There’s a bass note, typical but almost self assured in its beat and the promise to come .

tha-thump thummmm dada thump-dum….tha-thump thummmmm dada THUMP-dum….

The bass continues on as if it’s announced the most important part, and it has. I can see the gold reflection shine as the player steps forward with that horn.

Suddenly it’s early 1994.

My middle brother (I’m the oldest) Joscoto kept harping on this band. This amazing band he liked. Some kind of ensemble band like the guys I was currently into like Widespread Panic or Blues Traveler. "no man" he said, "you gotta get this disc called "Remember Two Things"

The horn, a sax, kicks in. It’s deep throated and bright and clear. Up tempo to the bass, and it’s the shine moment before the violin kicks in. The player is leaning forward, a spotlight on him. His shirt reflects the light, his ear piece visible, cheeks are puffed out with the line notes.

Every up and down in my life has been marked by Pearl Jam, or the Dave Matthews Band. Even my closest friends, the ones I trust the most to make fun of me, are all over My DMB fandom. Their music has been so much a part of my life. Not just Dave’s noodling on the guitar or vocals but every member of the band. I went so quickly into Under the Table and Dreaming to Crash to seeing the band no less than 15 teams over the next 15 years.

The player is Leroi Moore. Leroi is out, in infinite repose. The light’s on him and the band is lining up behind him. He’s laying down that sax line like a prophet leading the worshipers to the land where everything is all right, it’ll be ok.

There’s a point, so the saying goes, where life stops giving you stuff and starts taking it away.

The light on Leroi fades away slowly as the band picks up the main number. It’s "Crush" and Leroi has more to do in the song, but for now he guided the intro in under the fading light of the Columbia River Gorge sunset.

Sometimes there’s words in life. Most times, there’s not.

Life’s been taking a lot of inspirations away from all of us this year.

I can hear the breeze that I can never hear when I’m there. The stars are climbing bright as the light fades across the horizon. Heaven’s amphitheater hushes for a moment.

There’s a clock ticking pause, as Leroi purses his lips and puffs his cheeks for the sax part.

The part doesn’t come this time. There’s silence when the horn blows.

Leroi man, I will miss you deeply.

The mini lightweight notebook has been the holy grail for me for a long time. I just want a machine that offers me the ability to write comfortably in any environment, or web surf and read email. I like connectivity options, wireless, and a high quality screen that doesn’t compromise on readability. If it can play games, fine. But that by no means is a requirement or what I am looking for.

Oh and it has to have a nice build quality and design.

Too often these mini laptops are either oversized (Thinkpads) or they are overpriced (the old Toshiba Libretto series) or both (Macbook Air). I thought I had finally found the perfect machine with the Asus Eeepc 4G. Sure, it couldn’t run Vista but that was no big deal, it ran both XP and it’s own Linux distro pretty quickly. And it was only $399! But after months of using it, the 800×400 resolution of the screen, and the tiny cramped chiclet keyboard began to really wear on me. To the point where I imagined the eeepc might almost be a better first machine hooked to a monitor and keyboard, rather than in its portable format.

Along came the HP Mini Note 2133. It’s a little over two pounds, about the size of a large paperback book, and it ranges in price from $529 to $849 in varying processor and RAM configurations.

So I decided to give it a spin. I’ve been using the HP Mininote 2133 for a week now and can say hands down it beats the EeePC 701 and even the 901 series in just about every way. While there are some compromises to the design, I think I’ve finally gotten the minipc form factor that I will use to judge all further iterations. It’s glossy bright screen is capable of displaying HD video in a bright and clear way, its full sized keyboard means not having to compromise being able to write or edit documents on the go (I’ve been writing almost all my blog entries and twitters and emails on it now for a week). While the processor is woefully underpowered, it’s overall Vista specifications aren’t bad at all. I thought the Eeepc build quality was fine for the price (I got a nice black one and while made of plastic, it was very solid and looked nice.), but the 2133 is just outstanding. A brushed chrome finish, solid hinges, and they didn’t skimp on the style of the design such that in just sitting here in a sushi place in Vegas writing this review I’ve gotten at least three comments on how nice my laptop is. I even gave the manager on duty a brief tour of it running Vista.

