Last week the AP reported on the “Crazy Rasberry Ants,” and I thought it was a belated April Fool’s Day joke. No way could tiny ants be attracted to industrial electronics…what biological need could gadgets possibly satisfy in these bugs?

I swear to you, it’s not a joke. It is a festering reality.

Scientists are still unclear of the motive, but there is speculation and real fear about the dangers of these buggers, especially as they spread through Houston, moving ever closer to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The Crazy Rasberry Ants have already ruined sewage pumps, gas meters, and fire alarm systems in Texas. The only upside is that they eat fire ants, which sting humans. But for a nerd like me, a species of ants rampantly F-ing up the electronic elements of modern civilization that we take for granted is a far worse sting.

Available with 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM. Sweet.

There are a couple electronics/computer recycling events coming up in the Ann Arbor area. The first is Saturday, April 26 at Best Buy. Best Buy is teaming up with Great Lakes Electronics to recycle used electronics at no charge. Drop off will be in the Best Buy Parking lot on Lohr Road. They ARE accepting computers, monitors, printers, fax machines, TVs, audio equipment, VCRs, DVD players (items up to 100 lbs each).

The next event begins Thursday, May 8. Ann Arbor Public Schools and Climate Savers Computing Initiative at U-M are working together to recycle electronics. Schools and businesses can drop off items Thursday and Friday, the general public can drop off on Saturday, May 10 at the Pioneer High School Parking lot. (Thanks to Nicole & Diddy for the tip!)

photo from IT NYC 2006

We had a plumber come in and replace a piece of the sewer pipe running through the payroll office today. Surprisingly there was no sewer smell - just the overpowering smell of the PVC cement. Wow. It was so bad we moved the payroll folks out of their office and into IT, forwarding their phone line and giving them seats at the bench. Looked up the health effects of PVC cement: INHALATION: Will cause irritation of mucous membranes, nose, eyes & throat, coughing, difficulty of breathing. Exposure to high vapor concentration may cause headache, dizziness, nausea, narcosis. I’m not going to look up “narcosis.”

Apple has released a cool new aluminum cased laptop today, the Macbook Air. It’s considered an ultra portable laptop, weighing 3lbs with a maximum height of just .75 inches when closed. The Air will be available in two configurations, both of which with will come with the maximum 2GB of ram. The base model has a custom-made Intel Core Duo processor that’s operating at 1.6ghz and includes an 80gb IDE hard drive. The top tier model will come with the same custom Intel chip but the clock speed is bumped to 1.8 GHz. The top model will also include something that has never been seen in an Apple computer, a 64 gb solid state hard drive or SSHD.

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The Apple Blog has a nice review of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). TAB covers the big and little, good and bad changes to Apple’s operating system. I’m particularly excited for the new Finder, which looks very iTunes-esque and even includes Cover Flow. Leopard ships October 26, ZingIT review to follow shortly thereafter. Get excited.

UPDATE: Paul Thurrot (yeah, the Windows guy) has a pretty sweet collection of screenshots from his recent upgrade to Leopard.

Good article about tea in today’s NY Times:

Flying to a remote corner of India and braving the long drive into the Himalayas may seem like an awful lot of effort for a good cup of tea, but Darjeeling tea isn’t simply good. It’s about the best in the world…

Link: http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/travel/14Tea.html
PDF: nytimes_high_tea_indian_style_14oct07.pdf

VentureCake has a great article about the kernels used in VMware. It comes almost immediately after VMware’s IPO, which generated lots of investers for the virtual machine software maker. The trouble: VMware basically has two kernels, one of which is the popular Linux kernel. The GPL of the Linux kernel makes redistributing the kernel (for profit) illegal. So now that VMware is $79.99, is it violating the Linux GPL? If so, can it run without the Linux kernel? “VMware had these serious questions posed directly to them a year ago, repeated in a public forum many times since, but have yet to respond at all.” VentureCake explores these questions and the workings of The VMware House of Cards.

Perhaps this is a good thing for the proverbial mother-in-law computer. It’s cheap up front, it runs linux that looks like windows, it comes with gobs of apps and connectivity, and has a subscriber service that does network backup of personal files.

In addition, it is touted as “green” and is certainly low power consumption. If it breaks in the first three years they will send a replacement unit at no charge.

For a $99 start and $155/yr subscription over three years you’ve got $563, or basically the cost of a Mac Mini.

Apple released the next, faster generation of MacBooks today. The new Books are available with a 2.0GHz or 2.16GHz processors (as opposed to the previous 1.86GHz and 2.0GHz) and come stocked with 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB. Hard drive size has also been increased from 60GB to 80GB with options for 120GB and 160GB drives. A dual-layer Super Drive is also available and comes stocked in the black MacBooks.

Nothing but good news here: the new MacBooks are faster but still the same price (starting at $1099) and the price of the previous generation will likely be reduced on Apple’s refurb site. We’ve been huge fans of the MacBooks since they came out, and with improvements like these I’m sure we’ll remain big fans.