Well, Obsessable just published a comparator that pits all the current popular netbooks up against one another, so I can spend far too much time sorting back and forth between the different models and dreaming about possibly upgrading to something new that I can freshly hack with new hacks and actually get Leopard running on it. Check it out.

Here’s a list of some of the netbooks and related items covered by the netbook comparator: Netbook, SSD, MSI Wind U120, Asus S101, Asus Eee PC 1000, HP Mini 1000, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, Acer Aspire One, Lenovo IdeaPad S10, Averatec Buddy, BenQ Joybook Lite U101.

UPDATE: Brian weighs in with his thoughts on netbooks over at his blog.

As Kristin and I were watching Santa Claus is Coming to Town tonight, I started thinking about Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and his discussion of the panopticon and panopticism (here’s a random excerpt from the book that I found via a quick search if you’ve never read it; Wikipedia, of course, also has an entry on the book). If you were to ever study for an advanced degree in literature with a focus in critical theory, or perhaps study for a degree in philosophy, you would probably read this book (if you haven’t and these descriptions fit you, you should) and you’d also be plagued with thought processes for the rest of your life that cause you to think of the book while watching children’s stop-motion animation pieces like Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Listening to Fred Astaire telling the kids (the captive invisible audience for the tale; in other words you while you’re watching it; the show casts all audience members in the role of a child eager to hear the great origin story of Santa Claus) about Santa’s magic snowball that he can peer in to like an all-seeing god to see whether you’re being naughty or nice so be good for the sake of goodness—listening to Fred Astaire telling you about this will suddenly make you start thinking about the panopticon and Big Brother and the ever-watchful eyes on us that keep us disciplined. That is what you’ll think about if you’ve read the book and you’ve studied far too many books in graduate school. I recommend against it.

In any case, that’s what I started thinking about while watching the show, and although I love gifts and I really enjoy Christmas, I really hate the lie of Santa Claus that we tell our children both because it is a lie and because it is a bribe to persuade them to act good, not for the sake of goodness, but so that they will get toys at Christmas time. The whole thing smacks of dishonesty and hypocrisy and I hate it. I always have ever since I first learned that there wasn’t a Santa Claus when I was a child. I hated it more as I grew up and started reading Foucault. And I still hate it when I think of Foucault while watching a Christmas show that, admittedly, I love (because I love stop-motion and I love the one foot in front of the other song, which is a good message). I don’t have any kids, but I plan on having children someday (hopefully sooner rather than later) and I really don’t want to tell them these lies. Kristin says I’m just a grinch and interested in destroying the magic of the holidays, but can’t it be magical and fun and honest? Or am I being too much of a snobbish sort who has read too many books, filled his head with idealist thoughts, over thinks things, and I just need to relax?

In any case, there’s a lot of people talking about Cyber Monday deals today, so if you didn’t get all your shopping done on Black Friday, be on the lookout. Also, don’t forget to check out Obsessable’s Holiday Gift Guide for 2008.

It must be a big deal, as Mahalo has a whole tab devoted to it on their homepage today. Their Cyber Monday page, however, makes no mention of cyber slang. Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to cybersex, but no mention of any connection between it and Cyber Monday.

Here’s the initial test podcast recorded with it (with one slight edit in GarageBand to remove foul language):

http://media.sampletheweb.com/4trackpodcast.mp3

iTunes gave my podcast the boot from the iTunes Store without a warning because of lack of updates. They notified me after the removal. Yay for no warnings! :-b

So, I began the horribly time consuming process of uninstalling Boot Camp to do a full reinstall. The only problem? All Boot Camp installations now fail with a “Disk error” after the first stage of Windows installation reboot. I never had this problem before. I’ve tried erasing the Boot Camp partition and starting from scratch with two different Windows XP disks that I own, one Windows XP Professional and the other Windows XP Home, and nothing works. Even though both of these disks have worked flawlessly in the past (so I really don’t think it’s the same problem outlined here; even though I’m going to give it another shot after this post is up).

There is 200MBs of unexplained partitioned space on the hard drive that I haven’t noticed before. I think that space was most likely created by Parallels and is the root of all these problems, but I have no idea if that’s a correct hunch or if I risk rendering my MacBook inoperable by fiddling with this. I am beyond frustrated and no one from Parallels has replied to any of my questions through the appropriate, provided channels for complaining about problems, so I’m left with no choice but to complain publicly here.

I need a solution and I’m hoping someone from Parallels sees this post and reacts appropriately. If your incompetent support staff cannot provide me with a solution, then I want a full refund for not only the upgrade that I just purchased, but also for the previous copy of the software that I owned, since the new version ruined the working solution I had in place.

If anyone from VMware wants to offer me a deal on an alternative solution that will allow me to fix my Boot Camp installation and run a virtual machine off of that partition and it works, I will gladly publicize on this blog that your product works, that your support staff is helpful in cleaning up Parallel’s bungled messes, and I will recommend that everyone using or considering using Parallels use your products instead.

UPDATE: After multiple attempts, I finally got Boot Camp to reinstall, and then I was finally able to get Parallels to work. This doesn’t change the fact that Parallels destroyed the previous Boot Camp installation, I now have to spend hours reinstalling programs, and Parallels support still hasn’t contacted me about either of my two open tickets that I submitted over two weeks ago.

Randall wrote up a good first impressions overview of the all that the New Xbox Experience has to offer. I’m loving the streaming Netflix integration myself, and now feel as if I need to get a larger hard drive for my 360 so I can start saving games to the hard drive. Awesome feature!

But, seriously, Lee Matthews, next time you bother to kick a new site in the shins, why not read the FAQ first so you know how to criticize it correctly? That’s the type of extra researching that served me back when I was one of the first bloggers on Download Squad. The same tactic has served journalists well for years. Blogging’s not just about being a “Quick Draw McGraw” with your judgments. :-D

We’re not some silly popularity contest based on followers. Twitemperature is based on how much what you’re yammering on about syncs up with the online trends that are happening with what everyone else is yammering on about. We’re going to add some more things eventually, but right now, that’s what drives it, and it would seem that a lot of people are having fun with it.

Also, big shout out to Brian Alvey for the nice post about our launch. I don’t know if we’ll bother adding songs, but I do have a Foreigner reference in one of the rotating messages for cold temperatures.

Twitemperature measures whether you are hot or cold on the current topics of concern to the Twitter community.

I just wanted to take a moment to announce a little weekend project of mine and Ryan’s: Twitemperature. I got the idea last week while watching all the storm of activity around Twitterank (don’t worry; we won’t ask for your password), I registered the domain, I pinged Ryan with my ideas of how it would work, and he slapped it together over the weekend.

We have a FAQ that explains it in more detail, but basically you enter your Twitter name (or the Twitter name of anyone really) and we poll your last couple of hundred tweets and compare what you’re talking about against all the current online hot trends that everyone else on Twitter is talking about. We also have a list of penalties that can work against you in order to try to prevent spammers from always being hot. The temperature gauge is extremely dynamic, so feel free to check back regularly, and please tell all your friends about us. I hope everyone really enjoys this tool. We have plans for several updates like leader-boards, overall Twitter community temperature, and tracking people’s highest and lowest temperatures, but this was all we could squeeze in in one weekend, so hopefully this is enough for you to think it’s cool and worthwhile.

You can follow us on Twitter here.