Bought a Laptop

On the spur of the moment, inspired by the 1 day (today - Oct.19) Dell $750 off $1500+ laptop deal Peter blogged, I just bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Given that you sacrifice the standard 15% off and I didn't exactly hit $1500, this is an extra about 30-35% but that is pretty good and lets me get an acceptable machine for $1K which I was not sure I was going to manage. I hope the keyboard and trackpad are managable for me. This machine is actually significantly more powerful than my old home desktop so I may even use it there too.

I've been thinking about a laptop for a long time but putting if off - for now at least I'm happy this inspired me to move on it and get past the Mac/Windows choice.

Cook's Illustrated vs Consumer Reports

I forgot to mention this in my last entry. There is an obvious comparison of the equipment reviews in Cook's Illustrated to Consumer Reports and for me CI wins easily. I like CR and subscribe to it off and on but I have two big problems with their reviews. First off, although they select a winner it is never really clear to me how much better it is than the others. There is not enough direct comparison of the top few choices. CI picks a very clear winner and nicely explains why they chose that one. The other big problem I have is availability. With CI, I have never had a problem finding something they recommended (it may be helped that they and I are both located in Boston), usually at Kitchen's Etc.. With CR, OTOH, I often have problems finding things and they don't give any indicators of what stores would be good to find a given model in. I am currently having no luck finding the top scorer in their recent air conditioners review and this is quite annoying. Both are very useful magazines but I personally like CI much more.

Things: Introduction

I had thought about doing this for a while but reading Recommendo yesterday and the related Tools are the Revolution piece finally decided me. I am going to review every once a in a while things I own; tools, art, tech, whatever. I will focus on those things which others can buy but will sometimes review more unique items.

One thing I will generally not talk about is Kitchen stuff and instead will again highly recommend Cook's Illustrated magazine and their accompanying PBS show America's Test Kitchen. This is the cooking show for engineers, where everything is tested and tested again to find the best solution, treating cooking as a science rather than an art which is how I cook. It will be less useful to serious cooking people interested in play in the kitchen. A few items which they recommend and I highly endorse are the Oxo Swivel Peeler (which I found before discovering them and love), the Unicorn Magnum Pepper Mill and the Microplane Zester. All of these won their category's test. I have not yet been steered wrong by their reviews or recipes.