DAAAAAAAA........ bears, da bears da bears da bears.... DAAAAAAAA.... bears, da bears, da bears, da bears.

Check out daytipper for your daily fix of mostly useful information that doesn't feel like a drive-by know-it-all-ing.

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Sorry:)

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We've known it was coming for quite a while - but the reality is even sweeter than the rumor - which usually isn't the case. Go sign up for a Google account if you don't alrDocs & Spreadsheetsake Docs & Spreadsheets for a spin. You won't be a bit disappointed.

This is the Google-ized incarnation of Writely, the online word processing site I blogged a few months ago. Now it's spiffed up and ready to take on the world.

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Eager to jump headlong into the glorious bounty that is Chicago's food culture, I was looking for local reviews and suggestions from real people when I ran across Yelp on a web 2.0-related blog.

Yelp's tagline is: Real People. Real Reviews. This is very much what you get here. Reviews of all types of local items of interest including, restaurants, nightlife, salons, shopping, services and more are served up by an active social networking community in a very nicely done web-2.0-ish package. Look for ratings of reviews, endorsements of reviewers, personal tidbits, messaging - it really is a virtual community.

This site is so nice and covers the restaurant scene so well that I'm going to have to find something else to blog about.

And, oh yes, if you're interested: here's a link to my profile on Yelp.

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Let me start by saying that we love it here. The biggest impression after a month is that we live in a place with a ton of great amenities such as a brand-new public library which is huge and well-stocked (and has a Lavazza Espresso bar), a close walk to the Metra station, several nice downtown eateries, a killer old-school hobby shop, nice restored downtown movie theater and tons more. It's also interesting that although much of the bill for the quality of public services, parks, libraries and schools is footed by our many neighbors living in 1-2 million dollar homes, there is a very obvious lack of pretension here. It's a very nice blend of people - both old and new.

We've taken advantage of the close proximity to Chicago at least one day every weekend so far. In particular, we've already hit Chinatown three times.

Our furniture arrived this week and Tasha has done a killer job of putting everything in its place (providing there is room for it).

We're starting to have a real home here and it's nice to be somewhere I could see staying for a while.

Expect to hear much more from me in the coming weeks as we get settled in and I finish up huge project at work that will be finished next Friday.

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So here's the scoop. My company has relocated us to the Chicago area and it looks like Elmhurst may be the perfect spot for us to land.

We'll be pulling out of town this weekend if all goes well and should be settled into some place by the end of next week. I'll be sure to post pictures, trip stories, snafus and anything else which may be of interest.

For now, wish us luck or pray for us - whatever thing you do and PLEASE include praying that we sell our house in Knoxville.

Finally, my time has come. This weekend I became the proud foster parent of a brand new Intel-based Mac mini. A good friend of mine spent a couple of days with us and we embarked on a little side project. I'll be working on some Java code for him over the next few months and we thought the best way to keep everything self-contained would be to buy a cheap Windows desktop. At the same time he had asked about the new Mac minis and the usefulness of having a Mac around the office for working with graphic designers, etc. I mentioned that the newest Mac minis are capable of dual-booting Mac OS X and Windows XP. He also mentioned that he needed another Windows workstation for one of the workers at his office back in England. At that point the deal was sealed.

So after a bit of attempted haggling over price, the two of us came back to my place with three Mac minis. The plan was to set all of them up with Windows XP and to leave one of them here for me to work on our joint project. In one evening we were able to easily get all three of them dual-booting and completely updated.

Now, although I'm still a bit shocked and impressed at having Windows natively running on this beautiful little oh-so-Apple-styled machine, I have to say that it didn't all come off perfectly.

As soon as we plugged in the first mini we realized that hundreds of MBs of updates would have to be installed prior to enabling the dual boot mechanism. In addition there were two different firmware updates required - both with very different tricks needed for a successful update.

After all required updates were installed, I downloaded and installed Apple's Boot Camp software (beta). This performs the re-partitioning of the hard drive into two partitions (one Windows and one Mac) and sets up the necessary subsystem for dual booting. This part was very straight forward and well thought out. Once Boot Camp was installed and a Windows XP installation disk was inserted, the mini was restarted and the bastardization began.

The rest is all a fairly boring tale of ugly blue DOS-like installation screen for Windows and the typical long-winded and confusing Windows XP installation - with one exception; once the Windows install was complete and the system was booted into Windows XP, I was able to insert a Windows driver CD (kindly burned by Apple's Boot Camp) and install Apple-provided drivers for the mini's special hardware. The driver CD provides updates as well as enabling the built-in Bluetooth capabilities of the mini. WOW!

Overall the process was doable, but not as simple as the average Mac user is accustomed to.

In the end though, the result is pretty astounding. Now I'm going to have to tear myself away from this little beast long enough to get some real work done.

The only real problem we had was one of the minis decided not to boot, at all, straight out of the box. The light was on but no one was home. Our first idea was to take it back to the store the next day, but I took a look at Apple's support site for the mini. Apparently this is a known issue with the mini and firmware updates have been released to fix it. There are also some very detailed instructions on resetting the PRAM and the PMU. These have to be followed EXACTLY for the process to work. Fortunately for us I had a computer-savvy octopus nearby who was able to perform some of the steps, especially the one where we had to plug in the power cord, hold down command, option, X, P, T, A and 3 (all at once), rub the mouse on one of our noses, turn around 5 times and shout "start, please, start." OK, maybe it wasn't that bad - but pretty stinking close.

It will be pretty interesting to see how this dual boot capability and its not-so-easy (or Mac-like) setup is received by those who may be potential "switchers."

Anyone else have similar experiences? I'm curious to know if the process is the same for the Intel-based Mac Books and Mac Book Pros.

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This evening I was strolling the West Town Mall - just for fun... OK - it really wasn't for fun - I was helping my nearest and dearest shop for clothing. Anyway, just a few steps before the Brooks Brothers store - right at the place my stomach usually starts turning in anticipation of the hideous southern preppy, seersucker, navy sport coat assault on the senses that is Brooks Brothers - my whole evening got a little bit better.

So I wet myself a bit. I'm not ashamed. We're getting a freaking Apple store!!! No details on the time table yet, but there's a construction wall with a nice, big Apple logo printed on it.

After a bit of checking, I turned up a couple of other sites who've been speculating about this. Mat on Macs scooped this over a month ago after an article in the Knoxville News Sentinel. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) had a post on the subject as well.

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The Dialect Survey

American Ethnic Geography

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