If you’ve followed the elections, you’ve probably seen President Elect Obama with his BlackBerry in hand. Afterall, if you’re a crackberry addict you have it with you all the time. Well, it turns out that his BlackBerry may be banned from the Oval Office because of strict email laws and traditions. There is also the Presidential Records Act, which requires all official correspondence be made available in the public domain. This means no late night messaging from the Obama.

So what is he going to do? He’s a smart man - he’ll figure out something.

Yup. Need I say more? The closer we get to the day, the more and more ads are going to get leaked. This time Target’s ad shows up online.

It’s been two weeks, so that means there’s a new Foamy episode. This time it involves the crazy pill popping squirrel and Germaine. They discuss book binding of the flesh (don’t ask - just watch). [ VIDEO LINK ]

Staples has Microsoft Live OneCare v2.0 for $39.99 - $25 Instant Savings (see discount as you proceed through checkout) - $20 Rebate (offer # 3282738) = ($5) with free shipping. There is also a $20 upgrade rebate (offer # 3282734) available for those who qualify, which means you would get paid $25 for purchasing this product.

Best Buy has Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7825 14″ Laptop for $549.99. Choose in store pick up to save on shipping, otherwise it is $20 to ship.

Specs:

* AMD Turion X2 TL-60 2.0GHz
* 3GB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM
* Multiformat DVD+-RW/CD-RW drive w/ double-layer support
* 17″ WXGA+ TFT-LCD Widescreen Display (1440×900)
* ATI RADEON X1250 Video Card
* 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (5400 rpm)
* Built-in Atheros high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g)
* 56 Kbps Modem
* Vista Home Premium
* 6.9 lbs

I honestly thought this game would have caused some problems for Florida going into it, especially after reading all the bowl projections last week and listening to all the commentary about what Florida needed to do in order to get to the National Championship - boy am I glad I was wrong. Needless to say, are proving why they are the hottest team right now.

Yes, SC was ranked 24 going into this game but they have the number 3 defense out there so I was sure they would cause a disruption to Florida’s offensive game but then again the Gators have other talents this year, as they were able to put away the Gamecocks with a score of 56 to 6.

It’s a known fact that many students and fans of the swamp are still ticked at Spurrier for leaving the Gators a few seasons ago but they have renewed faith in Urban Myer as he has proved time and time again that he’s one of the best coaches in NCAA as he was able to hand Steve Spurrier he’s worst loss as a college coach - now that’s impressive.

You could say that the game was pretty much over when Brandon Spikes intercepted Chris Smelley’s pass and took it in for a 12 yard touchdown or when James Smith scooped up a failed lateral attempt in Gamecock territory at took it to the half-inch yard line, where Tebow ran it in for a 1 yard score.

All in all, the Gators have performed well and are a picking up speed as the steam roll their opponents. Next on the list, Florida will play Citadel Bulldogs in Gainesville next week before heading up to FSU for the yearly rivalry. Florida controls their own destiny and they have a good shot at playing in the championship as long as they keep focus and increase in the style points category.

I know. I promised I would review this machine a few weeks ago but after getting caught up with a few things, I finally had some time to sit down and play around with my toy. For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about - I am referring to the Asus EEE PC 1000H netbook.

Background:

Here’s a little background on this purchase. After carrying around my IBM Lenovo N100 laptop, I thought it was time for something a bit more portable. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Lenovo because it was packed full of features. It had a 250GB hard drive, wireless, bluetooth capabilities, fingerprint reader and a web cam, but it was just too heavy for day to day travels. With this in mind, I set out for a laptop that was extremely portable but had some of the same features of the old laptop. At first, I wasn’t too keen on getting a netbook because I thought it was a pretty much a fad but I decided to do some research and realized that a netbook was probably my best option.

From there, I started looking into the MSI Wind and some other netbooks but finally decided on the Asus 1000H for a few reasons. First, it was the only netbook which had almost a standard size keyboard. The keyboard of the other netbooks on the market feels very cramped and I didn’t want to have to retrain myself to get used to typing. Next, it had bluetooth and wireless N support which is a huge plus and finally the price. I was able to score of these beauties from an authorized seller on eBay and use live cashback from Microsoft. With the cashback, I ended up getting the 1000H for around $300 which is a steal for this model (at the time of this post).

Unboxing:

It took about a week to get my package, which was a lot longer than I hoped for; however, that’s what happens when you deal with sellers on eBay (even authorized dealers). As you can see from the pictures, the 1000H comes in a white box featuring the white version of the 1000H. Inside the box, there was a case for the laptop, power cables, manual, and of course the netbook - you know the typical things you would find inside of netbook box.

