I went vicariously computer shopping with a friend last night. She ended up with an Averatec (sp?). It was, by all appearances, ridiculously good for the price she paid. Has anyone heard of them or ever had one?

PC Magazine gives one of their laptops a good review.

That one was very much like hers, but she has an 80 GB hard drive and a DVD-RW. Still under a grand, and very small.

Jealous now.

help!

My boss has typed an e-mail in Microsoft Entourage, with the HTML turned on. It has different font sizes and bold and such.

She would like me to e-mail this to about 2000 people, whioch I have either in an excel spreadsheet or in Filemaker Pro.

In Filemaker Pro, I have yet to figure out how to format an email, so I ccut and pasted her email into word, and then did a merge to email.

However, when this goes to her computer or my computer, all the formatting is lost, and the email doesn't even appear in our default HTML font, but in, I think the fixed width font (it appear like old-time pine email.

What can I do to send this out correctly? Is there a way to merge excel with entourage?

Also, I do know it depend on the person's email prgram how it looks, but I at least want it to appear to my boss and me like it should!

Is Tivo dying?

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

t hugs his Tivo close

On the other hand, I would like one of these:

Do you need a Perfect Machine? Well, "need" is a strong word. Do you need your TiVo, iPod, cable TV, DSL, subscription to the New Yorker, or dinner at Chez Panisse? If you say yes to several of these things, you're likely the type to need a Perfect Machine.

The Perfect Machine ameliorates laziness, refines sloth, embellishes indulgence. Here's an example: Like TiVo, the Perfect Machine would record all your TV shows. But it would make your shows accessible anywhere in your house, on every laptop and desktop, on every other Perfect Machine, every connected thing. I live in a small apartment in Oakland, Calif., designed in such a way that I can't see the one television in the apartment from the kitchen, which is where I spend a great deal of my time. Cooking, for me, is a pleasure, but a pleasure best combined with reruns of "South Park." So here's the difficulty: I'm in the kitchen. I'd like to watch what's on my TiVo. How can I do this? I need a Perfect Machine.

Or say that you're on your couch, 6 feet away from your computer, which is playing one of the tens of thousands of songs you have stored on its hard drive. You have a sudden, insatiable desire to listen to another song, a specific track, let's say, the Stones' "Satisfaction." If you're the type who's OK with getting up and walking to the computer to change the track, you don't need the Perfect Machine. If, on the other hand, you're like most civilized Americans and would prefer to change the song using a remote, with a listing of all your songs displayed on your television, you need a Perfect Machine.

Seriously. I love that description.