“I will tell you this about iLiver 2.0: It’s nanoengineered, and it kicks ass. I wake up every morning feeling like Shaft, Superfly, James Bond and Kung Fu all put together. I’m bench-pressing twice my body weight”
Life is better again. Dan Lyons brought back Steve Jobs, this time with half of David Pogue’s liver.
Okay, so I get grief for talking about fishing and shaving the dog’s butt on this blog by people who for some resason think that the guy who does digital marketing for the company that makes ThinkPads is going to blog about ThinkPads. No way! Ok, so sure, I try not to get all spammy and promotional for the company that pays my paychecks, but every so often we do something that reminds me why I here and glad to not be there, and that’s my simple love for classic stuff that works, is designed by people who care about what they are making, and carries a kind of craftsmanship that I sure as heck didn’t get from my rental car this week.
For the last year I’ve had a serious love affair with my ThinkPad X200S — a bad ass little ultraportable with a 12 inch screen. I love it so much that I just juiced the hard drive to 320 gigs and am tempted to go buy some more memory to make it fly …
But then this came along. Just another ThinkPad?
This is the T400s. The T-series is our bread and butter ThinkPad — the one our corporate users roll out to their employees. If you are reading this post on a ThinkPad your IT department gave you then you are probably reading it on a T60 or a T61. It’s what I was given at IDG in 2005. If you bought it yourself, or are a big traveller, then you may be on an X200 like me, or an X60-61.
So why am I getting all spammy and in your face about just another black laptop?
Ah ….. This thing took all the glory of our X300 — the notebook Businessweek called the Perfect PC — and puts it into a serious heatseeker of a laptop. You can, if you are inclined to spend the big dollars, make this thing behave like a serious workstation. Configure it with a big SSD drive, max the RAM and you’re talking one of the most powerful laptops ever conceived. Super thin, and loaded. I could see toting this around for the next two years with never a regret.
I’d dumping the X200 for this. Listening to my buddy David Hill go on about the design enhancements– the interior design — not the skin, the bling, the crud that our competitors seem to think makes idiots buy PCs, but the internal genius… in this. I personally love the consistency of our design, I just need to figure out how to show you the inside genius.
Want one? Send me an email for my employee purchase code. dchurbuck AT lenovo.com. Here’s David on the keyboard.
Matt Jones at Jack Morton says what need to be said — it’s not the plumbing, but the water in the pipes when it comes to social marketing.
“At the risk of being branded a heretic or perhaps just being shown the door by my agency HR director, I have to say it: I hate social media. Why? Because it’s just media. And since when was media ever interesting?”
via Why I Hate Social Media – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.
Cape Cod Today on Three Bays’ tour of the Cotuit Bays last weekend. I saw them on the water Saturday — there was a little sun and break from the incessant rain. It’s good to see public awareness building about the water quality issues.
As I grow old I start to look at life’s potential opportunities differently, chafing at hours spent wasted in front of the television or laptop, fretting over powerpoints that don’t get read, emails that don’t get answered, Dancing With the Celebrity Housewives in Intervention … and realize, that at any given time, there is something I could be doing that I have never done before.
Last night I did something I’ve been meaning to do for the last four years — and that was go see a Durham Bulls game. I tried once the first summer I worked in North Carolina but was rained out before the first pitch.
Goodmon Park is what the connoisseurs of the sport would call a “bandbox” of a park — a nice new (1995) AAA league ballpark that sits like an emerald of grass in the late afternoon sun and gave me that wonderful revelatory thrill as I walked through the tunnel to the stands and saw in front of me that big green field (I get kind of religious when I emerge from the bowels of Fenway, but still, the comparisons between churches and ballparks are one of sport’s writings most tired but true cliches.)
Big bag of peanuts, four — count em — four hotdogs; a big Yuengling beer and a nice night in the Carolina summer on the third base line by the Red Sox bullpen.
Clay Bucholtz on the mound for the Pawtucket Red Sox — my home team’s AAA feeder. And Scot Kazmir rehabbing for the Tampa Bay Rays — last season’s arch rivals (we had an epic bench clearing brawl).
Bucholtz left the game early, falling behind, and by the end of the nine innings the Bulls had won, 3-1, breaking a long losing streak.
Just a nice night, well spent, with a good friend, a lot better than four hours weeding emails in a hotel room.