11.6 inch 2010 MacBook Air

FedEx just delivered my new ultra slim 11.6 inch MacBook Air (MBA) and it is a thing of beauty. The screen is bright and sharp, boots really really fast (under 15 seconds) and it can do things that my iPad cannot do - much better content creation capabilities. iPad is great for content consumption but it's lacking for any sort of content creation. Above all MBA runs OS X so enough said.

iPad is great for playing games (I am addicted to Angry Birds), reading books for short hours indoors, watching videos and casual browsing. The battery life on the iPad is just awesome. I regularly get around 12 hours doing a variety of tasks. I haven't tested the battery life on the new MBA but I read people reporting that they are getting close to 6 hours.

MBA weighs around 2.3 pounds a little heavier than my 1.6 pound WiFi+3G iPad but it doesn't feel like it's heavier. May be that's because the iPad is a slab and may be due to it's distribution of weight.

Overall this new MBA is just awesome!

1.4 GHz/4 GB RAM/64 GB Flash storage

iLife 2011

I purchased iLife 11 to upgrade the iLife suite on my core i7 MacBook Pro and it arrived at the end of last week. I did the upgrade and didn't get a chance to play around much. I did try the cool new audio features and the movie trailers in iMovie 11. Looks promising but nothing earth shattering.

Living Room Upgrades

As my 15 month old son started messing with our TV and other electronics in our living room, I finally blocked a weekend to do some rearrangements. Little did I know at that time how big of a project I was about to start.

First and foremost I mounted our LCD on the wall. I bought a Sanus tilting wall mount from Best Buy and with the tools so graciously provided by one of my colleagues at work, I was able to complete the task in under 2 hours. Our old TV stand was a beautiful piece of furniture with glass shelves but it didn't come with any doors. So it was really inviting for my son to fiddle with the volume control on our Home Theatre receiver and other gadgetry sitting on the glass shelves. So I went ahead and bought a new TV stand with glass doors from one of the local stores. It took me around a couple of hours to assemble this stand.

We had our front home theatre speakers mounted on iron stands and they were in a bad shape because of all the beating taken from my son. So I decided to replace our home theatre. I purchased the new Denon AVR 991 that is network connected. It is a very awesome AVR with multi-zone support and all the latest goodies. To go with this awesome AVR, I purchased KEF KBT 2005.3 speakers and the Sub Woofer. So by the time all this equipment got delivered and hooked up it was almost 2 weeks from when I started this whole project. Scope creep it is.