Lenovo S12 Netbook

This photo was taken outdoors in afternoon sunlight. The Dell on the left is a mighty ATG D630, which has a 500-nit outdoor screen, so bright it can warm a bowl of soup at 5 meters.

After looking at Netbooks for a long time, I finally ordered up a Lenovo S12 with the VIA Nano chipset.

It's pretty cool. Wouldn't want it as my primary development machine, but it'll come in handy at events, and will be a fine alternative to a real laptop during a week away for checking e-mail, SKYPEing, etc.

In short, it's a fun little toy.

No horsepower problems. The VIA NANO chipset is considerably more powerful than the ubiquitous ATOM chipset on most netbooks, even though the VIA clock rate is slower than the latest ATOMs(1.3 vs 1.6). Even with only 1 gig RAM, it rocks. I've got another gig of RAM ordered.

The chassis comes with a 1 Gig SODIMM soldered in, and another empty slot. The hardware will only recognize 2 Gigs, so I ordered an additional SODIMM. Had I known it worked this well with 1 gig, I might not have ordered that additional SODIMM. But then again, for $60, WTF.

The S12's full-sized kbd is much better than other netbooks I've tried. However Lenovo made a few poor choices on their "combi" keys, in my opinion. For example, HOME and END require a combi; two keys I use a shitload.

Another thing I like far better than most other netbooks is it's got two Touchpad buttons rather than one. Thus, right-clicking is solid, not an adventure in guesswork.

Screen is 1280 x 800. The extra real estate over the ubiquitous 1024 x 576 on other Netbooks is a huge improvement. 576 is just not enough real estate for me, especially when I'm browsing or using a compiler IDE such as Visual Studio.

The screen is relatively bright, but it is also very shiny. It reflects a ton of glare. It's way brighter than the previous-gen laptops (T30), but I'd not be too psyched to try to use it outdoors. However, under normal lighting, it's great. I don't see that well any more, so screens are very important to me. This one is fine in any indoor situation.

The integrated SD card slot on the left side is really convenient.

Another thing I thought was weird is in addition to a hard wireless LAN on/off switch (left side), there is also a soft wireless LAN switch (FN->F5). When I first fired the little guy up, I couldn't see any SSIDs, despite the fact that Windows told me the WL card was on and operating. I feared I might have a dud. But a little Googling revealed that a few zillion other people initially thought the same thing. I turned the soft switch on and away I went, wirelessly. Kind of goofy to have both a hard and a soft WL switch.

It came with Windows XP Home. I will probably replace that with W7 at some point.


The integrated webcam isn't any great shakes, but it's good enough for Skype and it's, well, integrated.

One irksome detail I just discovered is the HDD isn't easily swappable. You've got to spring the keyboard off the chassis to get at the HDD. Not the most convenient thing for a guy like me, who incessantly fiddles with HDDs.

So, in conclusion...is this little thang worth $420? You betcha. It'll come in handy in a lot of situations. I'm glad I waited. The ASUS, SANYO, and Dell netbooks that preceded it were cool little toys too, but this one has way fewer compromises. It won't fit in my jacket pocket like one of the 9" netbooks, but it's much closer to being a real PC. I can type on it and I can see the screen just fine.

Another Batshit-Crazy Euro.....

From the guys who brought us the "squirrel suit" (cruel enforcer of the Darwin theory), another batshit-crazy Euro invents a better way to kill himself.

link

Thanks to my good mate Digger in Melbourne, Australia, for this link.

Some Video To Make Your Teeth Chatter

It's Never Windy And Cold in Lake Louise

Today's Womens Downhill was moved down to the 2nd bad weather start because it was blowing about 45 knots at the regular start. With a temp of -8, the wind chill index was approximately -100,000,000,000C. It's warmer in outer space.

Where The Deer and the Antelope Play.....

Drove down to Banff last night to do some laundry. As we pulled into town, a humongous elk crossed the street in front of us...obeying all traffic laws. He crossed squarely in the crosswalk, like a good Bullwinkle.






In the meantime, an extremely rare Canadian Alpine Lynx showed up briefly to watch the mens Super-G on Sunday. Lynxes are both extremely rare and extremely shy, so the locals here were blown away that they actually got to see one in the flesh, er....in the fur.



For those of you who aren't familiar with ski racing, the orange stuff partially obscuring the Lynx is a substance known as "A-Net", a type of safety netting.

Lake Louise Shows Off Its Tail Feathers

Lake Louise, Alberta may not be one of the more difficult DH courses on the FIS World Cup, but it's one of the best places to race. After a week of wild-ass weather, today is classic LL: cold as a witch's tit, clear, sunny, fast, great racing snow. Not a bad place to race, eh cowboy?

