Decisions, Decisions.

Ah, yes, Mondays. How I loathe thee.

Anyway, this is turning out to be quite an eventful one also outside work. There's a new release of Snakelets out on the SourceForge site, for starters, which means I'll be updating my stuff.

Best of all, though, Slashdot finally went CSS (if it happened earlier, I hadn't noticed), which means we're finally rid of the fugly green and have, well... excellently styled, round-cornered, slightly-less-fugly green.

Still, a brilliant restyling nonetheless, and one that Alex Bendiken is to be commended on.

Next up, Pierre Igot sent his MacBook back to the store. Since I work well into the night (2, 3, 4 AM, etc.), I'm leery of a machine that doesn't even let you listen to music without kicking on the fans, especially because I usually listen to music (at a progressively lower volume) while I work.

When I got my iMac G5, I was more than a bit annoyed at the extra noise the iMac G5 makes when compared to the old "lamp-style" iMac (and believe me, these fans blow some serious air), so I think I'll be paying even more attention to the MacBook noise and excessive heat rumors from now on.

(Regular readers will have noticed I've been updating my MacBook node with everything I come across, as well as links to the latest batch of completely absurd KB documents that are making the rounds...)

And no matter how big a grain of salt you use on the amount of complaints, you just have to Google for a bit to confirm their existence (you can also search for "within spec" and other popular support terminology pertaining to the topic...).

Furthermore, I've been paying close attention to Daniel Jalkut's plight ever since the first post popped up on the Planet, and since then I also found a similar series on Betalogue and a few other similar - but shorter - stories here and there.

I've also been having a few interesting conversations with a bunch of folk over e-mail - Cian Walsh, Cristopher Briere and Pedro Leite, who got their MacBooks and Pros recently, have been more than helpful in answering my queries (whenever I actually got around to reading and replying to my e-mail), and they seem happy enough (although some find the machines a bit too hot and a bit too noisy).

Update: Pedro just IM'd me to say that his Pro's fans are now always on in the summer weather, and that the machine heats up more than enough to justify putting something between it and your lap - apparently the heat is blown back underneath the laptop...

The thing is, there's just too much negative karma on first generation Apple gear these days, and like I wrote just this weekend, I don't invest in hardware lightly.

So, unless my iBook dies all of a sudden, I'm holding off until Apple gets its QA together to such an extent that not only there is a) some sort of acknowledgment that, no, laptops aren't supposed to be noisy and hot just because they're more powerful and that b) there is ample confirmation that there is a new batch of MacBooks (or even Pros) that fixes these issues completely, and it makes its way here.

Anything that moos and isn't sliced in steak (as well as preferably quietly cooling off in the freezer) isn't going to get in the door.

So getting a new laptop might happen before the first production die of Intel Merom CPUs is cut, and it might not, but waiting until after Xmas - and probably until Leopard makes my iBook completely obsolete - seems like a more reasonable prospect.

Let's just hope the tables won't be turned and I won't find myself running a buggy OS on a finely tuned, perfect laptop...

On WinTel

Nah, no chance - I don't use enough of Windows at home to justify the expense.

I might go on a nostalgia trip and set up WindowMaker on one of my old laptops, but all the laptops I see out there are too big, too crammed with junk and too overpriced for me to actually go out and waste money on the things.

No, I want a decent Mac laptop with the polished Apple had before the switch to Intel - even if it means waiting another year...

Pointers on how to get hold of a cheap R100 are welcome, though.