No, this is not a post about Thanksgiving turkeys, or dark versus white meat. My friend, Chris, has posted a funny little thing on his site that I thought I would share with anyone reading here.

It’s about chests and breasts and touching. Aroused? Get out of here you sicko. For the rest of you still here, it’s about how there’s a double standard in personal contact. Women can touch men in places men can’t touch women. To me, it seems part of the male/female dichotomy. We men are seen as tough and strong, women soft and meek. It shouldn’t be a big deal to be touched, poked, and prodded. For women, culturally they should refuse such affronts and most do. I’ve rarely touched a woman’s breast that didn’t overtly want me to. I can’t say many have touched mine, but I don’t think I’d do the Elaine Beniss “Get out of here” shove to my girl friends. Of course there’s a double standard, but it’s nice to see some of my friends taking an objective look at it. Go Tran.

The other day, I went to the bank to deposit some money and to say hi to my banker. I’m still building that relationship, and I think it’s going well. I step out of the bank, which is in a busy mall like area.

I hear all this honking and screaming going on in the parking lot. I scan the area and I see it is coming from the grocery store. Apparently, a truck is pulling out of the parking lot with a baby carrier on top of the roof!! There are people honking their horns and other people even running after the car waving their arms wildly in the air. I’ve seen something like this before on [I]Jackass[/I], an MTV show. Some of the people catch up to the truck and the driver gets out and grabs the carrier off the roof and brings it into the car. There didn’t seem to be much concern or gratefulness on the driver’s part which confirmed my suspicions that this was just a stunt.

The fact is, every parent I’ve ever seen puts their baby into the car before their groceries. Sure some don’t, but they sure as hell don’t try to lift 15 lbs onto their roof, just to put a few bags in. Most parents I see, buckle their kids in first if anything. Then they tend to the bags. I rarely see anyone even put groceries on their car. These people were just doing this as a prank. To get a rise out of people, just like what happened on the TV show.

It got me thinking. If I were to see this and be in my car and I swerved to stop the car and they struck me, would I be a hero or at fault in a car accident. If someone had a heart attack at seeing such a horrible sight, would the driver be at fault? Could the police arrest the driver for upsetting people like that?

In my opinion, causing a disturbance like that was the same as yelling fire in a movie theater. There was an intent to deceive and the fact that it was for someone’s amusement is in no way an excuse. In fact, it should earn a more severe punishment. I’m all for amusement when people don’t get hurt, but when people are hurt, emotionally, mentally or physically, someone must pay. Sure on [I]Candid Camera[/I], people laugh afterwards, but they border on grounds for a lawsuit too. I’m not a hardass, ask anyone who knows me, but when I see recklessness like I saw in that parking lot, the jovial side of me goes on a long vacation. I just wanted to share my thoughts on a humorless event.

My Apple iBook has arrived today. Let a new era in personal computing begin. There are a lot of nice things about this iBook. I think the most obvious one is that it is all white. Finally, I’m one of the good guys! Second is that there is a tremendous amount of attention to detail with this machine. From the backlit apple, the visual instructionions, the light on the power cord, the box it came in, it all comes down to the little things that make you really appreciate it all. Third is that I love it’s small size and efficiency. This is a Japanese person’s computer. All efficiency. Fourth is that the graphics are just amazing There is so much eye-candy here my eyes are loving it. I really like how Macs enforce a strong sense of UI style, it makes using the programs easier. A few programs break the UI, but not as many as Windows, where it seems everyone is reinventing the wheel.

Apple’s slogan for OSX is that “It Just Works” and to a large degree that is true. It did most of the work for me in finding my wireless network after I installed the card. I didn’t have to load any drivers and my only configuration really was to choose the wireless network I wanted to be a part of (I don’t use the default name of the network). Getting the printer on the print server was pretty easy. It was a little more work, because D-Link doesn’t support MacOS natively. However, I just found the IP address and queue name my router uses and it worked. Cool.

I’ve installed Microsoft Office and the developer tools. Those should be fun to play with in the next few days. Yahoo Messenger works pretty much the same. Unfortunately, this version of IE is semi-crippled. Movable Type doesn’t seem to want to do its Javascript button things. I’ll have to make the urls by hand so click on them for my sake.

There’s been a lot of crazy things going on in the world lately. I’ll prepare my rant this weekend.

In this transition period between my old job and my new one, I thought it would be good to go ahead and start tranferring my important files and contact info to a new computer. Although I have a nice computer I build about a year ago (Athlon 1.2Ghz), I wanted to get a laptop. I’ll be very mobile with my new job and I don’t see myself carrying around a desktop in my car. So to that end, I’ve been searching for the right computer.

If you’ve been reading my blog, then you know that I’ve been drooling over the new powerbooks from Apple. These things are awesome. I’ve got the funds to buy one of these, but I’ve decided not to buy a powerbook. Instead, I ordered an iBook from MacWarehouse. These people were cool and they gave me some great deals. I realized talking to this lady that doing deals over the phone or in person is so much better than doing it by fax or online. When you talk to a person, you get a lot more information and can rapidly react to information of all sorts. The lady knew I was considering AppleCare, but I told her I was going to hold off on it. She dropped the price from $249 t0 $209, explained Apple’s standard warranty, and then said that if I bought it now I wouldn’t have to register it or mail off anything. I told her, “You had me at $209.” She replied, “You complete me.”

This was a much better experience than an online transaction. I think I’ll have to write something later about personal interaction versus computer interaction.

Click more to read my reasoning for the ibook.
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People, I’m getting sick. Yep, a dreadful cold. I probably got it from Yara, the poor thing had a cold last week. Now I can barely breathe through my nose. Ahh, this too shall pass.

The sicker thing is Apple’s new Powerbook! They just released a 1GHz version today with a DVD Burner. It is definitely something to drool over. I’m personally lusting for one now and debating on whether I should just go down to the Apple Store tomorrow for lunch and buy one. I’ll probably call them before I go to make sure they have them in. Otherwise, why bother?

I had thought about waiting until I did my first deal as a sort of reward to myself, but I don’t know if I can resist the titanium’s siren call… Oh, so sexy! I need help.