The MBP is a cool machine. And Leopard is a cool OS. Neither is perfect, but then neither is WindowsXP, or Vista, or any Inspiron, Vaio, or ThinkPad any other consumer would buy. The question people ask themselves is whether or not the Apple tax is worth paying for various products. In the case of a lot off Apple offerings, that question has had a reduced margin within which to provide financial justification. The MacBook is easily as competitive price wise as other thin-and-lights and/or ultraportables within the price range of that line's various models. The iPod now has models that are comparatively priced against other DAP's/DMP's, until you start analyzing the price points of the variants of the iPod Touch. The iPhone, in at least its 8GB skin, is in the same price range as many other smart phones, and I would contend its increased functionality over other smart phones easily justifies any price differential. The MBP has long for me been the one Apple product that still falls within that questionable zone of appearing to be a luxury product with little or no justification for its cost. Now being the owner of one, I do not know that I can say that my assessment has changed.

The MacBook Pro is certainly a product that I could not recommend to laymen who are not familiar on at least a casual level with Apple products and OS X in general. In all honesty, while it was more expensive overall, I think it took me buying my MacBook last year in order to gain any confidence that a MacBook Pro would be worth it. I do not think that I was knowledgeable enough a year ago for the purchase of a MBP to have been an educated choice. And I can further assert that it is my current love for things Apple that allows me to justify the cost in my own mind, because it can certainly not be done on a dollar-for-dollar basis comparison against Windows-based PCs if you only look at hardware specs.

I went on Newegg and did a pound-for-pound comparison against a similarly priced laptop. I selected the Asus G1S-B2, which is the 15.4" mid-range gaming notebook from the Japanese manufacturer. This is a variant of a model that about 6 months ago I decided was too expensive and opted for the COMPAL IFL-90 instead. I selected the G1 because I insisted on it being a comparison against the MBP and another 15.4" notebook. There are a few 17" models in the sub-$2k price-range, but the cost trade-offs that manufacturers go through in the larger form factor would have caused the analysis to be flawed.

The first comparison was in price. I gave both the MBP and the Asus credit for the discounts that were applicable in my scenario. I received about a $160 discount on my MBP since my friend was able to buy both using her military ID. The Asus currently has a $150 rebate available. My MBP came out to $1840, without tax. The G1S would have been $1700 after the rebate. This is within a margin where I am not particularly price sensitive, so it comes out as a wash in my personal assessment.

When it gets down to specs, the models come out as below:

MBP Wins: better operating system
Lighter (5.4 lbs versus 6.8 lbs)

Asus Wins: faster processor (by 200MHz)
Higher resolution display (1680 X 1050 versus 1400 X 900)
More memory (3GB versus 2GB)
Larger Hard Drive (200GB versus 120GB)
More Video Memory (256MB versus 128MB)
Faster Hard Drive (7200RPM versus 540RPM)
More USB Slots (4 versus 2)

So , from this listing, at the time I purchased my MBP, by specs, the tally sheet did not weigh in the MBP's favor. However, later today, after I wrote the first half of this article, the new MBP's were released. After calling the Apple Store to find out what options I had, I was told that I could bring my MBP in on Saturday, pay a 10% re-stocking fee, and then receive a new MBP. My friend who, much to her credit, had not opened hers yet, will be able to take hers in and do a one-for-one exchange. The re-stocking fee will be roughly equal to the discount I received by letting her buy the MBP's and receiving the discount on both. So it's a wash and a turn of good fortune. The only bad thing is that I will have to spend a good chunk of next weekend repeating the setup I just went through last weekend to get the new MBP configured.

Further, this changes the analysis I had begun based on my MBP's specs. If I compare the Asus against the new models, the list comes out with a much smaller delta between the two:

MBP Wins: better operating system
Lighter (5.4 lbs versus 6.8 lbs)

Asus Wins: Higher resolution display (1680 X 1050 versus 1400 X 900)
More memory (3GB versus 2GB)
Faster Hard Drive (7200RPM versus 540RPM)
More USB Slots (4 versus 2)

In both of these tally sheets, any spec not listed meant that the two system's specs in that area were equal.

Now, what I lump into those score sheets above are the small design advantages and operability advantages of the Operating System in Apple's favor:

Backlit keyboard
Mag-Safe Adapter
OLED Display
Multi-Touch Trackpad
Boot Camp
Operating System Advantages (no low-power state issues, Entourage, Spaces, Stacks, Stickies)
Free-fall protected hard drive

Now the latter list will be of varying total value to varying customers. Many Windows proponents claim that any of these functions can be replicated by a slew of third party apps (available for free) in order to provide Windows with the same functionally that is embedded in OS X. My problem is that this requires effort on the consumer's part, and after considering dropping this much money on a product, I'll pay the higher price if it means not having to immediately install a bunch of workarounds to make the system operate the way I want it to. The point is, depending on the user and the need, it is a completely viable perspective to have that it is worth the few extra bucks to not have to deal with Vista in its current state. In specific cases of some of the design choices above, certain ones could mean the difference in your laptop having a few dings and dents after a fall and your system needing to be completely boxed up and returned, and in the case of the mag-safe adapter, may mean never experiencing the fall in the first place.

There is absolutely no question in my mind as to whether or not the MacBook Pro is worth the Apple Tax that is imputed in its pricing. This is all the more true when considering the capabilities of the new models. I absolutely can not wait until this weekend to get my upgrade. In the interim, I am considering delaying my article on my actual setup and installation of the MBP until I transition to the new model. Stay tuned, because I may go ahead and write it…just so I can ignore you all this weekend when I pick up the new one.

I very rarely develop buyer's remorse…about anything, regardless of the purchase. But I am today; actually I've been going through it throughout the weekend.

One of the bad things about being the go-to advisor for tech purchases for most of my friends is that, when they are contemplating a purchase, through the course of talking them through my recommendations, I often become encouraged to make a concurrent purchase, especially if they wind up taking my advice and buy the product I am recommending, which is likely something that I would use myself. Such was the case on Saturday.

A former co-worker of mine had come into town for the weekend to hang out and one of my agreed upon responsibilities was to help her search for a laptop. The spouse had authorized her to spend up to $2k on the purchase, which was going to be used for both work at her non-profit organization, and for home use. Since she was so new on the job, she was not going to be up for a laptop upgrade for some time, and being a non-profit the organization was only buying a laptop or two a year for managerial staff. Her current machine was a 2.4GHz Celeron-powered Dell armed with 768MB of RAM. She was doing a lot of image editing and had Adobe Creative Suite loaded on the Dell Inspiron 1150 (circa 2002 I guessed based on the specs). Photoshop was chugging, which is no surprise.

