This is post is pretty much just going to be me extolling the virtues of a cool computer that my friend has, that I use all the time, and that I want for myself. It’s called the ASUS Eee PC 900 HA, and at just over 300 bucks, I’ll probably pick up one of these in the next few weeks, if for no other reason than to finally give my back a break. Carrying around my clunky old Dell is no fun at all, especially since I bought it last year, for approximately 4 times the price of this little bugger.

Here’s a picture demonstrating the Eee PC’s small size (if you click it, you’ll be taken to Amazon.com):

If you’re thinking of buying a laptop, the small, affordable “netbook” laptops that have come out this year are the way to go. If you’re shopping for someone else, or you’re trying to convince someone to buy one for you, here are the talking points you can trot out to convince whoever you need to convince to buy it:

True Portability
At 8.9 inches long by 6.7 inches wide, it’s much smaller than most college notebooks, and at 1.33 inches deep, and at 2.5 pounds, it’s lighter than the typical dead-tree textbook. Unlike most laptops, you really can take this with you wherever you go – without getting a sore back or shoulder.

Enormous Storage Capacity
The 900HA’s hard drive provides plenty of space to store all of your music, pictures, and video. At 160 GB, its storage capacity is forty (40!) times bigger than the similarly-priced HP 2133-KR922UT 8.9-Inch Mini-Note PC, which is equipped with just a 4 GB hard drive. Storage capacity was actually the reason I didn’t buy into the cheap laptop hype earlier this year – the previous models had 20 GB, tops, and that’s just not enough. Asus has done an awesome job in addressing that shortcoming with the 900HA.

The Reliability of Windows XP
Many computers in this price range are loaded with the less familiar Linux operating system, and many more expensive computers are preloaded with the less reliable Windows Vista operating system (which I’m not alone in hating). The EEE PC 940 HA comes with the tried and true Windows XP Home Edition, which means you’ll have no trouble running the programs you’re already used to running, and you should not have any hardware compatibility issues if you do decide to add a printer or upgrade your machine in the future.

A Bright, Easy to Read Display
The 8.9 inch TFT LCD display operates at a resolution 1024×600 (WXGA), producing a viewing experience comparable to those offered by larger machines. This is another huge improvement from earlier netbook models.

Wireless Freedom
An integrated 54g 802.11b/g wireless card means you have high-speed Internet access wherever there’s a WiFi hotspot, and a powerful 4-cell battery means you can work for up to 5 hours without being tethered to a power outlet. (My Dell Inspiron gave me 2 hours at the height of its powers…)

Solid Fit and Finish
High-quality materials give this model a look and feel that beats bulkier, heavier, more expensive laptops. Just because it’s small and inexpensive doesn’t mean it has to feel cheap. (Which will be a nice change for me…) The built-in webcam is another great plus. The only downside: like the Apple MacBook Air, this machine doesn’t have an optical drive. (I get the feeling that optical drives in general might be on their way out, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

The machine does have 3 USB 2.0 ports, though, so if you really need a CD or DVD player, adding an external one should be pretty easy.

Performance
The 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM is a huge step up from Asus’ prior Celeron-based models. The RAM is easily upgradeable, but my buddy’s machine had no problems running MS Excel and Adobe Photoshop without the upgrade.

Affordability
This model sells for $329.99 plus shipping. That’s a fully-functional laptop computer just slightly more than the price of a 16GB iPhone! (and way less if you count AT&T’s mandatory iPhone service plan)

Bottom Line
Like I said upfront, I strongly recommend this laptop – it’s a great little machine at a pretty fantastic price. You can pick it up through Amazon which I also recommend – because if you go into a particular store – I won’t mention which one – the salespeople will almost certainly try to up-sell you a more expensive model, which won’t have enough features (in my opinion) to justify the 100-200% increase in cost. Or, even worse, they might try to sell you one of this year’s earlier netbook models, which are almost as expensive, but much more limited in almost every respect. Make a note -this is the one you want (well, it’s the one I want):

If it sells out before Christmas (which I understand it probably will – computers are always popular Christmas presents, and the trendiness of the new netbooks combined with the value of this particular model will make it hotter than most) – another good choice is the Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch Mini Laptop- it’s generally pretty comparable to the Asus Eee PC in terms of size, quality, and performance, but it does cost about $80 more.

