The Best of Two Worlds?

What, pray tell, was I shopping for in the mall, a friend asks? A computer, a laptop to be precise.

A long time Windows user (but not a Windows "bigot"), I wanted to see if I could reasonably straddle the technical fence between Windows and Mac. My interest has been piqued by news of Apple's Boot Camp and third-party software named Parallels.

So, I walked into West Farms Apple store to ask a salesman about it. He wanted to sell me a laptop, of course, but he steered me away with the report that Boot Camp is still in beta. He couldn't speak to Parallels. His main point was approach this option carefully, if at all. The concept is still new.

That's enough to put me off Mac for a while. My livelihood is based on the Windows world. I have no problem with the Mac world. In fact, I was sorely tempted by the excellent quality of the Mac Pro diplays.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I welcome them. In the meantime, it looks like I'll have to stick with the Windows world and buy a laptop suited to it.

Cafe Nordstrom

This is a plug for Cafe Nordstrom in West Hartford, CT. It's tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner of Nordstroms, on it's second level. The salad I ordered was the best I've had in a long time. It was a tasty mix of goat cheese, chicken, greens, thin slices of green apples, apple chips, some kind of crunchy sweet nuts, and more. Very yummy and quite filling!

Its out-of-the-way location lent itself to this unusual mall event -- no teenagers. It may have been the hour (between 5 PM and 6 PM) and the day of the week (Thursday). Whatever the cause, the effect was pleasant and welcome.

Also, being in the corner of the mall, there were windows. Ahh, there's a world out there!

The price was a little more than an average salad but it was well worth it. I'll be back!

Paul Potts

Have you heard of Paul Potts yet? If not, check this out. What a story! What a talent!

DDT Ban = Mass Death

Check out this interesting NY Times article.

Excerpts and comments follow.

This “Fable for Tomorrow,” as she called it, set the tone for the hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book.

This astute observation is what is wrong with many of the politically-motivated claims of environmentalism. Keep an active mind as opposed to an "open mind" on this (or any) topic.

Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.

Interesting. Food for thought, pardon the pun, when considering organic vs non-organic food.

The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned.

Echoing this critical point on mass death is this article which reports: "The environmentalists' ideological opposition to pesticides has no basis in science. It is a death sentence to millions."

Spelling B Runner-Up

On the same day that a 13 year old boy won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Hillary Clinton's campaign pulled this number.



Can you spell "tomorrow"?

I found this snapshot at Foxnews yesterday. I can't find the link to the article now. But I found the error and its timing deliciously ironic.