Additionally the thing was the heaviest 14.1"-display laptop I had ever held, so one of her requirements was to achieve a reduction in weight, although she did not need or desire a reduction in footprint. The Dell's 14.1" screen was the smallest she wanted to go with; again, due to the amount of time she was spending image editing.

So the entering criteria did not make this an easy search. A 15.4" screen or larger that was also lighter than the Dell, would have 2GB of RAM (to handle resources necessary for Photoshop and instances of other apps running in the background). She was even interested in going into a 17" screen if it could be done. Add to that my own processor requirement that I additionally leveraged. I was recommending that she go with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, so that multi-tasking with Photoshop running would not be a question. I then also wanted to see her in a 2.2GHz processor, which I assess as the current sweet spot for users not looking to spend more than $2k.

We drove over about an hour outside of town because I wanted to be within striking distance of every electronics store I thought I would have to case to do a thorough search and find the best fit. We first stopped for lunch at Panera Bread to talk tech, go over some of my personal gadgets, and take a look at her laptop. While there, she was able to take a (very brief) look at my Samsung Q1, which is where she determined that she definitely did not want to go into a small screen. I knew that, while she did not travel a lot, she was constantly on the go within her area, and thought portability may have been a higher requirement than it turned out to be. I also wanted her to seriously consider buying something online, even though we were going to make the rounds and touch tangible products at brick-and-mortar stores that day. We headed for Newegg online and I walked her through a handful of 14.1" machines, one of which was a Fujitsu Lifebook, which I thought may have been a good fit as well.

After the brief bit of research we headed to Best Buy. While she is certainly no gamer, one of the first models we struck on was the new 17" gaming laptop that Gateway is selling through Best Buy. With a 17" screen, a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, a 250GB Hard Drive, an nVidia GeForce Go 8800M GT, 3GB of RAM, and coming in at $1200, this machine was an incredible deal (one I strongly recommend considering for all of my mobile PC Gaming brethren). In fact, the package was so attractive that I briefly considered buying it. The problem [for her] was that at 10lbs it did not meet the weight requirement. A few laps around the entire laptop section made me realize that nothing in the sub-$1000 range was going to meet the need, either. The only machine that we saw that met the criteria was another Gateway. While I forget the model number, it was one of the newer M-series line that comes with boutique paint jobs; this one's was a dark red. So we had one option out of all the models available in Best Buy. At this point she was more amenable to buying something online if we determined that she should go with a Windows-based laptop. There were a few Vaio's that could have met the requirements, but our knowledge of friends with Vaio's that had had problems made her skeptical of going with that particular product brand. Additionally, she had eliminated Dell's from consideration due to bad personal experiences. This was the only part of the filtering criteria that I was disappointed in, since Dell is now selling some very nice laptops via Best Buy's retail chain.

Off to the Apple Store. When we first started discussing her requirements (about two weeks ago), without telling her, I had already queued the MacBook as my lead recommendation. While she had $2k to spend, I did not think that she was going to need it (at the time I did not know about the intended use for image editing). I did believe that she was going to want something no heavier than 6lbs. She and I are both fashion conscious, so I figured that something that stood out from all of the Dells and Thinkpads in the local coffee shops would be of interest to her as well.

Throughout breakfast at the coffee shop and the initial search at Best Buy I became more considerate of the MacBook Pro as a good fit. It was one of the few mobile computers on the market that would meet both the larger screen requirement, but still remain under the weight restrictions. There were a slew of other advantages from a design aspect as well. Additionally, throughout the week just prior to her arrival, I had been using my COMPAL IFL-90. While I am able to get around Vista's quirks, I have overall not been happy with my Vista experience, am still waiting for the release of Vista Service Pak One, and recently read about the problems of the service pak bricking the PCs of some Vista users who had access to the Beta (ok, maybe "bricking" is an extreme term). My point is that, as a guy that people turn to for advice, I did not feel as confident in recommending that she go into a Vista machine knowing the potential issues she might face. Most prevalent, and the one I had been struggling with the most on the IFL-90, are the aberrations that people are seeing with the way Vista handles low power states (or rather fails to handle) and its recovery form them. The last thing I wanted for this friend, and the thing I can not take for any of my friends, is for me to recommend a product to them, have them agree to buy it, and then hear about them having constant problems with it. While they are all certainly responsible for their own personal purchasing decisions, I do feel responsible for tech recommendations of mine that go awry. Besides, it is my personal reputation for extreme but accurate geekitude that is t stake. I can't afford to be wrong, and they can not afford to spin the wheel by spending money based on my recommendations for it to turn out to not be the right choice.

I gave her a tour through Leopard and both MacBook Pros and MacBooks. While we shooed away any store employees who approached us while going through our own personal demo, afterwards we did ask for help. I wanted to make sure she heard a second opinion and one from someone who had been using a Mac for more than the 9 months that I had. Actually, I surprised myself by how much I was familiar with not only Macs in general, but Leopard as well, which I have not upgraded the MacBook to yet, and so have not been using on a routine basis. A couple of months ago, I had a friend who was looking into buying an iMac and at the time I was woefully inadequate when we went to the store in being able to thoroughly explain and demo the differences in OS X and a Windows operating system.

We started with the MacBook Pros. When we then shifted to the MacBook I was really surprised that she did not fall in love with the MacBook's keyboard, since it is one of the design aspects I am most enamored with in the MacBook's design. She did grasp and acknowledged that for a significant price delta there were not readily apparent product differentials between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Processor speeds are the same at the high end of the MB and the entry level MBP. The base model of the MBP did get her the extra GB of RAM that we were both insistent on. While I acknowledge the ability to buy RAM second-had, have it delivered, and install it yourself, there is value in having it pre-packaged and not having to dork with it. Hard drive sizes are the same between the mid-level MB and entry-level MBP. The 120GB hard drive size was of some concern to me. My own MacBook is down to just under 20GB of hard drive space, and she was leaning towards wanting to use Boot Camp so that she could use her Adobe CS2 package, which was for Windows and was provided by her company. With the requirement to make a pretty sizeable partition available for a WinXP install, I was concerned that the 120GB drive might get a little tight. Today, I am not as concerned about that as I was on Saturday. Moreover, supposedly, if you have a valid license for an Adobe product and then switch from Windows to OS X, Adobe will send you the OS X version for free. I warned my friend not to bank on that, though. However it was sufficient hope to warrant a discussion between us as to whether or not she should actually do Boot Camp or not. I intimated my own soul-searching attempt to answer that question when I bought my MacBook last year. Of course, I chose not to do Boot Camp because I felt that I would just rely on Windows as a crutch whenever I encountered something that I did not already know how to do in OS X. She feels kind of the same way.