The numeric specs on the system running Vista business are as follows:

Overall: 2.0
Processor: 2.0
Memory: 4.1
Graphics (Aero) 3.1
Graphics (Games) 2.5
Hard Disk Perf: 5.3

I’m running the 1.6ghz version with 2 gigs of ram and the 7200 rpm 120 gig hard drive. Doing web browsing and email, the system is snappy and responsive, and the onboard VIA chrome9 graphics DO support Aero, although with a processor penalty. If you have Aero on and decide that, in addition to web browsing and email that you want to open a spreadsheet or document, the system is going to bog for a moment. Once it loads it’s fine, but you can tell the proc is the weak point here. Sound is surprisingly good. I thought the Eeepc had outstanding sound for the form factor but this manages to beat it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s tinny and there’s no bass, but for itty bitty little speakers, music listening is basically decent and youtube viewing or other video is just fine.

Battery life is what you would expect for a small form factor machine with no optical drive. I routinely get 4 and a half hours on the six cell battery on Vista "High Performance". In fact I’m considering getting the three cell just because usually three hours of battery is fine for me and it would cut down on weight if I set the power plan to "Balanced".

Don’t let that graphics rating think you can play games however. While the Chrome9 is a very very capable IGP for basic 3d gaming, the processor is the Achilles heel of the system. Valve’s Source Engine video stress test at 640×480 with everything set to low garners a mere 10 frames a second. While older 2d games like Civilization3, Starcraft, or Diablo 2 might run just fine, only very light or very old 3d engine games are going to run acceptably on this system. But that’s ok its meant to be a tiny business PC not a tiny game PC.

A lot of people told me to hold out for Atom based machines. Or told me that the processor in this machine was it’s weak spot. It’s true that the atom appears to be a superior processor for this form factor. But what really sold me on this machine was not the proc, it was the gorgeous 1280×768 bright glossy screen and large keyboard. And you can get it today for a decent price. I can’t say enough about the screen, although its small and runs at high res, websites render perfectly on it, unlike the Eeepc lines which tend to sacrifice height in resolution.

Sure, better machines are coming, but there’s always the next better thing coming along in a few months. So far I’ve not seen one that truly nails the screen/keyboard option. Seriously I cannot say enough about the large keyboard. It’s 92% the size of a normal laptop keyboard. I know that sounds hard to believe given the overall form factor but really it’s true. The keys are very, very close to what you would see on a normal laptop sizewise.

At the tiny business pc part, it works relatively flawlessly. But to really unlock the potential of the hardware on the form factor, Linux or Windows XP SP3 is highly recommended. Overall, that will free up enough resources to make the processor less of the weak spot on the machine, but of course if your business requires Vista, I want to stress it operates on Windows Vista just fine.

So if you currently have an Eeepc, sell it! This machine, for only a little bit more, is well worth the cash for its wonderful large keyboard and beautiful glossy screen.

It should have tipped me off when the three people closest to the "drunk" blond chick having a seizure scrambled to cover their drinks instead of help her.

I should probably explain.

For my birthday, Jennifer Jabbusch gave me a heart attack by elaborately faking a seizure about 10 seconds after everyone gave me a birthday toast and sang happy birthday to me.

You see, to you this might sound like the cruelest thing in the world but us security minded people must be wired differently because I totally fell for it and it was the funniest thing I think that has ever been done to me on a birthday, with the notable exception of when Rochto surprised me on my 30th with a fake costume party. Yeah. No one else had costumes. That one still wins. But this one was pretty good. Rochto would have totally approved.

Anyways let me set the stage.

The first full day of Blackhat is usually spent slogging through presentations that everyone wants to see but really is just a way to kill the time until the night life starts. The best parties are on Thursday, but Wed. always primes everyone. Today being my birthday, I hit the appropriate sessions, talked to the appropriate folk work wise, caught up with numerous awesome people (Hi Terri! Hey Pete! Hi Austin! Yo Bryan! Hey Adam! Sup Jesper…ok ok I should stop I could do this all day), snuck off the strip to have a special solo birthday lunch at the Hofbrau Haus with special guest GERMAN BEER, and then got ready for the evening’s festivities. Already it was a pretty damn good birthday.

So Kympossible and a friend and I lit out for the SPI party at Tao in the Venetian since I didn’t have to go far and they were awesome to have a wrist band for me. We hobnobbed for a bit at the party and I met some cool new people.

