I’ll admit I’ve been linking to jkOnTheRun a lot for news lately, but James and Kevin are simply on top of everything a mobile pro needs. I’ve been following James Kendrick’s use of his P1610 for several months and have to admit it’s currently my top choice for my next computer. My second choice would be a Samsung Q1P which happens to be Kevin Tofel’s current machine.
I’ll claim not to be a follower, but the P1610 has just crossed another threshold that makes it a sure bet for me. Fujitsu is now shipping the device with Windows Vista Business as an option to Windows XP. This is great news as James has talked about audio driver issues (here, here, here, and here) with his from-scratch Vista install. Hopefully, these are resolved in the shipping OEM install.
According to this post over at jkOnTheRun, CompUSA is closing up to half of its brick and mortar stores. While customers should be able to clean up with discounts starting around 20% off, the big question to me is why.
Personally, I think this is a natural cycle for the computer industry. The consumer base has gotten comfortable with Internet purchasing of big-ticket items like computers and HD TVs among other things. At the same time, more and more technology products have been comoditized to the point that you can find almost everything you need at Wal-Mart, Target, or K-Mart. Not to mention long-time technology chains like BestBuy and Circuit City carrying everything from laptops, to cell phones, to car stereos, to HD TVs, to refrigerators, to… you get the point.
Trying to be a computer superstore when computing products are as common as toasters is a tough business. I’m not surprised that they are reducing the number of retail outlets when you factor it all in. Of course, this is my opinion of what’s happening, and did not contact CompUSA for any information on the topic, so take it for what its worth.
I’m testing BlogJet to see if it works better with the XHTML requirements of the theme I’m now using. While I may have only heard of BlogJet in passing previously, James Kendrick over at jkOnTheRun has recommended it in a post or two, so I thought I’d check it out.
Pretty nifty tool so far, I just hope it actually generates clean XHTML compliant output. I’ll give it a try for awhile (the 30 day trial period) and see if it does the job.
I’ve got the sidebar issue figured out! It was improper XHTML validation, meaning that I had some syntax issues in several posts. Still do one some I’m sure – I only fixed the one’s that were on the front page so it would work. I’m sure if a person drilled down into posts from a few days to a week ago the sidebar will drop down below the posts.
What? You’re wondering what caused this? I was too! My culprit was Windows Live Writer adding some “unclean” XHTML definitions when using certain features that made WLW really useful. So I’m back to writing my posts in the browser again for the time being until I figure out if it was my tag-insert plugin or something deeper in WLW.
It may be for me. My new theme simply does not like WLW created posts – mainly because it does not create strict XHTML. Why can’t Microsoft adhere to a standard? It really frosts my balls when they have some great (and complex) products, but they can’t follow something as simple as XHTML.
Ugh!
And it was a nice WYSIWYG editor as far as I was concerned. Figures!
As governor, the State Capitol will stand for unity and common sense.
In addition to the POW/MIA flag that has long flown over the State Capitol, we will fly two flags when I am governor: the Wisconsin state flag and the American flag.