We got a little hungry and decided it would be better to go grab some food, and talk some more and make the decision outside of the store. I mean, who can consciously choose to not buy a Mac when you are standing in an Apple Store. I will readily admit that were it not for finally making three trips into an Apple Store I would still be exclusively on Windows machines. The talk over lunch resulted in her making the final decision to pay the extra money for the MacBook Pro. She was a little concerned about being over the previously set upper limit she and her husband had agreed on, but as it turns out, since she holds a military ID due to her husband's job, she got a sweet discount, keeping her below the cap. I think that in the end it was the form factor that won her over. The ability to image-edit comfortably on a large enough screen but stay below 6 pounds was key.

The bad thing was that I have been in the mood for either an iMac or a MBP myself. The purchase of neither, at this point in the timeline, was justified. However, the IFL-90 was really making me cranky. Both the IFL-90 and the MBP have the same video card, although the MBP's has a quarter of the video memory. I reasoned that I could compensate for this by doing two things: my Boot Camp Windows partition would be WinXP, and I would just be loading older games. I would not have the compatibility headache I routinely go through with Vista, I would not have to suffer through the goofy suspend states (half the time I try to send my IFL-90 into sleep or hibernate, it wakes back up seconds after going to sleep. This particularly becomes irritating when I close the lid and walk away from the laptop, only to come back several hours later and find out it's display has been slow roasting the keyboard and internals because it is back up and running again). I have had significantly fewer problems with OS X than I have gone through with Vista.

That being said, I still want to use and learn Vista, the same as I want to use and learn OS X. I also think that Windows is still where gaming is at. The issue on the MBP would be that, while it would be awesome that it gave me the flexibility to run both Windows and Vista, the key is that I would want to use both, and I could not do that on a 120GB hard drive if I loaded the gobs of applications and games that I normally do on a Windows rig.

I also considered jumping to the $2500 MBP in order to gain the larger hard drive, thereby somewhat mitigating the storage size concerns cited above. That would also put me in the 256MB version of the nVidia GeForce Go 8600M GT, mitigating a further level of concern when gaming. But that much of a jump would be even more unjustified than getting the entry level MBP.

In the end, we both decided to buy matching MacBook Pros (although not matching shoes, which was her other shopping venture). Based on my recommendation and that of the store clerk, due to her intended use for image editing, she opted for the matte screen, while I went with the glossy, since my creative vein would lean towards music, writing, and video editing, and the color pop would accentuate games and DVDs.

So now the MBP is at home (well, its actually on the plane with me en route to Gulfport, MS) on the same table with the MacBook and the COMPAL IFL-90. Completely unjustified. I frequently talk about the difference between justification and rationalization, where justification is not necessary because I do not have to justify my own personal choices to anyone else, but I do feel that there should be some logical rationale to my choices, regardless as to whether or not the logic is flawed. But I cannot even do that in this case. I had no need or spot in my network or computing hobby for a MacBook Pro. I had just been wanting one. I am remorseful. So now I have to come up with functions and things to do with this thing that allow me to say that there was some reason for making the purchase. I just hope I can make it through the six months that it will probably take for me to develop that rationale. Take it from me, readers, it is much better to conduct that exercise in the six months prior to making the purchase for the average person.

Of course, my SNK status (single, no-kids) means that maybe I do not fall into that schema of assessment as some others do. With no serious, committed, romantic prospects in site, it is perhaps ok for me to indulge myself a little. Besides, I'm still on travel 1/3rd of the time. That's about 17 weeks of use that I can capture out of the MBP (but of course that's only if it is the laptop I take with me on every trip). Right, I know, this is still insufficient rationale; I'm not even buying it so I'll stop trying to feed everyone this line. Check out my next entry where I'll cover my experiences in Leopard and on the MBP in the first few days, including the Boot Camp experience.

Written on my MacBook Pro Model 3.1 at 32,000 feet.

This is the first MacWorld Keynote that I have actually ever noticed or cared about. Like most other Mac-Lovers, I had all kinds of streams and RSS feeds programmed into my iPhone in order to get the high points of new Apple products as soon as the words dribbled from Steve's mouth. And like most Mac-Lovers, I was most anxious to hear about the new ultra-portable coming from Apple. And I anticipate that I am going to get a lot of questions from family and friends as to whether or not I am buying one at launch.

While I am passionate about computer technology, I am probably most passionate about mobile gear. Any long time readers of the site know that I continue to struggle to find the perfect mobile computing platform to completely replace the ubiquitous notepad. I was hoping that the MacBook Air might be it. But it's not. The disappointment caused me to take stock of my current mobile outfitting across the board and determine why the Air misses the mark for me, and potentially with other mainstream consumers.

My COMPAL IFL-90 is my gaming laptop. It has a great screen, and I love the flat black color scheme. The nVidia GeForce Go 8600M GT at 512MB is plenty fast enough for me to play BioShock at the highest settings. The only drawback is that it runs Vista, and I have had numerous compatibility issues. It (like my last three gaming laptops) also has a suspend glitch where it does not always properly go to sleep. Despite those flaws, the MacBook Air could in no way replace my gaming laptop, due to being equipped with the integrated Intel X3100 graphics processor and running OS X. Regardless of the new campaigns to launch gaming on the Mac, if you want to game these days, you still have to do it in Windows to access the latest titles, and an integrated GPU just does not cut it in speed. Further, with the masses of files that I juggle these days, the MacBook Air's max hard drive size of 80GB really makes the Air too small to use Boot Camp and install an XP partition in order to play games. No; no matter how I cut it, the MacBook Air would not crowd out the IFL-90, or even infringe on its territory in any way.

