I recently decided it was time to replace my 5-year-old Sony laptop while it still has some resale value, and after extensive research, decided to go for another Sony Vaio — the VGN-AR320E model.

This huge “desktop replacement” laptop is a relatively recent model and has most of the features I want (big screen, big hard drive, Centrino Core Duo processor, 2GB RAM, USB 2.0), yet it was recently discontinued by Sony, and so was significantly discounted by many online retailers — prices were about $1,600, which is about what I spent on my last Vaio laptop.

Unfortunately, the first two retailers I ordered from came back telling me it was on “back order,” despite claiming that it was in stock on their websites. Although this was frustrating and wasted a couple of weeks’ of my time, I eventually got one from an eBay merchant for $1,390, so I saved a couple of hundred bucks for my (lack of) patience.

I have a couple of gripes with the new machine; firstly, it came pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium, which certainly looks nice (thanks to blatant plagiarism from the Mac OSX interface), but everything has moved from where it used to be in XP, so it takes ages to find anything. I’m also not convinced the new start menu is an improvement from a usability standpoint — it seems to take more clicks to launch programs than it used to — although perhaps I’ll get used to it. I do like the gadgets sidebar a lot, though (another OSX rip-off).

Secondly, it also came pre-installed with tons of crappy trial versions of software — a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works (is that still around!?), various bits of Sony tat and lots of AOL crap. It even has some MS SQL Server components installed — I have no idea why. I removed most of it.

Thirdly, there are no recovery disks; there is a recovery partition hiding on the hard drive somewhere, should I ever have to return the machine to it’s “out-of-the-box” state — which I hope I never will.

But perhaps the most annoying aspect is User Account Control, a new Vista feature that pops up annoying additional warning dialogues all the time to “ask permission” to do routine tasks, like launching applications or downloading software updates (which of course a new computer does ALL the time).

Also incredibly frustrating and time-consuming is the process of moving data and applications from one machine to another. I have a 60GB external hard drive for the process, so it should have been comparatively straightforward, but it’s an old USB 1.1 version, which doesn’t always mount properly (on either computer) and is incredibly slow. I tried to set up a peer-to-peer wireless network, but that didn’t seem to work either.

Apart from all the regular work (office files, websitre setc.), there are also all the “digital assets” that invariably have some kind of complex system to manage them; images (I somehow need to migrate my ACDSee 9 database, something my father failed to accomplish after literally months of support dialogue with company), and music (iTunes) being the biggest two.

Then there are all the device drivers for the myriad peripherals I’ve acquired over the years; a Canon digital camera, my aging iPod, two HP printers (an All-In-One and a photo printer), a scanner, my Nokia cellphone, a USB floppy drive (just in case!) and the aforementioned external USB hard drive. I also discovered the U3 Launchpad on my flash driove isn’t compatible with Vista at all (and i don’t think I’ll even bother installing drivers for my old Minidisc player!).

And then there are all the programs that spray logfiles all over the place; Skype, Windows Live Messenger, etc. etc.

I did start playing with the “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard,” but got cold feet half-way through — I find those wizards notoriously unreliable, and more often than not they simply bring old problems to an otherwise new and pristine computer. Besides, I’m a control freak where my computer is concerned, and I like to know EXACTLY what is going on, so I decided to take the manual route — which will be many, many hours of work.

In the push to hide complexity from the user, software designers have attempted to automate more and more of the functions of software — the point that they are now so complex, that it’s now almost impossible to move smoothly from one machine to another.

Well as you can see, thankfully the banner ads have disappeared from my site again after I contacted my web hosting provider, http://free.prohosting.com/.

Argh! Ugly banner ads have suddenly appeared all over my website, despite the fact that I paid my hosting company (free.prohosting.com) what was supposed to be a one-time fee for banner ad removal way back in January 2003.

Fortunately I’m a digital pack rat and still have the original email invoice, so hopefully the banner ads will be removed soon — or else I’ll need to find a new hosting solution.

I just got back last night from a couple of days in Washington DC, where I was part of an editorial committee working on the third revision to the NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.

While there, I was also able to visit my friends Gordon, Jamie and Darby, and was introduced to an employee of the World Bank who told me that they were all hoping that Wolfowitz would go. She also told me a funny story that when Wolfowitz first took over as President of the bank, he was given a facsimile of an 18th Century map of Iraq with the locations of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) marked on it!

I asked her if she thought the World Bank was a force for good, or a force for evil. She said she thought that, although many mistakes have been made, overall she thought it was a force for good (although obviously as an employee she’s not going to have a completely unbiased opinion!).

I’m extremely happy the Wolfowitz has been forced to resign. Apart from the fact that he had no credibility whatsoever in my book, I’m delighted to see that, one by one, the neocon architects of the current disastrous U.S. imperialism are beginning to discover that eventually their misdeeds catch up with them, and they can’t do whatever the hell they feel like after all.

Against all the odds, Sheffield United were relegated from the English Premier League last week on the last day of the football season — which coincidentally was also my birthday.

