Careful by Guster

I think they make sense. Until Google Glass can respond accurately to my brainwaves (and maybe connect to the internet on its own? That always helps...), it's just not practical. On the other hand, I can actually see myself using a smartwatch. I don't see watches replacing smartphones, because they wouldn't be as well-suited to gaming or photography. If I were in charge of design, I would try to make a hybrid: a tiny magnetic smartphone/tablet that attaches firmly to its wrist-based counterpart. I think smart watches may be a hit for a while, but they won't replace smartphones at all; and before we know it, technology will catch up with what we all wish Google Glass really was, and smart watches will be a thing of the past.

Maybe smartwatches and augmented-reality glasses will work in conjunction? That would solve the awkward camera on a smartwatch, and I would feel like a bad ass cyborg flipping through apps on my wrist and doing God knows what with my heads-up display.

Scala is probably the best investment, but it may not be that exciting if you're sick of Java. If you're like me, you want something super-low-level, super-radical, or super-high-level. I'm in a similar position, and I've decided to focus on C and Javascript. I think it would be awesome and extremely useful to really know C, and Javascript is a real trip. It's possibly the one language that makes me want to code in it, specifically. It's sexy. It's functional. It's procedural. It's object-oriented. It's whatever you want it to be. And along with HTML5, you can do some really cool stuff with relative ease. It's also cool to know a language with such a ubiquitous interpreter. If a PC has a browser, you can fiddle around with JS. I've spent a lot of my time as a high school senior (a slacker, in other words) in the web console or on jsfiddle.net, coding lots of cool little things: game prototypes, simulations, etc. And it actually comes in handy to know Javascript. You can press F12 on your browser and solve problems like you're a genius. Who needs to know the formula for compounding interest when you can just do some money += rate * money; in the browser? It's an awesome way to take advantage of a computer for quick and dirty problem solving through simulation. And it's cool that the same language that is responsible for those annoying alert(); messages can power games like RuneScape. Python is a sweet language, too, sharing many of the positive attributes of Javascript. Again, it's cool that it's perfectly functional as both my terminal's calculator and (higher-level) components of operating systems like Ubuntu. So here's my proposal: choose C over Go, and Javascript or Python over Scala or Closure. But that's just me.

I walked in to the Apple store, still undecided, and walked out with a 15-inch Retina Pro. I'm more than satisfied, so far. When you consider everything, it's a good contender for the perfect laptop. The screen is just perfect (short of a screen that physically resizes itself based on the situation), and it's even good for coding; it has a NVIDIA card, 8GB RAM, and a quad-core i7; its battery life is great, it runs OS X (and virtually every other operating system), it boasts the best screen on the market, has plenty of SSD space, and it's almost as thin as the Air. That said, it hasn't made me an Apple fanboy yet. While the hardware is amazing, and while the software looks nice, I sometimes wish the UI was running on top of Ubuntu. Using the terminal feels comparatively clunky in OS X.

It's interesting to go from a PC with which you sometimes have to wonder, "Can it handle that game/software?" to being worry-free. And the worry-free part is nice at times, but I feel like I'm more creative and daring when I'm limited with a lower-spec system that runs Linux. OS X seems to discourage tinkering. But maybe I'm still getting my bearings.

I think this machine will serve me well, though.

Really chill song: Weird Fishes