By now everyone’s stopped talking about the iPad like it’s the greatest thing since the… iPhone. If you hate Apple you will say it’s terrible. If you love Apple you will say it’s the best thing ever and you will buy 5 of them.

What I think is that it will definitely beat the Kindle. Sure it’s not E-Ink so it’s not futuristic but at least it has color, and I mean the whole screen and not part of it like the Nook. And while it may not have Flash support, many porn sites let you download their quality entertainment in MP4. It’s Tablet Lite, basically.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Firstly the idea of a true Mac OS X system in a tablet would not sit well with the Mac diehard morons enthusiasts. Because I think that the OS is best used on a large screen with keyboards and a mouse. And also because if you’re on the go and you’re cradling the tablet in one hand and you’re tapping with the other then you would want a very intuitive interface. And although I hate to say it, the iPhone OS does that very well.

Obviously ebooks are a good idea for the thing, but most books that most people would read are novels, and novels have words. Words are in black and white. Then get the Kindle for that. Much better battery life. And don’t bother with office work, because though it has iWork it’s probably going to be very watered down.

The best use for the iPad would be as an entertainment platform for those who think the PSP is too small and an actual laptop would be overkill. You know, netbooks. The screen is big, games would look good on it, it does everything the iPod touch does but better, and if you wanted to read books on it then you can do that, as well as go on the Internet. So it’s not a competitor to the Kindle or that Windows slate tablet thing, but rather the netbook subcategory. Same price, same size, and the new ones also have 3G and even multitouch. And I think the iPad will probably win.

If making a Big Gulp run in sweatpants is too embarassing for you (even idiot women have standards apparently) then shell out $39.95 for Pajama Jeans, the latest in the craze on late night television designed to make sweatpants look like jeans. Comfort and style at the same time? Holy crap! Even has that denim look, with those brass buttons and all that.

Coming soon to a retail store near you: new ways to look less like a bogan, such as ugg boots with panda fur!

One of the most annoying things about Chinese New Year is walking. I’m a lazy bastard yet I have to walk all the way to a bus stop to go to the Convention Center to take a bus to the border to walk to take another bus into the underbelly of Communism (it’s called China, you idiots). I’m back on Tuesday and I’ll be bringing enough money to relieve the debt in the US and I’ll be shopping for a new bank account, but then again the journey to do that is terrible. Or rather, hurts my legs.

And to make things worse, the metaphorical crack I am on, Twitter, is banned. As well as Facebook. You know, they might as well ban Flickr but seeing as they did that once they probably will as soon as I set foot on communistical soil. Hopefully Tumblr isn’t blocked because Tumblr has a very bare-bones Twitter client I can try to use.

I’ve also got my PSP with me, which is not as awesome as it sounds because in retrospect I should have bought an 8GB Memory Stick because I am unable to put both my Billy Joel music and GTA Vice City Stories on there without it telling me the card is full. Hooray. I can’t exactly grab a new stick on the go, so I’ll have to make do and whatever.

A great little site featuring pictures of nature with curves and mathematical graph overlays of the curves.

Wired Magazine has an excellent article about the wonders (or lack thereof) of those Internet rehab centers in China, and to me they sound like Guantanamo Bay, but worse. They beat you up more than a BDSM junkie would in his lifetime.

Worst part? People are overreactive over their kids and their “addiction”, because most of the time they’re just letting off steam, not exactly playing 24 hours straight and feeling suicidal when they aren’t playing. They’re only normal.

Recently, Deng Fei came to a conclusion: His son was never addicted. “He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink. The Internet was probably his way to vent the pressure on him,” he says, staring at his feet. “We didn’t know that then. But we know that now. It wasn’t really an addiction. It was his way out of the pressure of being a student.” Zhou Juan raises her head. “He didn’t even play that much,” she says.

Too late to come to that conclusion, wasn’t it?

I’ve got this plan for a venture. I need $20 a month of $200 a year for Media Temple, so yeah.

Basically it’s going to be a site with multiple “forks”. One is a basic blog site with news, HuffPo like, or possibly a more targeted site, Engadget style or whatever. The second part is a custom news aggregator, *like* a web-based feed reader but with advertising. You might go, “well lots of RSS feeds have advertising” but I think I can go one better. Exclusive content, a more web-friendly aggregator where it’s not just the first 30 words of the article, and also being able to lay it out like the front page of a New York Times issue. If Digg was social paper 1.0, this would be 2.0. There will be on-the-fly PDF rendering for printing out, converting it for mobile reading, and even offline reading. Basically I’m trying to make news as intrusive as possible. I’m using things like Yahoo! Pipes to do a fast prototype, but this could work given the resources.

I’m also trying to get a citizen journalism thing going, giving people accounts to create their own blog and post newsworthy news, and then having actual people put the best news together into one of those aggregators.

Can anyone spare money? Or resources?

“Computer games don’t affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music”

— Marcus Brigstocke