As indicated in my last post, I just acquired a Macbook Pro. For web development needs, I need to install an emulator and Windows so I can run dual platforms. I went through this exercise a year ago, buying a copy of XP Home Edition off eBay. Price at the time: around $90.

Here we are a year later, and Windows 7 has dropped. Price for XP Home Edition on eBay is now hovering around $50. I can’t find a complete install of Win 7 (well, a version that looks trustworthy, anyway) for less than $100.

In fairness, I didn’t even consider installing Vista last year. But if Windows 7 is having the opposite effect of Vista on demand for XP – which is what appears to be the case, if my experience is any indication – it would seem Microsoft really did get it right this time.

(As a side note, I’m obviously a Mac guy at home, but I’m on a Windows machine at work. They upgraded me to 7 shortly before Christmas, and I must say I’m very, very impressed.)

Nifty APOD  picture today.

Delivered today: a gently used 17″ unibody Macbook Pro I snapped up off eBay.  Early review, in no particular order:

• The display is fantastic.  Crisp and clear.  I hear the newer iMacs are having all sorts of display issues, but this one is good so far, and as it’s right at a year old I don’t anticipate it will be too problematic.
• The aluminum body, while gorgeous, is still delicate.  My wristwatch has a stainless steel band, and I may end up taking it off when working with the laptop.
• The multi-touch trackpad is really splendid.  Intuitive, quick to learn and easy to use.
• Just discovered the light sensor along the top of the screen – if I lean forward even a little and cast a shadow over the sensor, the screen darkens a bit to adjust.  Almost too sensitive.
• Out of habit, I keep going to the Home and End keys, which don’t exist on this keyboard.  Hopefully their absence doesn’t drive me too batty.

I’m not finished migrating over just yet, so I may have more quibbles (specifically when I start learning what portions of Adobe CS3 don’t work on Snow Leopard), but so far I’m loving this machine.

In a joint WSJ column, Orrin Hatch, Ken Blackwell and Kenneth Klukowski telegraph the forthcoming lawsuit(s) against Obamacare:

America’s founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.

If/when this monstrosity becomes law, I imagine more than a few state attorneys general will go in together on some sort of legal action.  I bet IJ and Clint Bolick will want in as well.

UPDATE: Can I call ’em or what?  New op-ed from Clint on the Goldwater Institute’s site:

Even if the Attorney General decides to abrogate his duty to defend the state against unconstitutional actions by the federal government, the Goldwater Institute stands prepared to defend state sovereignty and the rights of Arizonans.

And the title of said op-ed? “Health Care Bill Begs for Constitutional Challenge.”  Just in case it wasn’t, you know, entirely clear.

This year, for the first time, we ended up having a Christmas get-together at our house.  During the gathering I remarked to a brother how my 30s have been so much better than my 20s.  “Yeah,” he countered, “but you also have more money.”

Well, yes, but that’s hardly all of it.  As the curtain closes on this decade, I’m compelled to reflect a bit on what this decade means to me.  Wasn’t that such a troublesome, tiring ten years?  I won’t go into all the particulars in a blog post, but on a personal level, I was compelled to face a lot of baggage from the past.  Not fun at all, and an experience that I would only wish upon my worst enemy.

If there’s one thing I learned during the past ten years, it is that change can beget change.  Due in part to this confrontation with the past, we ended up relocating to another state just to get a change of scenery, which in turn produced far more unexpected diversions than I had anticipated.  I had some very concrete plans for my college studies when we moved to Arizona.  Those plans that never materialized, and for that I am most grateful.

As I say, it was a very painful decade.  So many old episodes of pain to have to revisit.  That plus the occasional terrorist attack and economic meltdown made it a wearying time to be alive.  As we have been reminded repeatedly – as recently as last week – these events are far from over.  In these areas I anticipate the next decade won’t much better than the last, but is likely to be even worse.  But I am struck with how very different I am.  I’m nowhere nearly the same person I was January 1, 2000.  Whether by my environment or my agency, I have changed, and I think for the better.  I’m a bit more certain of myself, and yet far less certain, and I take both as virtues.

Similarly, my wife is not the same person I married.  In a good way.  She’s deeper, a bit more locked into faith.  She had these qualities before, of course, but they’ve only improved with time.  If this decade was hard on me, it was at least as equally unkind to her, and so we have both been refined by the experience.  I look back on the last ten years with gratitude – both for those things that I learned and that those experiences are behind me.  Like Bilbo Baggins, I saw and learned things I never would have known any other way.

I began this post on December 31, 2009.  It is now January 1, 2010.  I hear all the predictions of further doom and gloom in the new decade, and I tend to agree that we are lining up for more of the same during the next ten years.  But for whatever reason, I feel strangely optimistic.  Happy New Year, I guess?