The one corner that the Air could have imposed upon is the one occupied by my MacBook. But when I compare it to the MacBook, it comes up wanting. The Air has a slower processor, and a smaller hard drive. It does have a higher max memory capacity, and it is roughly 2 pounds lighter. It does not have an integrated optical drive. While you can purchase an external Superdrive which will work great at home and/or seated at a desk, it does not help a lot on the airplane, at least not practically and comfortably. Where the Air really fails to hit a target is in its footprint. With a screen as large as the MacBook, the Air has the same footprint that my MacBook does. While my opinions may not be typical across the technorati, I do not care as much about weight as I do footprint. I'm a big guy; if I want to carry a heavy laptop I can, and it doesn't really make that much of a difference. The weight difference between the Air and the MacBook is only about 2 to 2.5 pounds. I do care about footprint, which drives how much stuff you can pack in a bag. I do not care about weight, or thickness. I do care about how much surface area a device occupies and how much it prevents you from carrying something else.

I will not go into a lot of detail on the merits of my LINUX Gateway laptop. In short, because the only reason I continue to use the Gateway is because it gives me a spare location to experiment with LINUX. It is not really feasible to replace it, unless someone is offering me one for free, so there is no real competition here between it and the MacBook Air. Again, due to the 80GB available in the Air's hard drive, it is unlikely I would dual boot the Air with OS X and Ubuntu.

That leaves the lane occupied by my Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). The Air has a full keyboard. I have a USB keyboard accessory for the Q1, but, much like the optical drive on the Air, it is a pain to get an external USB device situated on an aircraft. It actually makes the Q1 have a footprint as large if not larger than an ultra-portable laptop. The Q1 only has about 2h30m to 2h40m of battery life. The Air will supposedly have about 5. The Q1 has a pen-based (which can actually be used as a touch-based) interface and can be held between two hands like a notebook; perfect for surfing the web and reading eBooks. The main reason the Q1 has not become more of a steady computing companion is because it takes so long to boot. I don't mind the sluggish performance once it's up; I mean, heck, it is an ultra-mobile PC, I never asked for it to be as fast as my desktop. But the boot process is what really drives me nuts. OS X is ready within a few seconds.

While the Air could make some inroads into the Q1's current territory, at the end of the day, the fact that it would have to sit in my lap, that it wouldn't really be any more positionable on an airplane, and that it does not have a true touch based interface (although you can mimic some of the iPhone and iPod Touch functionality via the touch-pad) means it doesn't displace the Q1 either, and therefore does not really fit anywhere in my currently available equipment kits. Add to that the price-point above a MacBook, and I can only give it the hairy eyeball.

If I did not already have a MacBook, or if the Air had a smaller footprint (a 10.4" screen would have been good, but even a 12" screen would have created more product differentiation between it and the MacBook), I might have some desire to add it to the collection. But not today.

So the next question I am sure my readership will ask me is if the MacBook Air is not a good fit for me, is it a good fit for them? I would suggest that this product will be a good fit for people who meet one or more of the following parameters:

1. frequent flyers and road warriors who do not already have a Mac laptop of some type

2. college students in creative curricula who do not already have a Mac laptop of some type

3. those who have an iPhone or new iPod that would integrate nicely with a Mac OS X platform

4. those on a non-Intel Mac Platform who are looking to upgrade

Apple is confronted perhaps more than other consumer electronics companies by the concern of their hot new products cannibalizing sales of another hot runner, and therefore exert much more effort in the strategic considerations of their product price-points. While I personally question the $1800 price point of the MacBook Air as a consumer, as a matter of business analysis, I see the point in positioning it smack dab in the middle between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The question over the next few months will be if people see the point in making the jump from the MacBook price-point to get into a platform that does not offer that much more portability (the MacBook Air has roughly the same footprint as the MacBook, but is thinner, but only weighs 2.5 lbs less than a MacBook), but is significantly slower (if you don't spring for the 4GB of memory and the solid-state hard-drive, which would recover somewhat from the drop in processor speed in terms of user experience). It will be a interesting question to see the answer to.

"A computer is like a union; it never works unless you spend money on it."

Ahhhhh....I am in PIM nirvana. Well, maybe not nirvana. I would still like to a web-based service that would permit over the air synchronization of my PIM data. But at least I'm not in the PIM purgatory I have been in since my personal Blackberry lost a lot of its usefulness when I was forced onto a company Blackberry (which I hate...,more on that in another Blog Post).

So for a couple of months I have been flustered by how exactly I should be managing my PIM (a somewhat redundant phrase, since PIM stands for Personal Information Management). I am a PIM fanatic. At all times I use some application for my calendar and schedule, to-do task lists, tons of contacts, and personal digital notes for everything these other items can not handle. Before I got on the smartphone bandwagon, I always did this with a PDA. Now that I have joined the smartphone ranks, life is much easier...that is when all of my associated hardware is in sync.

Five months ago, my hardware got out of sync. I was forced to start using a company Blackberry instead of my personal one. This drove me back to my old condition of having two PIM devices, one with business data on it that I absolutely refuse to place my personal data on, and then my personal device (which is always more swank than whatever my job buys for me.

The problem was further exacerbated by my transition last year to running PC's on different operating systems. Right now I run two desktops on WindowsXP, a laptop on Vista, a MacBook on OS X (Tiger), a laptop on Ubuntu LINUX (where I am currently tapping out this article), and a UMPC running XP, In addition to the force to a company Blackberry, I was forced onto a company laptop. Previously, I was able to carry both my MacBook and my UMPC (which I used as my work laptop). The new company laptop for work is of such a size that carrying two laptops in my carry-on is no longer practical, so I can not always carry my UMPC or MacBook, which I had been using to synchronize my personal Blackberry.

So recently, if you tracked all of the hemming and hawing I did trying to make a decision on a solution, I transitioned off of the personal Blackberry (which was not getting much use out of the data plan that was costing me $45 a month) to an iPhone.

You've heard me say it here before...the iPhone (obviously) seamlessly integrates with or matches well with all of my other Apple products; my MacBook, my iPod (5G), and my iPod Shuffle (2G). I also plan on picking up an iPod Touch later this year for watching video on the airplane (without having to explain to the non-tech savvy stewardess why it's ok for me to use my iPhone while it's in Airplane Mode).

