Lonely

I recently came to realize that we have another tenant living at our place – a lonely old man who lives in a one-room apartment down in the basement.

Now, being one of only 3people who live here (this is not an apartment, its just one huge house where the owners stay in one portion and sub-let the other two to us and another couple) I was genuinely astounded to find that out – because the guy must at least a good seventy five and lives alone with a bicycle.

Yes, with a bicycle.
And one of the reasons I’ve never seen him before is because he doesn’t get out much and no one comes to see him.

It makes me re-think on all the times I’ve felt alone like when my roomie goes on vacation and stuff and realize, “God, its good to have people – friends and family – who love and care about you!”.

I guess it’s another one of those small things we all take for granted.
There is a lot in life we should be thankful for.

The New Macbook...

...and I'm so in love with it!

A few days back on the 14^th of October, Apple unveiled their latest new product to hit the market – the ‘new’ Macbook.

I’m not sure why I’m paranoid enough to do a post on every single product they come up with, but I guess it has to do with the fact that Apple just keeps doing things in a completely different way…and the macbook is one thing that’s caught my attention for a real long time.

In case you’re wondering what this is all about, I strongly suggest you see the video on it.

It still uses the same (old?) Mac OS-X leopard and runs on Intel Core2Duo, but I guess the most beautiful changes you on it are in the looks and what it’s made of; literally!

The first thing that’s completely different about it from everything else is that it moves away from Apple’s signature white (or black) polycarbonate body to precision machine-cut aluminum.

What really blew my mind is the fact that they decided to manufacture the whole body as a single piece – as opposed to virtually every other notebook on the planet (that I figure uses at least a couple of dozen parts for the main body); and the only way they could do that was to machine the whole thing from a solid block of aluminum!

Yes, every new Macbook out there comes from a separate, single, solid block of aluminum. Wonder what they do with all the little pieces?

The next thing big thing is the all-glass-and-LED screen that extends all the way to the edges. I guess glass and LED are the best things that go with shiny metal, and the new macbook beautifully eliminates the frame around the screen; lending a seamless appearance to the screen.

The new trackpad (also made of glass) eliminates the click-button…and instead the whole thing is clickable anywhere you want – you can even configure a “right-click-zone” anyplace on it in case you need one (remember, macs don’t require a right-click by default).

The trackpad also features the famous multi-touch as used on the iPhones and earlier generation Macbook-Pros.

Other interesting features noteworthy are the tiny row of green LEDs on the side that indicate battery status and the invisible sleep indicator light (that’s made by shaving off the side of the aluminum from the inside and perforating microscopic holes into the surface, so you only see the light when its on)

All said and done at the end of the day however and jumping back to reality, this thing is priced at over €1,500…and that’s WAY off my budget for a long time!

Guess the only place I’m gonna see it is at the nearest Apple store.

Overload!

I originally intended this to be sort of a sequel to my last post on Online living because I later realized there was so much I didn’t do it much justice – and as some people pointed out; maybe there is more to life than the internet.

But brings us to another point: overload of the stuff we love and hold on to everyday.

Apart from my work Email and office phone (which keep me busy nearly the entire day five days a week) I also have 3 other personal Email accounts which demand checking a few times a day. And then there is orkut – the single biggest service I use on the internet next only to google search.
To complicate things, I recently discovered a whole lot of my high-school buddies on facebook and joined in. And then there is Linked-In to keep in touch with old colleagues from work who neither fit in orkut or facebook.

And this does not even take into account the free sign-up offers I turn down everyday from places named Hi5, friendster, WAYN, Shelfari, RupeeMail, Yaari… and this list gets long.

 Add to this is the sweet chaos of blogging and checking out the regular blogs I read, joining in the discussion forum I comment on regularly (which I will not mention here) and a crazy service called My Blog Log – which I have no idea why the devil I signed up for.

Picasa and Flickr where I stash my pix online.

And then there is twitter; which I don’t use all that much either and just signed up because it felt like a good idea at the time (and because the guys from CommonCraft did a great marketing job with Twitter in Plain English!)

 It suddenly dawned on me that I have way too many things to keep track of online. Maybe it is time to switch all things off for a while and stay disconnected from all things electronic.

 

And when that day comes; I’ll do another post on it ;-)