I'm back!  (on my new laptop drive)  Considering the potential for disaster, it was relatively painless.  A mere matter of reinstalling Windows and reloading the entire 150GB of data which constitutes my online / business life.  {Let me just put in a plug for Acronis TrueImage which is a great backup/restore tool.}  Have I ever told you how much I hate file permissions?  Yeah, well I do.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's see what's happening...

The blogosphere is having a field day digesting yesterday's Apple announcements, of course.  Engadget has a ton of product details and hands-on reviews.  You might find this interview with Walt Mossberg interesting - he makes some sensible points (e.g. the significance of multitouch gestures on a trackpad).  Journalists like Walt have now become celebrities to the point where they are the subject of interviews!  BusinessWeek has an interesting series on Apple's New Friends and Foes.  Of course as a media distribution company (yes Virginia, that's what they are) they have relationships with a lot of content providers like music labels and movies studies, and with a lot of distribution points like cellular carriers.

My own morning after reaction: I still think iTunes Movies Rentals and the AppleTV are brilliant; they are going to do for movies what the iTunes store and iPods did for music.  The Macbook Air puzzles me, however; why doesn't it "stay on the air" all the time, with Internet access via Edge or EVDO?  The iPhone does...  This must be coming, right?  John Gruber and Paul Boutin wonder the same...  Reinforcing this for me, I actually watched part of the Jobsnote in my car while driving from San Diego to Los Angeles (don't ask) using my laptop's EVDO card....

And I'm wondering as I'm sure is Steve Jobs: how long before someone hacks Apple's DRM to allow "rented" movies to be owned?

Uncov skewers rewriting in Ajax: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  "The proliferation of stupid is the cancer that is killing the internet.  In the quest to re-implement every conceivable desktop application in Ajax, you mental midgets are setting computing back 10 years.  The worst part about it is, you think that you're innovating."  Indeed.

Kind of reminds me of Russell Beattie's WTF 2.0?  "I really do think there should be a litmus test for new web apps launched from now on - something very basic and if they don't pass, they don't qualify for any buzz or linkage.  It's a simple test: Will they take my credit card?"

Random note: Have you ever noticed that Chick Hearn appears on Pink Floyd's The Wall?  Yep, right near the end of Don't Leave Me Now, seems like maybe a Lakers / Bulls Game...

I saw this in The Scientist; seems more and more scientists are "going digital":