Anyway, PIM problem solved. Let me talk about my new PIM tools before I talk directly about the iPhone. I've converted over to iCal for my calendar. I still like and prefer data entry in Outlook, but for visual awareness after data entry is complete, iCal wins out. I'm on Address Book for contacts management now. It's an even break between that and Outlook. I still like the tiled business card view in Outlook, where all of the pertinent contact information for every contact is visible. But I do prefer the grouping methodology of Address Book. This solves one of my key problems on my personal cell phone, which is that previously all of my contacts were in one list, whereas I prefer to have some filtering between business contacts and personal contacts.

iCal somehow does to-do'd, but with my constant jumping from computer to computer, I have not recently been on the MacBook for a dedicated amount of time to figure this out. In the interim, I am using a Task Widget on my iPhone for any to-do's that are not tied to a calendar event. Mail is fine on the iPhone, but I'm not a huge fan of it on the Mac and definitely prefer Outlook. The way Mail sorts email visually does not allow for quick assessment or ID of pertinent subjects or senders.

While I am sure that you have read several reveiws of the iPhone, I prefer to contribute articles that reflect real-world use of a device as a non-review piece of equipment. My iPhone is not an optional piece of kit that a company or a magazine bought for me to review. Once my review is complete it's not going back to a store, and if I don't like it, there is no reporter's pool of gear for me to go swap it out with.

I justified the cost of the iPhone by...well, who am I kidding. When have I ever justified the cost for anything? But for those considering buying one who are not slaved to less practical philosophies like mine, I will enumerate some numbers that occurred to be while making the purchasing decision.

The data plan I was paying for the Blackberry (an unlimited plan that did not include text messageing; that was $5.99 extra per month for 50 inbound or outbound messages) was $45 a month. My iPhone data plan is $20 a month. I am trying to, and in the case of my last set of phones did, keep my phones for the full length of my two year contract. So if you look at a $25 monthly savings over 24 months, that adds up to $600 over the projected life cycle of the phone over staying on a Blackberry. In addition to that, I use the iPhone for so much more than I ever used my Blackberry for, including: synchronization with selected tunes from my iTunes database as well as vidoes from the same. I also use a bevy of iPhone specific web-apps which immensely increases the utility of the phone. Further, even the functions that are simply continuations of tasks I used to execut on my Blackberry, I actually use more. It is now much more frequent that I use my mobile email capability and text messaging to keep in touch with friends and family. One of the key reasons that I purchased the iPhone, regardless of how hokey a reason it is, is that it makes me more social, and God knows I could use more of that in my life.

I have never upgraded my system in preps for a game about to be released. In the past few years, there have been surges in mass upgrades across the entire PC gamer demographic. The first was caused by Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. The more recent one was caused by BioShock and, perhaps more so by Crysis. some gamers are obsessed with running the latest games at the highest frame rates and detail settings. Not me.

While I went through my phase of trying to upgrade graphics cards and processors on an annual basis, I am now trying to stick to running each for at least 18 months. There just isn't enough of a performance grade over a 12-month market cycle of game development to warrant annual upgrades. I am not going to be "forced" into a hardware upgrade because a developer codes their product to require system specs that far exceed the consumer mean spec baseline. Studies and statistics show that even amongst gamers, the average PC specs significantly trail behind the current market offerings, with most gamers running hardware that is a generation behind the latest greatest offerings, even when the latest greatest offerings have been on the market for over a year.

Going out and spending $600 on a video card just to run Crysis when, 3 months after its release, it is still the only title on the market needing the level of muscle it requires is an act I can not understand. I spent $300 a piece on each of my two 8800 GTS chip cards (one for each of two desktops). I have not fired up Crysis yet, but when I do, it will be set at a level of detail that those systems can handle. When I upgrade 18 months later, I'll probably re-install Crysis to see how it looks on a generation later graphics card.

While butter smooth and shiny graphics are part of the joy of playing any particular title, the gameplay has to carry the title for me over the graphics. This sounds cliché, because a great deal of the media and the industry itself ascribes to this philosophy. I am all for the desires of early adopters and "hardcore" gamers driving costs down for the rest of us by going out to get their latest hardware fix. I just do not feel slaved to joining them. I am comfortable running a few months behind the "latest-greatest" curve. Good games are like good music....you never really get tired of them. Years after buying a game, there is a good chance I will still have it installed on my hard drive if it is an excellent title. The game has time to let hardware catch up to it; I'm not in any rush. I do not yet see the need for a quad-core processor or a 768MB Video Card. I'm glad they're out there, but I'm not in the market for one...not until you can buy them for $300 anyway.

Drafted on my Gateway TabletPC running Ubuntu LINUX at 10,000 feet on Delta Flight 4707.

I am having some doubts. About my games. And about my systems. In truth, I have been having doubts since the Big Bang start of the current generation of gaming tech with 2006's release of the PS3 and the Wii, which then joined the 360, the latter of which had already been on the market for a year. In the months following those launches, I added a Nintendo DS Lite and PSP to my gaming entourage; and those consoles were all joining gaming PCs which were already in the mix.

Now into the second year following those acquisitions, I am having doubts. Doubts that the PS3 is ever going to get a library of games good enough to hold my interest. Right now, the last game I bought for the system was Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Doubts that the online component is ever going to become robust enough for me to sacrifice some of my time on Xbox Live for the Playstation Network. So far, it has not. I think the last time I played my PS3 online was back in February of 2007 when my 360 was turned in for service.

I have doubts about the Wii's library as well. And the control schema. The truth is that, as innovative and fun as the Wii's control scheme is, the fact is that playing it is such a paradigm shift in the user interface, that it is not well suited for existence in a multi-platform environment. Going back and forth between the 360's control scheme and the PS3 control scheme is almost seamless. But when it is time to jump to the Wii, I almost avoid it sometimes because I know that there will be a slight re-learning curve. And a lot of the games I have for the system are not save anywhere games. They are games with checkpoint saves that force you to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get to the next most logical place to save.

I have a healthy set of games for the DS. But I admit it; I am too self-conscious to pull it out in an airport and play. And frequently when I go on travel I get into whatever DVDs or encoded video I have brought with me before I start gaming, and sometimes I stick with that video to complete watching it, squeezing out any free-time available for gaming on the DS Lite.

I have a healthy set of games for the PSP, as well. But due to sheer randomness, it has not made any of the trips so far in 2008, so it has received little playing time.

