My older son ended up needing my (loaded) PowerBook for college, so I elected to take a small downgrade and replace it with a Macbook (not Pro) for myself.

Aside from a few annoyances, I'm pretty happy with it. I ended up partitioning the 120Gb drive into an 80Gb slice for Mac OS X and a 40 Gb slice for Windows XP. I plan on using the XP partition to hold games and viruses. And possibly Visual Studio 2005, which I picked up a copy of for $60 at the Microsoft Company Store when I was in Redmond.

I like the fact that when connected to an external monitor and keyboard, you can operate the Macbook closed. The actual operation seems to be fairly well thought out - close the Macbook, plug in the external monitor and keyboard and hit a key on the external keyboard to wake it up to display on the external monitor.

I don't care for the keyboard, which reminds me of the old TRS-80 Color Computer chicklet keyboard. Oh, and my Macbook is black and the lack of keyboard backlighting hurts.

Bootcamp is great, and XP runs nicely. The lack of a Delete key is a huge pain however, and having to press the right-hand Apple key while clicking in order to perform a right-click is just ridiculous. Isn't like 90% of the world right-handed? Aside from that, it's nice and fast and, in fact, regardless of what the armchair pundits speculated, the graphics adapter isn't bad - WoW runs at between 30 and 60 FPS.

I'm also trying out Parallels, since I occasionally have the need to run Windows Server 2003. I haven't decided though, whether it makes more sense to just boot from the XP partition and use VMWare.

I'm in Redmond this week, being educated on SharePoint 2007. SharePoint has a lot of potential: it's bewilderingly complicated in terms of setup and configuration, but it also has some amazing capabilities.

I spent a few years working on Portal back-ends from, oh, about 1999 to 2003 and it's interesting to see some of the ideas we thought about (but couldn't manage to bring to fruition) appearing in SharePoint. And done quite nicely. I predict that SharePoint will do quite well as a web front end, especially once people pick up on the power of features like the Business Data Catalogue, which effectively lets you create some (simple, at this point) level of composite application from various back-ends.

SharePoint 2007, BTW, works quite nicely in Safari on my PowerBook (which I have with me - and I'm not the only one). It doesn't have the tight Office integration that you'd have on XP, but the functionality is all there otherwise.

I know that every generation complains about the previous generation, and with that said I am, of course, going to complain.

I still remember, to this day, having the fact that "a lot" is two words drilled into me. It isn't "alot" or, as you'll see more and more often today, "allot" (which is what spell checkers recommend when you type "alot" - try it yourself). It's "a lot". Two words.

I don't think spelling, grammar or much of the English language are actually being taught, in fact. I suspect that it's a matter of scribbling down a phonetic representation of a word or phrase you've heard. Surely that's good enough, right? Because everyone knows that when you write:

For all intensive purposes

...you actually mean...

For all intents and purposes

Interestingly, these misheard phrases are actually making it into the (more or less) accepted English language. How many people know that it's actually couldn't care less?

Happily though, there's organizations like the Apostrophe Protection Society, who are here to help us. In fact, they're doing a lot of good. Do yourself a favour and bookmark their page. Send it to a friend. You'll be doing your part to prevent the language from degrading into inscrutability.

P.S. It's always dangerous to write a piece about grammar. I recognize this, so feel free to start picking. Comments aren't enabled on this site, so you'll have to email me. And I'll ignore you.