While waiting in the Denver airport, for an 11:10 AM flight to nashville, tennessee, I am sitting at a Quizno's in terminal A, that happens to be next door to a bar. The bar seems to be loosely associated with the Quizno's, because the barmaid keeps hawking Quizno's sandwiches and salads to the bar patrons. 

Many bar patrons are drinking beer, whisky and gin drinks at 9:00 AM. This would be totally unacceptable behavior outside of an airport setting. Apparently since airport patrons have been or will be traveling. The time zone excuse makes for a drinky drinkin' good time! 

The barmaid seems to be in her late thirties, and is enjoying the heck out of offering a "hot weenie" to every person who stops by. Apparently the Quizno's here offers a "hot weenie" sandwich on the menu. She seems to be cleaning up on the tips.   I am sitting near a "25-year-old" kid who's washing down a Quizno's Turkey Sub with a bud-lite; at 9:00 AM!  It's surreal.

The barmaid was nice enough to refill the water bottle that I had to dump out before crossing into the airport's "secure zone". She even refilled it with soda water for free! ... but I did buy a caesar salad from her.

I have had a Skype In number for a few years. When I first bought it, it cost me about $20 per year. I thought that was a good price for having a real number that people could use to call me on Skype. That and the ability to have Skype forward all calls to my cell phone when I wasn't at the computer, made my SkypeIn number very useful.

Last year, when I went to extend the number for another year, the cost had gone up to $35 I think. I moaned, and paid it. It was still a good value.

This year, I went to extend my Skype In number and see that it has increased again to $60 per year, plus they have changed Skype Out to a subscription-based service that they want $2.95 per month for. Skype Out used to be a service that came with Skype In for free. Now, they offer a discount for Skype In, as long as you buy a Skype Out subscription at the same time, but the price has still increased by about 100% overall in the last year.

I see a trend here. I don't want to spend any more time, dependent on a service that insists on doubling its rate every year. I like Skype and think it is may be the best VOIP service out there, but if outfits like Magic Jack can give me a phone number and unlimited VOIP service for $20 per year AND include custom hardware (to be fair they charge $40 for the first year to offset the hardware costs), then Skype's prices are gouging pure and simple.

The whole point of Skype and what makes it so attractive is the low-cost. If they continue to pursue this high-cost path then the service becomes much less compelling. EBay buying Skype has been the worst thing to happen to the service since its inception. I won't continue to support it financially until I am convinced that it is returning to its roots. 

I am a software developer. I write software that targets the Microsoft .NET framework. I have switched to a Mac for all of my development work. You can too.

About a year ago, I bought a 15" Macbook pro for my 16 year-old daughter, for her birthday. I was on a business trip to Oak RIdge, Tennessee and took her new laptop with me before i gave it to her. While on the trip, I fell in love with the operating system.

For the past eight years or so, I have done all my work on a VMWare virtual machine. I haven't installed a development environment on my host operating system in as long. Therefore, the switch to Mac was seamless. I purchased VWare Fusion (for mac), ~$70, and just copied my virtual machines over to the new mac without a hitch. VMWare Fusion ran my old PC VM's without any problems.

When my wife decided that she needed a new laptop (and asked for a cheap netbook), I purchased her a 13" Macbook Pro. She fell in love with it immediately. Later, I needed to replace my old HP laptop with a faster one. I decided on a  unibody, 15" Macbook Pro and am soooo happy I did.

Recently it came time to replace my desktop with a new machine. I had been using the same virtual machines, copying them back and forth from my old Windows desktop to my new Macbook Pro. I decided to go all the way and replace my desktop with a Mac. I had researched a little and bought a 27" base model iMac. After a little research (on the new iMac) I decided that I had made a mistake. I wanted the new Intel Core i7, 27" iMac instead.

I went back to the Apple store in Colorado Springs, where I had purchased the new iMac not a week earlier. They said that although they don't carry the Core i7 iMac, they will be happy to take this one back and not charge me any restocking fee as long as I order my new Core i7 iMac from their store.

So, tomorrow, I plan on returning this beautiful new, 27" Core 2 Duo iMac, and ordering a new 27" Quad Core i7 iMac and paying them an extra $500. It will take a week or so to receive my new, hairy-chested iMac, but it will be well worth the wait. Did you know that the new Core i7 iMac will hyper-thread eight processor cores? Did you know that the new Core i7 iMac has a powerful ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory?

Yeah. Me either. But it does.

According to independent benchmarks, the new iMac is far more powerful than the Mac Pro at about half the price. Especially considering the fact that the Mac Pro doesn't even offer a 27" monitor option.

If you are a Windows developer, I highly recommend upgrading your development machines to Mac.

Update:
The Core i7 iMacs are delayed three weeks. Apparently they are so popular that Apple hasn't all the parts they need to keep up with the demand. I ordered mine with the remote control and I see that it has shipped, but the computer itself won't ship until about the 12th of February, and I won't likely get it until the middle of the following week. Here's hoping that it all comes together a bit earlier.  On the plus side, they won't charge my credit card until the computer ships.

More Update:
I placed my order from the Apple store on Friday Jan 22. I got an email last night at 11:49 PM, that says my new iMac shipped yesterday. Only one week and five days from the time I ordered it. Apparently the three week lead time has a lot of wiggle room in it for the iMac factory. Hopefully Apple has solved the screen problems with the 27" iMac. FedEx is showing the estimated delivery date as Feb 8 (Monday), so I am very excited.