There are tons of PC games that lay dormant. The Orange Box, Crysis, Unreal Tournament III, CRC Championship Racing 2006, Titan's Quest, Star Wars: Empire at War...there are so many PC games that I have that I have never gotten around to, that the thought of launching into them seems almost daunting. My gaming laptop is available, but the instability I see with legacy games in Vista means that my time gaming on it is frequently consumed with rebooting, patching, re-configuring games to be run as administrator or in compatibility mode. A downer that, again, discourages me from trying.

I have spent plenty of time on my 360. But, of course, 90% of that time winds up being spent in multiplayer modes on Xbox Live. So I have games from last year and the year before that I have never completed the single-player campaigns of.

I have thought and wondered, in these first two months of '08, if I am seeing the end. I have had many entertainment hobbies fall by the wayside when they got to the point that it was to hard for me to keep up. It is feasible that I have tried to game so much, that I have grown to a point where I do not want to game whatsoever if I can not play everything. In fact, it would be nice if the industry would go back to a time when there were only a handful of really great games on the market at a time and the rest were crap. But I do not think we will ever see a world like that again.

Yet in all of this, I am starting to get excited. I have my DS Lite with me on travel and am looking forward to getting back into Mechwarrior: Phantom War. I am supposed to be firing my Wii back up when I get home and I think it will be a good time. I am looking forward to getting back in touch with what is on the horizon for 2008. I think a lot of systems that have libraries that have not been satisfying me will see a turn-around. Sometimes, taking that break is just the thing that's needed to regenerate interest in a waning hobby. Getting home will be ok.

I am sometimes appalled...ok, I am often appalled, at a lot of the aspects of computing that the average user takes for granted. One of those is the value of decent audio. While I am often concerned about the value-added aspect of computing and computer-based entertainment that some people may be missing out on, I am also not an absolute fanatic (despite what my writings and ravings may lead one to believe). I do not feel that computer-based audio is absolute crap unless you are fitted out with a $300 pair of headphones or 7.1 surround sound speakers.

I am underway for the second round of at-sea tests of my current project. Last time out, I blew off headphones, and regretted it. With all of the ambient noise in this environment, my MacBook speakers were just not cutting it. Having my headphones with me this time gave me pause to think about where I am with audio and what some people might be missing out on.

We know I travel a lot, and we know that the quality of my mobile gear is important to that frequency of travel keeping me from feeling like my quality of life is overly impacted. As much as the quality of the mobile entertainment experience is important, the capacity to have choices in my mobile outfitting from trip to trip is also important.

I currently maintain three sets of headphones, primarily for travel, but also for early AM gaming and movie sessions on the weekend without having to worry about waking up the neighbors. Additionally, sometimes the sound level on certain media formats is so low that I cannot hear it well when played on a laptop, so headphones become a useful tool even when I am at home. Appropriately, these headphones choices are tailored from high-end to low-end.

My current traveling companions are my Sony MDR-V700s. I cannot rightly remember how long I have had these headphones, but it has been for some time. At least since 2003. I have yet to find a reason to look for something to supercede them. Right now, I am sitting in my fold-up chair listening to Evanescence's The Only One from The Open Door album, and the audio quality is good. I will admit that I will not qualify it as excellent because I do not know audio parameters enough to claim that their sound quality is excellent. I will simply say that they are more than good enough for me. I think that for the average user, stepping up to a decent quality set of headphones will make a marked difference that will be enough to convince them of the value in going with something better than the headphones that came bundled in with their MP3 player. By the same token, those users do not need to invest in a set of Bose or Sensaura headphones.

My secondary set of headphones is a set that does not sound as good as the MDR-V700's when watching a DVD on one of my computers sitting in front of one of the 19" widescreen monitors in the computer room. However, on an airplane ride, they are invaluable. They are a set of Memorex Noise-Canceling Headphones. I was originally not convinced of the value-added in noise canceling technology (much like it took me years to see the value-added in bottled water). Because of that reason I was unwilling to invest be coup dollars in my first set of headphones of that stripe. This set came from a shelf in a local Wal-Mart. However, within the first trip, I was convinced. I was also convinced again that it was not necessary for the average user to go spend a ton of cash on noise canceling phones. While I am certain that other, more expensive 'phones will sound better, I am gaining a reasonable amount of value from this cheap set. It does not take a lot of money to gain the capability to screen out the screaming babies on the plane, the guy who won't shut up about how awesome his job is, or how savvy or smart he is, or the person who finds it necessary to find interest in my job, where I live, where my family is from...you get the picture. Screening out the whine of the engines is helpful, but screening out the noise of my fellow airline passengers is sheer bliss.

My third-string headphone slot is currently being filled by a walk-on, namely, the set that came bundled with my iPhone. I have heard talk from iPod fan boys that the set of ear buds that come packaged with iPods are better than the industry standard 'buds that come bundled with other MP3 Players. I do not know if this is true or not. I had a pair of in-ear ear buds from JVC that I had been using, until my ignorance in caring for that ****of headphone (the rubber inserts need to be periodically washed and dried with a towel), led to the coverings shredding slightly. The next time around, I want to spend a little more money on slightly higher quality in-ear phones. In the meantime, it is nice to carry a pair of headphones that are compatible with my laptop, iPod, and iPhone (the connector for the iPhone is a different form-factor than the industry-standard 1.8mm plug). These headphones are not great, but they are immensely portable.

So there you have it. Each of these sets provides a slightly different capability to my enjoyment of mobile entertainment. The Sony's offer the best sound quality, but are the bulkiest and the least pack able since they do not collapse into as small a footprint as the others. The Memorex's are not as bulky and offer noise-cancellation, but do not have the overall sound quality of the Sony's. The Apple ear buds do not have the sound quality of either the Sony's or the Memorex's, but are much more portable. In each case, all of the headphones offer better sound quality than a $5 set of phones form Wal-Mart. In each case, they increase the enjoyment factor of iTunes audio, encoded video, and retail DVDs when I am on travel. They also add to my Saturday or Sunday morning enjoyment of games and movies on the PC when I am at home. In no case did I spend an arm and a leg for these small improvements in that enjoyment. A minimal amount of research and a small amount of cash can take your enjoyment of the audio capability of even the cheapest laptop sound processor from the mundane to something that makes other people in the airport wonder what you are smiling to yourself about with your headphones on and your face buried in your laptop.

