Hey there Noah. I enjoyed your pod cast. Patte and I now have 3 computers in the house. A desktop running xp, a laptop running Vista, and an apple notebook. So I am now getting a bit of a better insight into all the pro and cons of the various systems. The insight of a non-nerd geezer of course but I'm not totally clueless. At least about the progams I use all the time. First Vista. It sucks. Running office 2007 on it is like pushing jello up Bill Gates yazoo. Everything takes way too long. The same program runs pretty damn well with xp and I have half the DRAM on the desktop as I do on the laptop. I think this may be due to all the crap they stuck in the program to fend off security attacks. Or maybe not. Like what do I know anyway? The office 2007 has a lot of worthwhile features on it but the learning curve on figuring out how to get it configured to your liking is also way too long. Took me forever to just find out how to set the fonts permanently across all programs. Still haven't found out how to get the address book in Windows mail to automatically match the one created in Outlook. I appreciated your comments on how nice it would be if new versions of existing programs actually made the program easier to use. Another example of how MS can screw thigs up is that when I installed O-2007 on the desktop the spellcheck in outlook express became completely scrambled. I had no choice but to make Outlook my default e-mail program. And now on to apple. First the good. It doesn't crash so i'm not dealing with those "do you want to report this error message" boxes two or three times a day. The bad is that the way the programs work, scrolling, saving. minimizing, etc. are not nearly as convenient as MS. When everything is working smoothly of course. One other thing about apple. I used to think of them as being comsumer friendly. That stopped when I realized that iTunes was selling songs at 3 times the price that e-music does. And then apple also does that annoying thing where any song over 7 minutes long is 'album only". And why the extra price for non-protected and for higher quality? The higher quality price jack really pisses me off. There aren't two grades of quality on a CD and what difference does it make to apple that someone is willing to spend more time downloading a song? They only have to post it once onto their store servers, right?

Well enough ranting. I found out a month ago that I would be going to DC in Sept. So I checked out the events page in the Seattle PI. Low and behold, I was able to score tickets for the Flaming Lips on the 20th and for Arcade Fire on the 24th. There is a god afterall. Patte will be flying down for the Arcade Fire concert. Praise be, praise be.