If you do manage to get your hands on either one, please let me know how it worked out for you!

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. It’s a video created by Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State University, and it’s a fantastic demonstration of why XML is such a big deal.

And yes, I was whoring out my blog in that last post. I apologize for nothing! Netbooks are the future.

UPDATE: The netbook post (”that last post”) has been republished and is now “that next post”.

If you try to sell something on Craigslist, and the buyer does not want to meet you in person, that should be treated as a huge red flag. If that seller mentions PayPal, escrow, “GUARANTEED SAFETY”, or anything like that, then you’ve got another huge red flag.

If you feel the need to investigate further, just to be sure, check the full header of the email sent by the buyer, and look for the originating IP address.

It’ll be a number that looks something like this: 41.219.252.160

Then, go to any IP locator website - IP2Location is the one I usually use - and copy & paste that number into the website form. The website will tell you, more or less, where that email came from. If you do that for the example I’ve provided above, you’ll find that the sender of the email with that particular IP address was from Nigeria.

Once any African country - ESPECIALLY NIGERIA - pops up in your dealings with a potential buyer, seller - or some party to any transaction involving requests for money, merchandise, personal data, or anything else of value - you can safely and self-assuredly tell that other party to go screw themselves.

If you don’t, you are most certainly about to be scammed.

When Barack Obama was running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2003, he attended a cocktail party at which a prominent author mistook him for a waiter and asked him to fetch a drink.

Oof.

Olives = Disgusting, yet Olive Oil = Delicious. Inexplicable.

Since it looks like I’ll be heading back to the 305 a little earlier than I expected (only until January! Don’t worry, good people of Argentina, I’ll be back!), now seems like a good time to share four new Miami-based blogs that I just discovered.

The first is Miami Dish, a very cool blog about Miami food and events, which I found via Twitter. (I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use Twitter properly, and I was just about to abandon it when I saw a “tweet” by Miami Dish. Twitter, Miami Dish bought you another chance.)

The second, also found via Twitter, is Greener Miami. For being such a clean, stylish city (last spring, Forbes named it “the cleanest city in America“), Miami doesn’t make its green initiatives very obvious. Public transportation isn’t great, traffic is heavier than you’d think, and I’m pretty sure my building didn’t recycle a single bottle in the three and a half years I lived there. The more blogs like Greener Miami, the better, in my opinion - especially when you consider that, if Al Gore is right, and the sea level does rise, South Florida is one of the places with the most to lose.

Two others I found on Miami Dish’s blogroll:

Mango & Lime: another great food and restaurant blog. The recipe for portobello quesadillas looks pretty fantastic, and the restaurant reviews are great. When I get back to Florida, I’m sure I’ll be checking out this site a lot more often.

The South Florida Daily Blog: a useful aggregator of news stories, blog posts, discussions about all of South Florida. It was SFDB that directed me to this Sun-Sentinel news story about local businesses trying to silence critics on the Internet by suing them. (Just when I was starting to give Florida a little credit.)

Will.i.am has a new video:

Buenos Aires has far too many transvestite prostitutes walking around at night.

Before you go jogging in the evening, it’s better to be absolutely sure you’ll be back by the time the sun sets, or wait until the next morning. FYI.

From The Onion:

Yeah, no more politics for a little while…

“The last two years proved who ‘the real John McCain’ is.”

Looking back, now that the election is over, I have to say that I don’t buy this.  People do stupid, scummy, out-of-character stuff when they’re running for office – especially when they’re running for President.  They do things they wouldn’t normally do, and justify it by noting that what really matters are the things they do once they take office – not things they do when they’re trying to get elected to that office.

I think we were really lucky that Barack Obama was strong enough not to resort to embarrassing compromises too often (regardless of what the media now claims). It wasn’t always this for Democrats.

Bill Clinton is probably not proud of his 1992 trip back to Arkansas to execute a mentally disabled man. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, did Al Gore really talk about the issues that he thought were most important?  That you thought were most important?