Earlier this year I finally gained some (real) geek cred when I became a dual-boot geek, meaning I had become a (novice) proficient user of two OS's. Not double-counting Windows Vista and Windows XP (I can't stand it when people do that), I added OS X to my litany. This week, I added Linux.

Specifically the Guilty Gibbon release of UBUNTU. And it's cool.

I do not know how to do much yet. I can surf, using Mozilla. I've connected to my wireless network. I can now play DVDs (not a plug and play task to accomplish). Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I am doing this all on my Gateway Tablet PC.

I am not sure if it is even politically correct to refer to it as a Tablet PC anymore, since that verbiage is directly tied to the resident installation of the Tablet PC OS.

If you are a regular reader, you will remember my travails through the summer over trying to come off the Gateway and shift to a UMPC, then being driven back to the Gateway, which required a reformat and restoration of the factory image. After restoring the default layout of the Table (a Gateway CX2618), I encountered problems with the digitizer pen, which I later determined was failing. I purchased a new pen, as well as a new power adapter (the old one had worn a spot in the cable insulation), with the intent of using the tablet for the the next year a my work laptop.

After all of that effort, my plans to rule the world with my own personal electronics were eventually thwarted by those do-gooders in the IT department, and I was forced, after some 18 months of living outside the box, onto a company laptop. So the Gateway, which I had just spent some small amount of cash and large amounts of personal sweat in resuscitating back to life, was relegated to multimedia duties and personal authoring, since I still very much enjoyed using the pen interface.

Then the second pen started to fail. And not in that "it just completely dies" sort of way. But in the even more infuriating "it will work sometimes and then stop, and then work again" kind of way; the kind that keeps giving you breaths of hope only to beat you about the head and shoulders with discouragement once you get going.

The Gateway was headed for a trip to the dumpster. But a recent reading about th Ubuntu live CD, and a friend who had experimented with it, gave me the courage to attempt another install of Linux. I had dabbled with trying to install my retail version of SUSE 10.0 on four previous occasions and had failed miserably. I figured it could not help to at least try the Live CD, and use it even if I could not get a full install done. I had small hopes for getting an install to run on a a laptop made by a manufacturer as notorious as Dell for using proprietary hardware.

And truth be told, it took me a while to get everything working. My first eye opener was that using the Live CD as the primary OS was a non-starter. Too slow, for one thing, but I was also restricted in how much I could monkey with hardware settings and accessing the hard drive for file changes and re-partitioning. Only taking a deep breath and attempting an install would give me the full power I wanted.

A full morning of attempted installs before work failed. Talking it over with some co-workers, the recommendation I received was to try the Feisty Fawn download. Returning home, exhausted from one night of no sleep already, I plunged in again with Fawn. Still no joy.

Finally, I started playing with the partitioning and install configuration options. Eventually I struck on altering where to install the boot file, and voila, Ubuntu Gateway.

I have had two awesome experiences so far. The first was installing Mplayer, since the packaged Totem does not seem to work. A quick Google showed that this a prevalent issue widely experienced by new Linux users. Mplayer is the fix, or rather the alternative. Installing an app in Linux is not just double-clicking on an executable and observing an automated process while sipping coffee. It requires opening the Terminal, analogous to accessing the Command Line in Windows. In a few minutes, I was typing terminal commands and it felt like....I as back. I mean, like I was that kid again typing commands in DOS to order the laptop to do things. I was happy.

OK, so, no, I do not want to be typing the Terminal every day just to install a DVD player app. But as a side-hobby, it's pretty cool.

My second experience was a timely need for me to use my powers for good, not for evil. A buddy of mine had a 4 year old laptop that would not boot into Windows...it kept throwing an lsass error every time it booted up. Within a few seconds of being hung in the desktop with the tutorial pop-up, the system would reboot. I could not even get into Safe Mode. Time to slick the machine and restore the factory image. But first, I had to recover the data on the hard drive.

The ze5470, the older HP Pavilion I was working on, has a floppy drive, but I was not about to try and figure out ho to make a Windows Boot floppy...like I had any floppy drives in the apartment anyway. So I shifted to Bart PE.

OK...I was able to use some of the assessment tools, but I could not get the laptop to recognize my 100GB Portable USB hard drive, and I was not ready to move the laptop into my already cluttered computer room to try and work in there. Ubuntu.

Gutsy Gibbon booted, but I could not see anything in Gnome...the video was all blurry and fuzzy...I could make out the pointer and icons, but it was too risky to try and muck around with hard drive partitions while guessing whether or not I was t the right place in a drop down menu. Feisty Fawn.

Booted; worked. Now another lesson, or a re-learning...I could see the hard drive and the files in the NTFS partition, but I could not reformat the drive in order to then install a new Windows partition and boot scheme. Further, again, I could not see my portable hard drive. I was going to have to move the laptop.

Once in the computer room, I was able to hook up the Seagate external hard drive that I usually use with my Mac Book. Using the Feisty Live CD, I was able to back up all of the files to the Seagate hard drive. I had safely moved to the point where I could slick the drive, reformat, and install the factory image. So Linux had saved me, despite using other tools I had in my bag. And I did not have to remove the hard drive to hook up an IDE-to-USB adapter. I really did not want to hook the hard drive up to one of my own PCs anyway, until I'd had a chance to virus scan the contents.

So in the week since I started using Ubuntu, it has already come to my aid in restoring a PC, and I have had a childhood passion rekindled. I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.

4. Dungeons and Dragons: the Animated Series - Before video entertainment really took off, I played pen and paper/tabletop RPGs. Although it was not favorite RPG, I got my start like most kids did, with Dungeons and Dragons. When the animated series launched in 1983, I became an immediate fan. Despite its targeting towards more youthful audiences, the series offered poignant perspectives on ethical choices, and taught lessons in perseverance and compassion. I picked up the boxed set earlier this year. The great mystery of the series is how and why it was cancelled, as several of the conclusory episodes never aired, and viewers were left with a hole as to whether the kids ever got home.

