First off, I do like my MacBook. It's just the right size for working on my lap, it's Intel dual core is powerful enough and yes it's cute. However, the cuteness has faded somewhat as it's now held together with two bits of sticky-tape! I kept thinking that the palm wrest was sticking to my hand and I thought it was coming unstuck. However, it's actually started to crack and break apart. There is a ~3mm border that goes all the way around the flat surface, it's that this is breaking away and my is it ugly. So the next time you hear someone harping on about the build quality of Apple, just hand them some sticky tape...they'll need it.

My little Mac Book does a pretty good job of running my "at home" applications and doing so without getting too hot and noisy. However, every now and again it ends up sounding like a Spitfire about to take off. What I've noticed that is that in the majority of these cases there is nothing running that should be stressing the system out, however, the one common item is that OSX is waiting for me to acknowledge a dialog, e.g. there is a update for xyz do you want to download it? Simply dismissing the dialog turns the Merlin engine off and taxes back to the hanger. So is there some bug on OSX that gets the UI into some kind of tight loop waiting for a response? If so this could be pretty serious for any sort of server application that could be starved of the processor, or at least sucking power.

I spent some (un)productive holiday time completing UT3 campaign mode and it was good fun. It's more story based than previous versions and does give you an opportunity to choose different paths through the campaign although I've not spotted how I can replay it ensuring I don't retake the same path. It's certainly more hectic than 2004 and judging by the levels of my hair pulling it was certainly harder to beat some levels, especially one particular warfare game where my team was outnumbered. I guess I was supposed to use the 'play card' feature and there also seemed to be some hints about a team roster but I didn't use either. One negative critism I'd level was that the AI was pretty dumb. Without wishing to spoil it there is a very important 1 vs 1 duel in which the CPU player is highly skilled, however the computer cannot resist going for the power ups. In this map the "double-damage" is situated in a difficult to reach spot that involves ducking to reach, which in turn means you're moving really slowly. I.e. you go in there and it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Having realised that, I would wait for the power up to apear but make no attempt to get it. I'd simply wait for the computer to attempt to get it when I could then easily mark up another kill. Now I would have expected a human opponent to realise that this strategy was costing them dearly and to give it up but the computer AI was just dumb. In the same duel in 2004 it took me a good few goes to see off the computer but I did this first attempt. Bit of an anti-climax really. But overall UT3 is great fun and getting in a 'dark walker' and unleashing War of the Worlds style death rays is good fun. Unlike many other games I'll still be playing this for some time to come.

and to stop lines breaking in a table;

overflow

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I spent 30 mins today trying to understand why the Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) or  NetMon wouldn't capture any data. After a lot of fiddling with network settings, Virus checkers and the like it turned out to be something very simple. NetMon has settings about how much disk space you should have free before it automatically stops capturing...yes I've got less than the default 2% free. After changing the setting it started working. Would have been nice if it has said, "automatically stopped, not enough free disk space" or something!