I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, and tapped the YouTube icon. Doing a search for “Sesame Street” returned a list of clips I knew she’d like, and we started out with a classic Cookie Monster bit. I flipped it over, the picture re-oriented itself, and she smiled while Cookie started explaining numbers. Almost immediately, there were prodigious results, and we watched a few more clips while things sorted themselves out.

There are many excellent reasons to have one of these things beyond a potty training aid. (For the record, we prefer books). Friday night after Jen drifted off to sleep, I stayed awake streaming a Ghost In The Shell movie from Netflix until 1:30 in the morning, something that was inadvisable considering I was on baby duty early the next morning. (Review: The movie was middling to poor, but it was good enough to get me sucked in. The Netflix app has a lousy UI but streams movies very well). I’ve tagged and labeled photos, updated my Mint account, written forum posts, looked for recipes, and checked the weather. It’s so much easier to deal with for certain things than a laptop would be, even with a screen-based keyboard, and it’s much easier to carry around.

Compared to a first-gen iPhone, it’s slicker and faster than a politician at a county fair; everything is immediate and smooth. It makes my 4-year-old MacBook Pro feel like a Mac Classic. I spent two hours watching the movie with a full charge and when it was over, the battery was still at 90%. Even better: the back was cool to the touch, unlike my MBP, which gets blazing hot. The browser is fast and responsive, scrolling and redraw is immediate (unlike my iPhone), and as a pretty heavy-duty internet user, I’ve only stumbled across one or two sites with video I couldn’t watch.

I’d like to say I’m writing this post on the iPad, but because it’s owned by my company I’m keeping my personal login details off the machine. There is a WordPress app available, and many of the things I use our backup laptop for are accomplished easily on the iPad. One thing that looks a little sketchy right now is printing from the iPad, but there are some solutions available and it looks like Apple may be working on something as well. I do find myself wanting to do certain things with it that I can’t (hook up a camera and download pictures, for one) but overall I see this as a no-brainer for our near-term future. I think we will wait, however, for when they put a camera in the next generation—shortly, I’m guessing, given the advent of FaceTime.

I take my hat off not to BP, but to the incredibly skilled workers and operators who are piloting million-dollar machines by remote control five thousand feet below the surface of the ocean to fix a problem that never should have happened in the first place. They make it look easy.

Last night, while watching the second-to-last episode of LOST, I decided to tear into my MacBook Pro to replace the LVDS cable: the wire that sends pretty much all of the signal to the LCD display, and what I suspect is the root cause of the issues with the lower half of the screen disappearing for the last five months or so. I found one available online for $12 last week, and figured that $12 was cheaper than $1,200 for a new MacBook, which is what I’ve been mulling over for a few months now.

Because I wasn’t able to find the exact service manual or take apart directions for the model A1151 17″ MBP, I got stumped by removal of the clutch cover, and no amount of searching at 11PM revealed anything that would help. So I reassembled the case and rebooted, which went fine, but upon logging in I found the trackpad button had become extremely sensitive, to the point of being unusable. So I’m back to considering a replacement, which is not a happy thought.

At this point, I think I’d keep the MBP on my desk at home and get something more portable, like a standard MacBook, for carting back and forth to the office. As much as I love a 17″ display, I don’t use it enough at work as a hardcore workstation to justify the extra $1,000.

I’m currently listening to a 9-year-old album by Ivy called Long Distance, which is slightly uptempo chilled francophile pop (does that make sense?) I also have the new album by Delorean on heavy rotation, which is good; I’ve been sick of all the music I have for months now, so I like having some options.

And, quickly: last night’s LOST was…good, I guess. Rushed, to be sure. I think they’re trying to wrap up two seasons’ worth of explanations and story arcs and mythos in one abbreviated season, and a lot of the action feels forced and tossed-off to me. I wasn’t expecting a “very special episode” dedicated to Jin and Sun, but their departure (while in keeping with the “rules” of the show, as explained last night) was pretty quick. I’d developed an attachment to certain characters over the last six years, and so having more than one of them disappear quickly has been a bit jarring. While I’m glad the writers didn’t resort to maudlin half-hour goodbyes, it would have been nice to get just a little more time with folks, especially since they’ve all hiked across the island seventeen zillion times just to meet up with each other.

At least with a weblog, I can choose to share what I want with the world.

At this point, I’d really just like to have a new laptop.

I’ve been working on a WordPress-based portfolio site for a friend of ours, and over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve dipped a toe back into working with PHP, which has been fun and challenging. This evening I was able to pull some snippets of code from here and there, make some educated guesses, and get a spiffy category display page working in the way that I’d originally imagined—something that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to do. The site is coming together really well, and our friend sounded excited about it when we talked to her on the weekend.

Meanwhile, the simple fix I thought I had planned for the Slattern is not so easy after all. I read that simply manually cranking the sunroof motor would seal the window, but I couldn’t get it to budge on Sunday. So I have to pick up some Torx screwdriver bits and tear down part of the sunroof in order to slide the tracks back into place whenever the sun decides to come back out this week; in the meantime, I’m back in the Jeep. I guess it’s a good thing we haven’t sold that yet, huh?