There are lots of ways to see the outcome of today’s primaries, but I think the New York Times has done the best - far more compact and easier to read than CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post.

No Flash, no ajax, no hard-to-read maps or graphics. Just text, good highlighting, and a compact horizontal layout.

I bought and next-day shipped my new MacBook Pro from Amazon on October 19.

On October 24, Apple announced a new line with Core 2 Duos and other upgrades.

This afternoon, by sheer chance, I noticed that Amazon had dropped the price of the model I bought by a few hundred dollars. I sent customer support a request to refund the difference - why not?

Six hours later, a friendly email arrives in my inbox. Refund granted.

Amazon does something amazing: they combine the purchasing power and logistical expertise of a massive retailer with the kind of customer support you can expect from a neighborhood store. I get my impulse purchases overnight for a few bucks (Amazon Prime), competitive pricing, a monster selection. Except for niche purchases, I’m finding it harder and harder to shop anywhere else online.

(Why am I in the water? See Jumping Ship.)

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks - and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

• Quicksilver

- A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

• Firefox

- The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

• Mail.app

- Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

• Adium

- Great cross-service IM.

• TextMate

- For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

• VirtueDesktops

- Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

• Parallels

- Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

• iTerm

- The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.

On Friday, I said goodbye to my five-year-old IBM ThinkPad A22P and hello to a new MacBook Pro.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop - great, maybe - and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (”dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.

This past Christmas, I was lucky to get a BlackBerry 7105t under the tree. This was, I thought, a great phone. Nice and small, good bright screen, and a well-designed address book with Outlook syncing. SureType is nothing short of magic and email via a cheap T-Mobile account worked pretty well.

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part - SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right - $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing - a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

I have a confession to make. This isn’t my first blog post, it’s my second. The first one was right about when Google bought Pyra Labs for their Blogger service. For those of you keeping track, that was just about three years ago. Suffice it to say, my first attempt didn’t take.

At the time, I was working at VA Software as Director of Engineering for the SourceForge enterprise product. As the engineering team grew, I spent less and less time with my hands dirty in technology and more time in product design and development process. (My last big commit to CVS was to update the year in a bunch of comments from 2002 to 2003. Touching nearly every file gave me a nice bump in our commit stats. :)) I have no real desire to write about personal stuff, and back then I didn’t feel strongly about writing about technology.

Fast forward three years. I’m knee-deep in the construction and day-to-day operation of Wikispaces, a free wiki host. Along with Adam and Dom, I’m one of three employees at our start-up, Tangient LLC. There’s a massive growth of the kind of consumer web properties that really spark my interest. I’ve got an increasingly long list of ideas and topics that someone else might possibly want to read about. So, I’m giving blogging a second try.

I’ll likely keep things confined to a few areas: Wikispaces and how we’re growing the service, the tools and technologies that make modern sites tick, new services of particular interest, and notes on my fascination with Alexa stats. Seriously.

But don’t worry - if I start posting about what the cats ate last night, some trippy experience I had while riding Muni, or rants on politics, I’ve instructed several friends to break all of my fingers.

We’ll see how it goes.