Then there are these:

When we moved we needed Cordless phones with 3 handsets – we now have 3 floors, and I wanted Dect phones so all the Wifi in the neighborhood wouldn’t interfere with our phones. We found a great sale on some Phillips phones (the poetically named CD4453B/37). These phones are SUPPOSED to have a long battery life – 150 hours of standby and 12 hours of talk – Sadly not even close – I followed the instructions on charging the batteries fully and letting them drain fully the first few times, I try not to leave them on the charger if they don’t need charging… Sadly they need charging every second day, and if you put them on Speaker phone they will often die with no warning –Even if they still have 2/3 bars showing on the charge indicator- they you have to go around the house looking for a phone that still has some charge. I may try buying different rechargable batteries to replace the ones that came with them – but maybe that’s throwing good money after bad.

Why would anyone want different Cordless phones to have different memories on them? You need to program each phone seperately, teach each one how to get messages from the invisible answering machine, teach each one a good phonebook – yes you CAN copy phonebooks from phone to phone, but to do that you need to have all of them in one place, and hit some keys on each on – yes I really want the phonebook to come to the other phone. The memory belongs in the base so you don’t have any of this insanity.

The UI on these things is crazy too. Most anything you want to do requires lots of keypresses – and now I’ve lost the reciept and I’m stuck with them. Of course it could be worse – I could have gotten the next model up which looks and feels more like a relay baton than a phone.

Lesson: Don’t expect much from Cordless phones, don’t trust brand names, keep receipts.

Recommendation: buy something else if you can.

More:
Today in the IMDb I read that this was possibly a “legal way to censor movies.” Boring. Part of the message of YouTube is that MashUps are interesting to lots of people. Making video mashups easy and low-bandwidth is super interesting. Splicing in the “deleted” or “alternate” scenes from the extras on your DVD is interesting.

Cuts Press Release & AP Article -Sept 25, 2006.

Thankfully, my boss is frugal and when he saw that our companies standard Windows Laptop would cost us about twice as much as the MacBook I got the choice was clear – Cameron gets a MacBook. Admittedly the Windows Laptop would have had a bigger screen, a docking station, and an external monitor, but I’m very happy with the MacBook.

I’ve used Boot Camp 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.1 like most people I couldn’t tell the difference between .01, and .02, but 1.1 was a lot better – in the MacBook I have an abbreviated keyboard – no windows delete key – just a Mac Delete/Windows ? key. That made hitting control-alt-delete (to log into the network) problemmatic. Windows has an alternate keystroke for getting the task manager up (force quit) – Ctrl-Shift-Esc, but without a real extended keyboard I could not hit control-alt-delete to log in until Boot Camp 1.1. It is now fn-ctrl-alt-delete. Right now Boot camp just works – choose on boot what OS to use (hold down option key to pick – similar to multi-booting lots of Linux/Win machines) and it happily is OS X, or Win XP. At work I have an IT department to make sure the firewall, and Anti-virus software is working.

The problem I’m still having with Boot camp is that sometimes when I re-boot it comes up with the wrong time – usually off by 4 hours – I’m guessing it has something to do with OSX and XP storing the Time zone differently so the computer gets confused. I haven’t cared enough to really detail when this problem happens. On the windows side I have a boot script that double checks that the time is right if I’m at the office, In OSX “use network time” usually fixes me up.

Today I was sad to see John Gruber write:

The principle of Occam’s Razor holds that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.