Specs:

You can’t have a review of a product without disclosing the specs. The 1000H measures 10.5 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches and has a 10-inch display. It came with 1GB of DDR2 ram, a 160GB hard drive, 1.3 MP web cam, bluetooth, wireless connection, 3 USB ports, a SD card slot and a 1.6GHZ atom processor.

The Upgrades:

What kind of tech geek would I be if I simply accepted the stock features of any device I got my hands on. After opening the box and being amazed at how small and light this netbook was it was time to take it apart. Seeing that it only comes with 1GB of ram, I simply swapped the 1GB stick for a 2GB stick (2GB is the max this model will accept). From there, I took swapped out my hard drive from the Lenovo and popped it into this baby to increase the disk space from 160GB to 250GB. Now before you start saying that for the price of the upgrades I could have gotten this model or that model, I got the 2GB chip on from a deal that cost me 5 bucks after rebate and the hard drive was swapped out from my previous machine so there was no real added cost. The upgrade process took roughly 20 minutes as all you have to do is unscrew the bottom panel of the netbook to replace both parts.

The Vista Leap:

After everything was said and done, I wasted no time and upgraded the machine to Windows Vista. Why do you ask? I’ve read many reviews about how Vista has better battery options than Windows XP and I wanted to see for myself. Also, I had an extra copy of the Vista Ultimate and figured why the heck not. The first issue I ran into in trying to upgrade Vista was figuring out how the heck to install it. As many of you know, netbooks do not come with optical drives and the 1000H is no exception. In order to get Vista installed, I had to dig up a 4GB USB Flash drive and format it using the disk part command in order to get it to be viewed as a hard drive partition upon boot. After it was formatted, it was just a matter of using the xcopy command to copy everything off the Vista DVD disk on my desktop computer to the flash drive. Everything went without a hitch and Vista was completely installed in about 40 minutes.

Results:

You may be wondering what were the results of the Vista installation. Well, it turns out that Asus do not have any drivers dedicated to Vista on their site but the XP ones worked fine. The only issue right now is with the ACPI error that I receive upon booting into Vista. This controls the function keys to control the volume. There’s a hack out there to reroute those keys but I haven’t messed with it yet as the error message only pops up after a restart. I get a 2.6 experience score under Vista and the limiting factor turns out to be the graphics card, but it’s enough to run the Aero feature.

Although it takes about 50 seconds to boot up Vista, I am surprise how smoothly everything runs after it is fully loaded. There really isn’t any lag unless you start running applications like photoshop but who in the world would want to photoshop on this machine? Movies played extremely well using Windows Media Player as the default player. High Definition videos (720p and 1080p) played choppy but after installing CoreAVC those played just fine.

In regards to the battery life, with everything turned on (web cam, wireless and bluetooth), I can get close to 3 hours with the battery it came with. Seeing I don’t need to use the bluetooth and web cam feature all the time, I have them disabled from the task bar and gain about an extra hour of battery life. If you turn off everything (bluetooth, web cam and wireless) you will get 5+ hours which is not too shabby.

Opinion:

Pros: Considering that I’m a Power User, this device holds up really well. I take it everywhere with me especially since it is really light. I can get anywhere from 3 to 3.5 hours of battery life which is plenty of time to get my tasks done. I bring the AC adapter along with me if I’ll be gone the entire day but most of the time it stays at home. I was extremely impressed at how well it handles the Vista operating system and I will more than likely keep it on there and as the Windows 7 beta progresses, I will probably try it out on this machine and see how it stacks up.

Cons: I originally wanted the white version to this netbook because I read about how fingerprints show up really easily on the black model; they weren’t lying. The fingerprints get annoying from time to time and I constantly have to wipe off the housing of the netbook but the white version was out of stock and I really couldn’t wait on it to get back into stock. So if you decide to pick up this netbook, you may want to look into getting the white counterpart. The only other complaint I have right now is the ACPI issue in Vista but Asus currently does support Vista at this moment for this device so I can’t be too upset about it.

Other Thoughts:

The only thing left to test on this machine is the test of time. Since it is a relatively new netbook, there really aren’t any reviews on people having physical issues nor are there any reports of what the failure rate and time are on these devices but hopefully it will hold me over until I purchase something else down the road when Asus comes out with an updated model.

Like gambling and alcoholism, we are one step closer to adopting “internet addiction” as a disorder. Doctor Tao Ran, from the Beijing Health Ministry treats suffers of the addiction. He says, the threshold is around six hours a day and one of the following symptoms in the past three months: “yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.”

If you are one of those that suffer from this addiction, don’t worry there is hope. “Eighty percent of addicts can be cured with treatment, which usually lasts about three months,” said Tao. He did not describe the treatment, however.

I spend many hours in front of my computer, but I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to it but perhaps I’m just in denial.

Source: Lifehacker