5. Firefly - Joss has a tendency to re-use actors who have done well for him in the past, and this show is almost fully cast with actors from guest installments of Buffy and Angel. Nathan Fillion had been the Caleb in Season 7 of Buffy, Gina Torres was Jasmine in Season 4 of Angel, Summer Glau was the ballerina in Season 3 of Angel, Adam Baldwin, most famous as Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket, portrayed the last liaison to Angel and the Senior partners of Wolfram and Hart in Season 5. If you watch Buffy, Angel, and then Firefly, you can see the learning process in film-making and screenwriting between Whedon and his steady circle of staff. With Firefly being his third turn at a series, it is the best of the three, but unfortunately the most short-lived. The concept is much more what I think of when I've read about the original plan for the original Star Trek series (first titles Wagon-Train to the Stars), as this series much more evokes the sense of mankind as pioneers and frontiersmen in colonization of other systems. The unique mix of science-fiction and believable western settings is pulled off excellently, and the further combination of Whedon's unique method of storytelling makes this one of my favorite series of all time.

6. Seinfeld - in my head, there all sorts of people types, social occurrences, and human behavioral oddities that have labels and are recalled from memory by this schema. I have been allured to Seinfeld because these elements are so much a part of the show. The fact that the comedy is steeped in something that is so real for me allows my typical reluctance to become enamored with this genre something very easy to surmount. Probably the best script-writing in the history of this particular genre, Seinfeld holds a very tight grip on a spot in my top TV list that is not easy to come by for a comedy.

I love discussing tech...and games...and tech...and sometimes I love discussing it at a level that the average human being could care less about. But I also like entertainment...movies, TV, music...and sometimes it is ok to take a more relaxed approach to the LaBlog and just talk about that.

TV Seasons on DVD are one of the greatest inventions since the remote control. I like TV shows, but since I am basically obsessive compulsive when it comes to managing my time, I have a mental inhibit which prevents me from being required to be seated on my couch at a designated time on a designated night of the week to do anything. The sad thing is, when I find a show I like, I can not wait for it to go off of the air so that I can buy the boxed collection(s) and watch an entire season in a 3-day weekend if I so choose.

In the past couple of years I have expanded the media choices I purchase video content in since I have more devices that give me more options in how to carry that content with me. Retail DVDs are choice one. Blu-Ray, which I can not take with me on travel but can play on my PS3 connected to my 720p HDTV, is choice two. Choice three is video content downloaded from the Xbox Live Video Marketplace. Choice four is video downloaded from iTunes, which is my newest way of experiencing TV shows in a portable format, either via my iPod or on my MacBook.

So here are the lists of some of my favorite TV shows and why:

1. Angel: in 1998, I checked out an episode of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and pleasantly found that it was nothing like the atrocious movie of the same name. I got into it for a few episodes before I had to deploy that year. I caught a few episodes when I got back in November, but then moved to Monterey, CA for grad school. At the time, Buffy aired on The WB, a network not carried by the cable network I was on in Monterey. IN October of 1999, though, the spin-off series Angel launched. I did not get into it as weekly serial, but over the next few years, I caught handfuls of episodes and knew I liked it more than the Buffy series. I think in some ways I relate to the character, and on a simpler level, the show, set in LA vice the fictional town of Sunnydale, and the lead character being male, makes it easier for me to be immersed in the storyline.

Joss Whedon is an amazing storyteller, and you will see that just about every series he has done is on my list of favorites. Again with the OC lean towards any fiction that is very detailed and orderly, I drift towards Whedon's opuses because he loves arcs. When taken at face value, Angel, at least seasons two and forward, is one huge story arc. Even if you don't buy that, Seasons 2 through four are season-long arcs, with recurring characters and very few episodes outside of the main story-arc. Characters change from episode to episode, and there are almost no episodes that you could just lift form the storyline and make sense of as a stand-alone episode. The story of man traveling a road seeking redemption for all of the things he has done, and tripping and stumbling along the way is something that appeals to me, and this show tells a great story that lasts five seasons and ends with at a consciously chosen point to close the tale, not the hiccuppy, glitchy, jerky end of a show that has to be wrapped up because it has been cancelled for the next season.

2. Battlestar Galactica: I tend to find Directors and Producers whose work I like, more so than actors and actresses who attract me as a loyal follower. Ronald Moore was the heir to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek legacy, but many fans have blamed him for the deterioration of the franchise from its golden years, since the move of the Next Generation to the big screen. Cutting his strings from the Roddenberry/Paramount Empire, Moore moved to a partnership with Universal to re-imagine this series in nothing less than what can be termed an epic production series. I only have Seasons 1 and 2 of this series (I think it is now in Season 4), and have only watched the first one-and-a-half seasons. Word on the street is that the current season will be the last, and that there will be a spin-off involving the Battlestar Pegasus.

Edward James Olmos has always been an amazing actor, and his portrayal as a subdued, soft-spoken, but unconquerable military leader results in consistent class A performances form episode to episode. BG shows the human race in all of the splendor and malevolence that people display in times of crisis. The estranged relationship between the elder and junior Adama, and the way in which the younger grows and changes during the series is an enjoyable transformation to watch. The Sci-Fi channel can only seem to maintain one or two marquis series at a time due to costs. The fact that this one has been chosen as one of those few has produced an enjoyable experience for me over the last three years.

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there are a lot of poignant themes that go on in the 7 year run of this series. Buffy dealing with the immense responsibilities placed on her shoulders while also trying to be a normal teenage girl results in some dramatic moments that would just have never occurred to me. This is much more a rat-pack style show than Angel, whose cast grows from the primary three characters over its duration, but tends to remain focused on a relatively small group of characters. Buffy maintains an entire rogue's gallery of allies and enemies that are always introduce spurred elements into the primary tale. Each of the main characters goes to their darkest side and back, and no one quite winds up where you think their characters will be. The only primary male character of the primary three, Xander, after six seasons of being the show clown, ends up being a little more rough-and-tumble in the end. Again, Whedon weaves an opus that fans can travel along with over a much longer series run than is normal in the industry.

This series piqued my interest originally just because I wanted to see what Whedon really had in mind when he passed the original script off to the studio for the big-screen production. I drifted off from it because I found Angel much more appealing. If you watch Angel, however, there are so many crossover and references to events in Buffy that I really had to go back and watch the original series just to make sure I had gotten the entire story. While Buffy in no way beats out Angel for my favorite series of all time, it is so closely coupled with my number one show that it is hard to call them separate shows. While Angel certainly maintains its own identity as a storyline, if you consider the entire tale to be told over 12 seasons, that makes for a television story that exceeds the scope of any other fable told on the small screen before.

More to follow - next up: an animated series that just "went away", another Whedon tale, and the greatest comedy of all time.