on the battery. Side effect of this is that there will be a little less heat generated.
• Do your best to limit short charging -- try to use up the battery before recharging. Just don't let it go below 10-15% or so on LiON batteries.

Sorry for the rant, but sometimes people don't realize how much they've come to expect from technology. More and more they find themselves expecting more without actually doing anything reasonable in return. Technology isn't the answer to everything, it is fallable.