another vote for the 13" retina macbook pro. also, you can use the imac as a monitor rather than having to acquire a dedicated one. that way you can extend its life way beyond your applecare period (something i've never bought for a desktop machine, by the by).

it's unfortunate that t.o.p. is dependent on amazon to survive. amazon is evil. amazon will destroy the rest of retail and then it'll finally be able to justify its obscenely ridiculous p/e to the vultures on wall street. also mobiles make really awkward cameras even if the picture quality is almost as good.

i like "sized for regular guys". i've a ford focus with recaro chairs. it's a nice secure fit for me. went to a special lunch with my peers and i was the driver. the guy who took the passenger seat isn't obese by any stretch but he's wider than me. he complained the chair was too tight. a data point on ford chairs ....

i've been using cyberpower ups devices for years and have had too many power failures with which to test their effectiveness. passed with flying colours. whereas a previous apc ups failed me - too long of a delay between the mains failing and it taking over meant the computer had already crashed. plus its battery life was pathetic.

phew! after all the digital ink wasted on that daft sir jonny camera, your rant was a wonderful breath of fresh air. many thanks for that!

given i'm highly active and for most of my life very skinny, i was taken aback when i started dramatically gaining weight a few years ago. similar to dr wittig, i found monitoring my input/output helps. being the retentive type also helps. acquired a fitbit dongle. can't unreservedly recommend it as there are some really annoying flaws in both the device and the app/webapp that support it. but obsessively tracking my weight, exercise, and caloric intake have pushed my weight back to a reasonable range. i'm also attempting to follow taube's more fat less starch recommendations. difficult for a vegetarian. but not impossible.

always found the claim that scratching a diamond across a grooved piece of vinyl sounds better than decoding a pcm bitstream to be a tad dubious. major reason is a transfer function called the riaa curve. this compensates for the fact that you can't cut those grooves wide enough to record the lower frequencies as they were actually played. thus an important aspect of any analogue amplifier is the accuracy of its riaa filter. so how's that different than any of the digital filters required to make 16bit pcm data listenable? it's still a transfer function. it's still possible to error when you build it. or when the components drift from age ....

your article and the new yorker piece both suggest i should look into what my health plan offers in the way of sleep therapy cuz i sleep poorly and function badly in a rather demanding tetchy job .... doesn't help that our idiot government has inflicted jetlag on us all this weekend. i loath dst - what a stupid concept!

yup, that maser is a handsome car. but many of its stable mates are not, especially the sedans. to my eye, they look like chrysler products with a lovely exhaust burble (something only the italians seem to do well). have to agree with your take on the new stingray. it has potential as a good-looking car from certain views but overall isn't. it's a beast, too, which could be a good thing except too many boyracers will end up pranging the thing.

i like prof krugman too much to impose such a repulsive job on him.

bartlett repeats one of the great anti-canadian healthcare tales: "And although American conservatives are fond of pointing to cases where Canadians come to the United States for treatment, ..." thing is, in most cases where canadians ventured south for heathcare, the canadian medicare system still paid for that treatment. this is what american conservatives ignore. also, there are centres of excellence in canada where american patients venture north to get better care than is available in the united states. there's nothing wrong with specialisation and cross-border medical care.

oh well .... "oh well" was my favourite track from "then play on". so sad to hear it turned into a dirge by a zed-zed ....

why? it was yet another of his leveraged buyouts (per taibbi http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829). willard contributed a paltry sum of his own then piled debt on the repuglicant teatards. too bad they hadn't a reasonable alternative. too bad they're not reasonable ....

curses: i now own a gx1 (once it gets here). hope you get your cut from the clickthru ....

i'm offended! frankly, it matters not how neutral a tone you take on any topic: someone somewhere will be offended. there are plenty of aphorisms about how you can please some of the people some of the time and that's about it. and good luck with it ....

meandering slightly off topic: i rode by a stable this morning. saw a number of young women/girls riding or otherwise mucking about with the large odoriferous mammals. never see any young men/boys. just girls. wondering if my sample set is just too small or is obsessing over horses a girl thing?

wrong coast, mike. california is the place ya oughta be, so load up that truck and move to beverley ....

contacted my local subaru dealer about arranging a test drive of a brz when the car is available. got an obnoxious reply saying test drives were right out - all cars were already allocated to buyers and would i like to get on the wait list. cripes. i won't buy a car under those circumstances, no matter how much the filthy hacks in the motor trade laud the damned thing. i try driving every car i consider buying. no exceptions. thus no brz for me ....

encountered a problem on initial landing at gov.uk: they apparently failed to consider really large viewports. thus the satellite view of portsmouth gets tiled on my scope. alistapart had a great piece about dealing with this very issue.

dunno, from a quick perusal of his blog (assuming newmonetarism.blogspot.com is the right williamson) he appears to have sneer down to a fine art. good luck dealing with him.

although that citroën concept is about as repulsive an eyesore as you say, it's exempt from the ugliest car awards as it's not a production machine. pontiac and their hideous aztec still rule the roost ....

ignoring the trolls, where did krugman address the bit about the evil miracle?

never did understand the art market, even after carefully reading "the painted word" (http://www.amazon.com/Painted-Word-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427581/). understand it even less now that charlatans like damien hirst waded into that marketplace. i'm hoping it's merely something in the nature of a fool and his money and not some taste malfunction on my part ....

i used to have a collection of about 1,000 vinyl lps, mostly british and japanese imports. after acquiring my first cdplayer (1982 or thereabouts), i started replacing my lps with cds. i've managed to find about 90% of my old collection in digital format. the other 10%? well who cares? the thing i miss the most about those scratchy old vinyl disks is the covers. the rest .... took the lps to bert's on yonge street or the record peddlar on queen or gave them to friends and eventually reduced the collection to zero. mp3/aac didn't really come along until long after my lps were already in someone else's possession. however, i've ripped all my cds to mp3/aac and carry them around in my various ipods. i still have ALL the source cds. wondering why as they take up a fair amount of space. maybe because i still don't really trust the hard drive(s) that hosts my collection. by the way, ip law and the desires of the record companies are only vaguely in sync. there's lots of room for fair use and format shifting whereas the record companies would like you to pay them over and over again for the same old stuff in order to keep them from a well-deserved bankruptcy.

a bit rich of jowly warmongering elitist friedman lecturing anyone on morality. like politicians, the filthy hacks who pollute our discourse need to have patches indicating who bought and paid for them. the hacks are just as corrupt as our politicians, especially the grey lady's frontline hacks, friedman, dowd, collins, &c.