Gun Barrel, Claire's Corner, Finish. Once again, the "Sled Dogs" have come through, and yesterday's blizzard is but a memory.

The men at Crack of the Beave in Colorado have the early TV slot this week, so our training runs and races are starting an hour later than normal. Hence, a leisurely, civilized breakfast in the morning at the Chateau Lake Louise, followed by a little time to stretch and do a few minutes of yoga. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Walking In a Winter Wonderland, Part Deux

Got the mens races off, flawlessly. Great team effort by our guys, requiring a lot of work and a half-case of Gosling's Rum.

Monday was supposedly laundry day, due to the transition (men to Beaver Creek, women in from Aspen). However, the course was a mess due to another ton of snow, so we spent most of Monday digging our stuff out from under the blizzard and re-loading for the women. Never did get to the laundry.

My colleague Miguel Wakker snapped the above photo up near the womens DH start on Monday. Some of the course is under a half-meter of snow, so today's training run is iffy. Crazy weather for Lake Louise, as normally it's just too cold here for substantial snow to fall.

For the next few days, the weather appears to be getting back to "normal", i.e. -23C and clear.

Walking In A Winter Wonderland

Normally, Lake Louise, Alberta is one of the best places in the world for ski racing at the professional level. The weather is amazingly consistent (either very cold or unbelievably motherfucking cold), and so when it snows, the snow comes down as pixie dust and doesn't accumulate much.

Counterintuitively, fresh snow is bad for ski racing. Race courses are injected with water to make them almost as hard as ice, so any snow that falls after the course is injected must be removed from the course, either manually or by snow blowers.

Yesterday we got in a really smooth training run with 95 competitors. Very high number for a World Cup "speed" event.

It snowed all last night, and oddly, the temp is barely below freezing, so big flakes fell from the sky, and the accumulated snow on the course was knee-deep in places this morning. The race jury called it a day by 8AM, so we had nothing to do except clean up a few details in The Batcave and then go powder skiing.

Bonus.

The powder skiing wasn't that great, as there's very little snow under the fresh powder, so I gouged up my "work skis" pretty good on the rocks. But that's what work skis are for.

It's supposed to snow all day and then really snow hard tonight, so tomorrow might be another powder day.

Very unusual for Lake Louise. In all the years I've been doing races here (since 1994) I can only remember one other day off due to too much snow.

There's a Great French Joke In Here Somewhere

The script of Risky Business meets reality, and reality bites back.

"Who's da U-boat commander?"

link

Or maybe it's a Texas joke?

Or maybe it's a joke about guys with way more money than sense?

Or maybe it's a joke about engineers who spend millions trying to cut a few kilos out of a supercar's design, and then said supercar is bought by a middle-aged fat guy carrying 100 extra kilos around his middle.

Enzo Ferrari had nothing but disdain for the people who bought his cars. He considered them all poseur idiots, a means to an end. The people who bought his road cars were poseurs with too much disposable income, and the people who bought his old race cars were even bigger idiots, because he'd since built a better one.

And so forth.

Here a video of the aftermath:

link

First iPhone Virus

Hoo boy. Here we go.

link

Winter is on our doorstep. Now that the gauntlet has been dropped, look for iPhones to be attacked relentlessly by 16 year old be-pimpled hackers all over the world, sitting around in their underwear with nothing better to do.

Windows 7 Doesn't Suck Too Badly

"Doesn't Suck Too Badly" is about the best we can hope for from Microsoft. Honestly, if Gates and Ballmer had to pay for the lost productivity we all suffer every time they totally change the Windows UI, then they'd be driving around in 1976 Pintos and living in crappy apartments instead of living large as arrogant fuckwad douchebag billionaires.

I installed W7 on one of my Dell ATG D630s. To my utter astonishment, I discovered there actually is a benefit to W7: Every single device installed perfectly, right out of the box. That, in and of itself, was amazing. I wasn't left with a Device Mangler full of question marks. Right off the bat, I saved an hour of futzing around on the Dell web site, downloading drivers and playing an infuriating game of "guess the hardware".

The default UI blows, of course. It took me about an hour of Googling around and futzing around to get the UI as close to "Windows Classic" as possible.

Start -> Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Personalization -> Basic Themes -> Windows Classic will get your windows to look reasonably like XP.

Then you have to futz with the firewall and the Start menu.

Start Menu:
Notification Area: OFF
Taskbar Buttons: Never Combine

To get most of the M$ crap off your Explorer windows, open up a window and click -> ORGANIZE -> LAYOUT.

Unfortunately, the only way to get a Classic start menu is to install a free program called CSMENU.

-> Control Panel ->All Control Panel Items -> Performance Options -> Visual Effects turns off all the bullshit eye candy screen stuff like animations inside Explorer windows, fade effects on the menus and other assorted, needless crap.

