Aston Martins

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of Aston Martins. At first, I thought it was due to the release of the lower-end V8 Vantage (if you call $120,000+ low-end). However, it seeems that people are picking up a ton of DB7s. Maybe in anticipation of the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace? There's seemingly no trend going on that I can latch on to.. I've seen convertibles, hard-tops, DB7's, Vanquishes, and Vantages. Whatever it may be, it makes me very gleeful. Keep it up rich folk.

Mojave Experiment

No, not some secret nuclear research group in Los Alamos or Area 51. The Mojave Experiment was run by Microsoft last month and has not been blogged about much in the mainstream blogosphere (Engadget, Valleywag, Techcrunch). So I decided to give ol' MSFT a hand. They essentially did what Pepsi did with the "Pepsi Challenge" by blind-user testing people with Vista, claiming it was a new OS code-named Mojave. "Mojave" got much better reviews than Vista did - almost double the rating. This tells me nothing, because I was pretty happy with Vista when I started using it at work this summer. I would have got it earlier if my poor Dell Inspiron 600m could have taken it. Most of the anti-Vista sentiment is the visceral reaction of many people against everything from Redmond, combined with some harsh but creative "Get A Mac" ads out of 1 Infinite Loop.

Check out the results for yourself.

Frozen Yogurt

This week instead of my usual nightly pearl milk tea (bubble tea, tapioca tea, PMT) run, it seems I've made a switch - the new thing to do is frozen yogurt? I was surprised to learn this as I have just returned back to the Valley for a significant time since last summer, and trends here are certainly as ephemeral as the old dot-coms were. Anyway, there seem to be a great variety of styles of frozen yogurt (in texture, temperature, color, taste), toppings, store environments, and pricing structures. So far I've only gone to Yogurtland and I Heart Yogurt, which are perhaps the two opposites in structure and style. Yogurtland is very much modern, chic-style design with lots of glass and steel, self-serve, charged by the ounce. On the opposite hand, I Heart Yogurt has fewer options but rotates them so there's a new set of flavors daily, with more traditional toppings choices (as opposed to the fruit and great variety at Yogurtland). The interior design is rather simplistic. Personally, I liked the I Heart Yogurt the best, but I have yet to check out the other two - Tartini and Froyo. More on this breaking story later!

On a sad note, "FinestBlackBeatz" has been temporarily shut down - supposedly the guy running it is an engineering student or something?