Despite being safely above the relegation zone at 15th in the table just a few weeks ago, and despite the fact that they only needed to draw against Wigan, a team already in the relegation zone and that had been in considerably worse form recently, I got up early and went to a bar in SoHo to watch the Blades play awful, desperate (and at one point horrific, when Jon Steade and the Wigan keeper smashed their heads together) football, and yet again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The other highly unlikely factor that conspired in their relegation to the Championship was that West Ham beat Manchester United, the league champions, 1-0 at home, thanks to a goal by the gifted and controversial Argentinean Carlos Tevez, who is already at the centre of a legal challenge and FIFA enquiry over transfer irregularities.

Perhaps the saddest part of the whole affair is that the Blades’ outspoken and hardworking manager Neil Warnock decided to quit. It’s a shame, because I thought he was a good manager who brought the Blades to the Premiership and obviously cared deeply for the team and the fans.

I just treated myself to a new Samsung LN-S3251D 32″ widescreen LCD HDTV, which seems huge compared to the standard 20″ telly I’ve had for the last 6 years or so.


But now I have to figure out how to get rid of my old Panasonic CT-20G5 20″ stereo color TV, which I’ve had for the last 6 years, and which still works perfectly. I don’t have any need (or space, for that matter) for a second TV, and a quick search of eBay suggests that there is absolutely no market for second-hand CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TV’s anymore.

If I can’t sell it on Craig’s List etc., I’ll need to figure out how to dispose of it responsibly. It would be a huge shame to send a perfectly good TV to a landfill!

This is a great idea — Modbury, a small town in Devon, has completely banned plastic bags. Now shoppers either bring their own reusable bags, or they buy biodegradable bags made of corn starch.

Apparently San Francisco will introduce a similar ban later this year.

I just discovered through the website StumbleUpon that Congressman (and potential Presidential candidate) Dennis J. Kucinich submitted articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney to Congress yesterday.

Bizarrely (and somewhat suspiciously) this doesn’t seem to have made the mainstream news — not even the trusty old BBC website has the story. I learnt about it from an article on a website called The Raw Story, Kucinich announces impeachment charges against Vice President Cheney. I was a little skeptical at first, but the link to copies of the articles of impeachment on Kucinich’s website seem to be real.

Kucinich, who was my favourite candidate in the last Presidential election, makes the point that it’s important to impeach Cheney before Bush, because if Bush was impeached first, Cheney would then become President!

I’m back home in Brooklyn, and enjoyed a quiet night in last night watching two good “message” movies.

The first was Lord of War starring Nicolas Cage, the story of Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian-American who grew up in a restaurant in Little Odessa in Brooklyn to become the World’s biggest independent arms dealer, a character who is apparently based loosely on real-life arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Apart from being an interesting and compelling action movie (Cage’s Orlov is a surprisingly likeable and sympathetic character, given his occupation), the film ends with the poignant message that private arms dealers are only operating in small-scale niche markets that the big arms dealers are unwilling or unable to operate in — often with their tacit permission.

The film ends by making the point that the five largest arms dealers in the World by far are the U.S., the U.K., Russia, France and China. It is not by coincidence that these five countries are also the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

My second message movie last night was Fast Food Nation, a fictional story based around the non-fiction book of the same name by Eric Schlosser, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the movie. The concept — turning a non-fiction book into a fictional story covering the same themes — worked surprisingly well.

There are various inter-connected themes in the film; it covers Mexican immigrants making the dangerous crossing into the U.S. who end up working as unskilled and abused employees in large corporate meat packing factories; a meat packing industry forced to cut corners to lower costs by profit-greedy fast food companies, and fast food companies trying to make profits by selling as much product as possible.

Everyone in the movie comes across as relatively normal and human, trying to do their best for themselves, but the end result is horrible: The immigrant workers have low pay, appalling and dangerous working conditions and no rights, and the consumers get to eat meat that is contaminated by fecal matter — i.e shit.

I stopped eating in fast food restaurants years ago, even before I read Fast Food Nation (see blogs passim) — I come from the land formerly of the mad cows, after all — but it was a good reminder of how unbridled capitalism can result in stable systems that put profits first and people and the environment last.

Chris & Martina got married AGAIN last night — this time by a priest, in a church called Santa Catalina de Siena. It was great; I´ve been to quite a few weddings in the last few years, but until last night, none of them have been in a church. There were about 200 people in the audience, and the ceremony was in both English and Spanish. I even had a small function: I read one of the three “intenciones,” which are kind of like appeals to God. Mine was an appeal for world peace (we were told what to say in advance).

After the ceremony there was a reception in a large courtyard behind the church, and later there was a dance. Apparently it´s traditional in Argentina for the first dance of the night to be a waltz between the bride and her father only, but then the groom cuts in and takes her for the rest of the dance. The symbolism doesn´t really need any further explanation!

It was a brilliant evening — I had a load of fun, and didn´t get back to the hotel until about 4am. Getting up in time for check-out this morning was a bit of a challenge!

Today I have to retrieve my credit card from El General restaurant, bar and cultural center, where I accidentally left it the other day after eating a steak there. When I arrived, all of the patrons were singing an old fist-thumping military song about General Peron! After the meal, I met Nan & Crispian at a huge nightclub called Museum after which we played pool in a dive bar in San Telmo — that was a fun night too!

It´s hard to believe that my vacation in Argentina is almost over already — I fly back to New York tonight at 8:20pm. My time here has gone so quickly; I´ve had a really great time, and met lots of old and new friends.