Unfortunately, a lot of the hard-coded locations of vital stuff have changed, an unfortunate annoyance that has carried over from the hopeless Windows Vista. For example, you can't get to C:\Documents and Settings because it basically doesn't exist.

But the performance is pretty good, I can live with it. I'll wait for at least Service Pack 1 (if not Service Pack 2) before I use it for anything important.

News Flash: The French Are Good for Something

OK, I admit it. I was wrong. The French are good for something.

link

The next time I am falling-down drunk and find myself with no corkscrew, I will think of how brilliant and creative French people are.

Three Weeks 'Til Downhill Season

Three weeks till the World Cup DH season kicks off in Lake Louise, Alberta. Winter doesn't even start for 7 weeks, but I'm sure The Sled Dogs will pull the races off. The Sled Dogs are a hard-working, hard-partying, loose confederation of course workers (most of whom are volunteers) who have been together since the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. They work their asses off literally around the clock to prepare the DH and SuperG pistes at LL.

A lot of people dread downhill season - the interminable weather delays, the changing snow conditions, innumerable course holds, the monstrous courses requiring huge infrastructure and setup. I, for one, love downhill season. You will not find a more entertaining display of athletic prowess, presented in a better natural venue. In short, downhill is the ultimate in sport theatre, at least as far as I'm concerned. As a fan, I simply dig downhill.

Another reason to love downhill season is, well, downhillers. To wit, they are (as a group) not screwed down too tight. Excepting the mostly straight-laced Austrians, your Kristian Ghedinas, your Tommy Moes, and your Todd Brookers are a batshit-crazy bunch.

Let's have a look at the basic concept. Go to the steepest, iciest, most dangerous mountain you can find. Snap a pair of devices to your feet, devices designed not to arrest your momentum, but to maximize it. Point the slippery devices straight down the hill. Shove off. Go like hell. Try to go faster than all the other guys, without killing yourself.

Perhaps now you can understand why downhillers aren't screwed down too tight.


My favorite ski racer currently competing on the World Cup tour is a guy named Rainer Schoenfelder, whom I've never met, but who became my favorite skier after I saw a video of him blasting through a slalom training run at Wengen last year buck naked. On a bet. Anybody that wacked has got to be a cool guy.

One of the best ski racers in the world, the defending World Cup Overall champion in fact, is a Norwegian named Aksel Lund Svindal. I've met him briefly a few times, and he didn't seem to have much personality. Just goes to show you.....first impressions can be deceiving.

Check out this video of the Norwegian DH team, shot at Portillo this past summer, about three weeks after I skied there.

http://www.aksellundsvindal.com/blog_cms/yet_another_michael_jackson_tribute/2009/10/22/1131

And that's just one of many reasons why I love downhill.

Royal Pains

Don't know if you've seen the TV series Royal Pains on USA Network, but it's very entertaining. It concerns a "concierge doctor" on call to the rich, famous, zonked-out, and totally psycho in a Richistan haven called The Hamptons, which is out on Long Island.

The Hamptons is a real place. I spent this weekend visiting friends out there.

Nice little $28,000,000 beachfront love shack


Another one.


One thing money cannot buy is good surf. This blown-out lumpy mess is considered epic conditions by the local surfers. Guh....ross! I wouldn't paddle out into this sick blecccch for all the tea in China.
It's October here, the water is about 54 degrees and the air temp is about the same, so the hearty, brave souls around here paddle out into this dreck wearing 5 mil wetsuits, complete with balaclava hoods, gloves, and booties. I shot the shit with a few of the local boyz down at the beach this morning as they waxed up their boards, guys who were stoked to surf in this. Nice guys, but crazy as shithouse rats.

Bexel Flypack. Don't Leave Home Without It

Obviously, floating a production truck to Bermuda is impractical. Bexel's FlyPack solves that problem. Very cool.

Audio world.

EVS World



Not a bad place to hold a golf tournament.

Most of the crew is staying next door at the Pompano Beach Club. Five minute walk to work.

Lost in Translation, Miami Style

I'm sitting in the American Airlines Admiral's Club at Miami Airport.

En route to Bermuda for the PGA Grand Slam of Golf.

The date is October 17. Autumn has barely begun. It's snowing to beat the band in New York. Here in Miami, it's 92 degrees.

In the AC, there's a room called "The Bose Room", where the chairs are wired for satellite radio. Each console has a variety of stations.


I'm guessing the guy who programmed the abbreviations into the consoles is either extraordinarily dumb, an extraordinary smartass, or, as is the case with a very high percentage of Miami residents, English is not his 1st language.

Orianthi Panagaris

Wow.

Just.....wow.

As Carlos Santana says, "seriously ass-whupping".