DISQUS

I'm afraid I don't see the point of Wolfram Alpha either & I suspect that's because I really have no interest in maths. About all I've successfully got it to tell me was things like populations of cities, the weather & time in those cities and stuff like that that I can already find quite easily if I'm so inclined.

It might have potential, but at this point it seems like its only use will really be amongst the scientific types using at as something of a glorified calculator. Perhaps it'll need a Steve Jobs type to dig deep and find a way to make it useful to more people and take it into the mainstream. If they even want to make it more mainstream, they may be happy just keeping it amongst the maths geeks & experimenting on it to their hearts content.

I just don't get the fuss about the Kindle. My husband and I have been reading ebooks for years and have accumulated quite a large library of them between us. We read on a type of device that has been around for years - a PDA. My husband has an old Sony Clie and I upgraded over year ago to Palm's Tungsten E2 which I find even more comfortable to read from than my old Clie. I understand that a Tungsten E2 will set you back roughly US$200 (probably less on eBay). You can then download a free version of your ebook reader of choice (we prefer eReader (ereader.com) and managed to get the Pro version in a bundle - was worth it too), and from there you can pick up ebooks for pretty cheap. A new release often sells for around US$20 although we usually stick to the ones priced $7 at the most. There's no way I'm paying for classics now either. Manybooks.net has been slowly working on converting book available via Gutenberg into as many ebook formats as possible.

Apologies for the rant/plugging, but with all the discussion about the Kindle lately I've been astounded that nobody has pointed out that you can already read ebooks perfectly well without being forced to only buy from one store and pay through the nose. I love books as printed books as well, but the price of books in Australia has steadily climbed and the price of ebooks, even with conversion rates, is a significant saving for us. Not to mention that no trees died to feed our reading habit, I can read in bed without disturbing my husband, my PDA syncs to iCal, my shopping list and menus are on it, and best of all, it's small enough that it goes everywhere with me. At any time on a bus, waiting for friends, having lunch, I can whip out my PDA and choose a book from my library. I believe there's even software out there that can convert webpages into a format readable on a PDA complete with images, although I don't recall the name at the moment.

Ahem, apologies again for the rant and oh one last thing. Yes, I can add as many notes as I choose to my ebooks as well :)

What I always found interesting was the negative reaction of the housekeeper who also happened to be African American. Her automatic dislike of Prentice always reminded me of the British TV series "Upstairs Downstairs" where the servants seemed to cling to the whole class structure even harder than the "upperclass" they worked for.

I just love this movie and I don't think the issues raised in it are likely to become incomprehensible for some time yet. Even without the racial issues, there is the whole shock of the whirlwind romance, the parents realising that their daughter is no longer a little girl and that they in turn are growing old, the awkwardness of meeting the future in-laws, and also the comfortable groove (sometimes rut) that marriages inevitably settle in to. It's always refreshing to watch an intelligent movie in a sea of toilet humour comedy.

No kernal panics or crashing, but having a devil of a job with airport on my new MBP. I'm going along fine and then suddenly I can't access the internet. It claims it's still connected to our network, but the list of computers hooked up to our network doesn't list my laptop when this happens. Same thing was happening on Windows under Boot Camp on the same machine, until my clever fiance finally found some new drivers that worked beautifully. No dropouts under Window, great speed, everything's perfect. Unfortunately the same doesn't go for the 'net under OSX. It's very clearly a driver issue. Somebody has found a fix (essentially rolling back) at: http://tinyurl.com/36tubb

I haven't tried it myself yet. I'm holding out for another few weeks in the hope that Apple will fix the problem. Apart from this problem, which thankfully doesn't seem to be a hardware issue, my MBP is absolutely beautiful. A great introduction to Macs for me :) I keep annoying my Windows only fiance by running out and babbling at him about how much I love my Mac whenever I discover something else that "just works". And speaking of babbling... :)