Were John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards thinking more about weapons of mass destruction or their own political ambitions when they cast their votes on the Iraq War?

Even Barack Obama voted to reform FISA on Bush’s terms, granting telecoms retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping – and he used to teach Constitutional Law!

Do these capitulations and moral compromises make our politicians unprincipled frauds?  To some extent, yeah, they sure do.  Should they outweigh all the good that these men and women have fought for and achieved over the course of the rest of their careers?  I think we’d all say that they should not.

Mostly, these failures of nerve, of temporarily putting ambition before principle, are sins we forget when our candidate loses, and forgive if we’re lucky enough to have that candidate turn out to be a capable public servant.

Over the last two years, McCain really did vote with Bush 90% of the time.  He did.  The country was looking for as broad a coalition against Bush as we could get, and he wouldn’t be a part of it.  He apparently thought that that was what he needed to do to win the Republican primaries, and he was probably right.  There’s no doubt that many of the votes he cast and many of the statements he made (especially his flip-flop with regard to the treatment of foreign detainees) were inexcusable, and will stain his reputation for a very long time.

Here’s the thing, though:  Democrats controlled Congress for those two years.  Over that period, many of the Arizona Senator’s votes led to very little action.  Quite a few of them were effective only in convincing Republican primary voters that McCain was not actually a closet Democrat.  Let’s not forget: in 2002, John McCain was allegedly considering a move out of the Republican Party, and, in 2004, he was allegedly on the short list to be John Kerry’s running mate.

How could that have been?  Why would Senator Kerry have even considered running with McCain? Well, from 2000 – 2006, McCain became Bush’s most capable foil in the Senate.  Not just among Republican Senators, but among all Senators.  Deservedly or not, he was the Senator who was most respected by the national press, and when he broke with the President, it changed how a significant number of people saw an issue, because it changed how the national media reported on that issue. He sided with Democrats – against Bush - on environmental regulation, health care reform, gun control, and the first wave of Bush’s tax cuts.  This is not ancient history.

You may also recall that in 2002 McCain co-wrote a law that (with Sen. Russ Feingold) that attempted to eliminate unlimited “soft” money in politics, and required the “I approved this message” addition to campaign-funded ads.  The point of all that was to improve the quality of political campaigns, and to reduce the appearance of corruption in government – two things that were not exactly at the top of our current President’s to-do list.  He pursued campaign finance reform for years, at considerable risk to his standing within his own party.  If it hadn’t been for the Enron scandal, Republicans would have never let the bill make it to the President’s desk, and even if they had, Bush would have certainly vetoed it.

I think that McCain’s body of work in the Senate, taken as a whole, including those moments of political courage, including those moments of stubbornly standing on principle, and, yes, including his recent drive to get his party to forget those moments, is the more accurate measure of McCain the man.  It’s indisputable that, in order to take a shot at becoming President, he disappointed many of his liberal and independent admirers by transforming into someone who was unrecognizable to them. It’s very tempting, especially now, to evaluate him in light of his 2007-08 Presidential campaign alone - but it’s not the whole picture.

I’m glad McCain 2.0 didn’t sell, and I’m glad that the right wing which he thought he need so badly has been marginalized.  Like the rest of the world, I’m genuinely thrilled that we finally elected the right man for this job.

It’s far from certain, though, that McCain’s recent transformation will be permanent, or that he will support his party’s charge to oppose the solutions offered by the Democrats.  When McCain returns to the Senate, he might very well change back into his pre-2007 self.  If he does, then I think that’s an event we should all welcome with open arms, not rolling eyes.

I’m not saying that Democrats should make any effort to accommodate McCain or his supporters, and I’m not saying that Democrats should “govern from the center” - whatever that means.  What I’m saying is that, over the next few years, there’s going to be a group of angry, fanatical people who form the remains of the Republican Party.  I don’t think those people will consider McCain to be a member of their club, and I think things can only get better from here if we acknowledge that on this issue, they just might be right.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

UPDATE: Via Digg, here’s the last part of a series in Esquire by Chris Jones, tracking John McCain’s descent from 2006-2008.