So as many of you already know through reading the Sun or word of mouth, Cornell WebMail has now been skinned with Gmail to form Cmail. Curious, I decided to take it for a spin and try it out.

Myth: teenager gets accepted to college, buys a new computer, packs things up, and flies out to start a new life. Fact: teenager gets accepted to college, buys a new computer armed with an atrocious amount of processing power, RAM, and graphics card, packs things up, and flies out to start a new life. Today we'll focus on the issue of the vastly overpowered PC that has become commonplace by industry standards. Let’s face it, how many of us actually looked at the tech specs on our computers before coming to Cornell? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

Do you remember when you were filling out forms on the internet and reached the last page, only to see at the bottom that you need to spell out a random, arbitrary word hidden by weird type face and an ungodly amount of scribbles on a small image? Do you remember the frustration you felt when you pressed submit and you mistyped one letter and the ENTIRE PAGE reset? Do you remember the rage you felt when you went back to the image, only to have a new one pop up? Or is that just me? These annoying little images are known as CAPTCHAs, short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

It’s been pretty obvious that Vista is not doing as well as Microsoft had hoped it would. So in an attempt to save its franchise, Microsoft has embarked on a mission to create a better Windows, namely Windows 7. You should all understand that the offer to try the beta had ended back in February, so if you’re hoping to pick up a copy to play around with, you’re straight out of luck.

Being a Mac user, I’m bombarded with the inane advertisement that is the Safari home page whenever I start up my browser. Surprisingly, I can’t believe that I’ve JUST seen the ad for the new iPod shuffle. Aside from VoiceOver, which (l) allows the iPod to announce things to you, such as playlist title, song name, etc., the other feature that caught my attention about the shuffle was the placement of the controls on the right earbud.

In an earlier blog about antivirus programs, I briefly mentioned a malicious program called a rootkit. Make no mistake, rootkits are not something to be taken lightly. If your machine is infected with a rootkit, a hacker can access your computer remotely without your knowledge.

Out of curiosity, has anyone actually heard of the Optimus Maximus keyboard? No? Well that’s okay, I wouldn’t have expected you to hear about it. And if you HAD heard about it, I would be impressed.

Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. Ring any bells? Well, they should. Odds are, you’re probably using one right now. That’s right, these are web browsers, designed so we can exploit the Internet for whatever it may offer us; be it scientific articles for research or pterodactyl porn for… something.

There are some very basic guidelines that need to be followed when considering physically cleaning your laptops. It’s a known fact that laptops will get dirty, as exemplified by some truly disturbing images, but what people often don’t realize is how easily that problem can be resolved if the correct measures are taken.

If there are any words that nobody ever wants to hear, they‘re that “you have a virus on your computer”. Just thinking about the word virus sends chills down someone’s spine.