As always, for our less tech-inclined crowed: scintillating tales, elicit pics and candid film of mostly fly and oft aggressive lesbians are readily available here and here.

I gotta into a discussion with Geezy last night about my philosophy on buying a new Mac Book so I could run Parallels or such on native Intel to have a Windows test environment handy. My thoughts: I got a workhorse Powerbook I snagged of Amazon for about half what a new Mac Book would cost, and picked up a shiny HP Win box floor model avec widescreen monitor, 400 gig drive & TV tuner card + PVR software for about half less than that. The catch is that I don’t get super fast Windows emulation when I’m on the road, having to return to the tower to test. Also, since I bothered to get the tower at all feels like I should use it…so thanks to JayShutUp & Lady Michi now I got a fucking Warcraft addiction. But I also get Windows Media Center with a IR remote and such, which is pretty nice after not having TV around for the last couple of years.

It’s been a while since I had Windows as my everyday OS, and it’s been a bit of a hassle re-learning how to deal with the constant “why the fuck is it telling me that?” user experience inherent to Microsoft’s software. But overall I’ve been able to get a decent environment config’d and I must admit (though quietly around fellow Mac fan boys like Rocket and Orion): I’m kinda digging on my PC.

Helpful to the whole experience have been the following apps and add-ons, which have proven to make Windows suck far less than usual:

Launchy - file launcher
Running Quicksilver as keystroke-based file launcher for OS X is much more intuitive to me than the traditional desktop icon + program menu item metaphor. Launchy does the same thing for Windows. And it’s free.

Sandboxie - sandbox environment manager
Run apps, including web browsers, in a virtual machine. Fuck up the virtual? Won’t impact your real OS install. Open source.

Web-Developer Server Suite - WAMP, WAMP, baby.
Dead simple to install and config Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP web-server distribution for Windows. Free like beer.

ShellEnhancer - Windows UI add-on
Adds a bunch of features, adjust others, to make Windows not look but act a bit more like OS X. Double click menu bars to roll up windows. Minimize apps to sys tray with middle mouse click. Other neato stuff I haven’t dug into 100% yet.

ColorPic - Color, um, picker.
Stop opening Photoshop just to get the hex color off an image. Slightly silly UI, but small footprint and does the same gig as ExColor on OS X.

TightVNC - Free VNC Server
This plus Chicken of the VNC as my Mac client actually do let me take the box on the road. Latency issues once in a while but again: free like a pint.

E - Text Editor - Textmate for Windows.
If you use Textmate at all, you know why this pretty sweet.

InfranView - image viewer.
Lightweight & quick + does a lot of the simpler tasks of Photoshop.

Teetered to the capitalist edge by a barely needed nudge by Matt Rocket, and caught up in the techno future fury of emotion that was the same day pre-game to seeing Transformers: The Movie on IMAX (during which I not only shat myself involuntarily but popped an blood vessel behind my right eye due to acoustic rape), I bought an iPhone a while back.

Apparently as of yesterday I was the only guy on the planet who hadn’t cashed in his rebate. In case I’m wrong and you’ve been living under a rock as well, here’s the link to get yours:

Apple iPhone Rebate Link

Steve Jobs jacks up the iPhone $200 bucks from his marketing team’s MSRP, gets the early adopter fan boys and girls like me to buy in, soon afterwards drops the price down to the real numbers to zombie the rest of the pre-Christmas hordes into dropping kwon…then offers a rebate in the guise of a sincere apology which most people will either a) forget to use or b) use towards buying something that costs way more than the rebate is for.

And you wonder why I love this fucking guy? GENIUS.

The Internet? Yup. Still magic, babe.

Animoto is a new-to-me online instant video generation social thingee where you:

1. Add pics, either by uploading from your computer or grabbing from your (for example) Flickr feed.

2. Add music, either commercial MP3s you choose to break all the laws of fair use for, or from their own craptastic selection of Hip Hop, Indie and Shit Rock.

3. Hit ‘Puree’ and let Animoto crank out a video for you based on your choices.

Here’s the result of 5 minutes of picking random images polluting my laptop + a track from the Yeah, Yeah, um, Yeahs:

Apparently, I’m some sort of genius existential pop art film producer. Who knew.

The also offer some kind of premium subscription make full-length features as well as this sort of thirty second masterpiece. Check ‘em out here.