Meanwhile, the illustrious illuminated man Christopher Hoff and company were laying down camp at Casa Fuente in Caesars. (For those who may not know or cannot make with the clickity of the linky, Casa Fuente is a Cigar bar in the forums shop Mall of Caesars.)

Before long the Hoff was holding court with 20 or so security folk who twitter and blog and what not and was calling us over via the World Wide Tube-interweb.

Now, I usually allow myself one cigar a year, and tonight was my birthday. I’d had a particularly good day even though I was away from home and before long, myself and friends were heading back to meet the others at the cigar bar. We arrived to find a rather ruly and relaxed crowd, downing Mojitos and smoking.

The bar itself is out in the open of the forum shops, so we were basically holding court over most of the far end of the mall. Ryan Naraine hooked me up with a nice mild cigar and Hoff hooked me up with a Mojito. (side note: Mojito’s are very difficult to make well. This place does it perfectly)

All was right with the world, catching up with old friends and new, and talking twitter stories and security days gone by. I could not have imagined a nicer time to be had.

Suddenly Hoff demands that everyone take a shot that he is having the waitress bring ’round. This shot appears, at first glance, to be some type of clear liquor based shot like a lemon drop or something. Jennifer starts acting all concerned, "Does this have vodka in it?" She’s making a very big deal about vodka, how she can’t have it. Hoff assures her it has no Vodka in it. She asks no less than three times and he assures her, no less than three times there is no vodka in the shot. Everyone’s getting a bit impatient because the shots are taking a bit and all 20 or so of us had to have one for some mysterious purpose only Hoff knew. Again Jennifer points out that she cannot have vodka under any circumstances.

Once everyone had a shot in hand we discovered the purpose. Hoff announced we would all sing happy birthday to me and do the shot. So 20 of the nicest people in the world loudly sang happy birthday to me such that the entire mall rang with it. I had to burst out laughing when they got to "dear stepto", I don’t think anyone’s ever used my nickname in a birthday serenade. It was really really REALLY awesome and I just want to thank everyone who was there for making it such a wonderful moment. It was beyond cool.

But.

We security folk can’t do anything "normal"

‘Cause then Jennifer had a seizure.

Well no that’s not quite right, you see, she had prepared a couple of guys around her what she was going to do. So as I’m still kind of sitting there in a shocked and really grateful glow, I hear: "Jennifer you don’t look so good" and I look over and sure enough she doesn’t look good at all, her face is kind of contorting. Her hand goes up to her mouth and just as I ask "hey are you ok" she jerks suddenly knocking over one of the tables nearby and starts convulsing. I jump up with the other guys and go "HEY WE NEED HELP" (totally not noticing the three closest guys to her were laughing and covering their drinks so she wouldn’t flail into them and spill them) and she flips over and totally pulls a "Gotcha" and busts out laughing.

There’s literally several seconds of stunned silence as the rest of us realize she’d totally owned all of us and I managed to sputter out "YOU BITCH!" as we all collapse in laughter. I completely fell for the whole deal hook line and sinker despite several rather obvious clues.

It was awesome. What a way to take the piss out of the whole thing right then and there. I have not both laughed that hard, and been totally relieved, at the same time. I may have turned a year older, but in one fell swoop she took 10 years off my life. She gave me a hug and a "happy birthday" while I was still freaking out about how much I had just been fooled. The worst part? Hoff missed it, he’d gone to hit the restroom. (he wasn’t in on it)

We finished off the night dancing at the Cleopatra bar. Note to all Security beat people: Ryan Naraine has got the moves.

So thanks Hoff, and Jennifer, and Ryan and Dennis and Jeff and Alan and Martin and Rich and Brian and wow, everyone who was there there were so many awesome people I’m actually so tired I cannot link them all!

I was worried my birthday away from home would suck, but you guys turned it into one of my faves. People ask me if I miss security or miss working in the security industry and I always answer the same way. I don’t miss the work but I sure do miss the people. Thanks guys. I say guys because seriously Jennifer I will have vengeance.

Ha ha. No, just kidding

(no I’m not)

no really

(seriously)

Jack Daniel caught the singing on video. They caught me so by surprise I could just sit there. A great night, thanks again all.