This past weekend we went up to Chicago for one day. We went to Reza Restaurant, did some shopping at the Iranian stores and ended up at the Signature Room in John Hancock Center.

The Signature Room is a very high class lounge and restaurant on they very top of the John Hancock Center. You can see the whole city of Chicago from there. The view is magnificent.

The food there is great too - we didn’t eat there though. Their entrees range from $22 to $44. The bar/lounge itself is very nice and classy. But its main attraction are the huge windows all around the bar. You can really see the whole city of Chicago. At night, when the city lights up, you can hardly find a better view in the entire city.

I had been to nicer bars before, but never enjoyed them as much as the Signature Room. I should mention that the drinks and apetizers were more expensive than regular, but not bank breaking.

My brother owns a Toshiba laptop. He bought the extended warranty for the laptop when he bought it. A while ago his laptop had some problems (was turning off on its own and not turning back on anymore).

He called Toshiba customer service to figure out how he can mail the laptop to get it repaired. They issued him a ticket and told him he should receive a package to ship the laptop in.

Three days later he called to see why the package hasn’t come yet and they tell him the ticket was canceled. No one knew why. So they created a new ticket for him with the same promise.

Three days after, he called them again to see what happened. They tell him that he had two tickets in the system and the system automatically canceled both of them (They hadn’t really closed that first one yet). Again they created a new ticket and told him to wait.

Three days after, he called Toshiba customer service another time. They said “oh, you should take the laptop to UPS and ship it yourself”. After fighting them over the phone for a good half an hour, they gave him another ticket.

Of course that last ticket didn’t work either. Same procedure kept going for 25 days. Also, every time he asked to speak with a manager they somehow didn’t transfer him to one.

At the end of the 25 days, I took the phone and called on his behalf. I was so angry at every one of the customer service employees, I felt bad for them. But I finally got to a manager and after complaining to her for half an hour, she ended up mailing the package herself and calling us back to confirm it.

For a simple service, my brother had to stay without a laptop for almost a month and use minimum 30 cell phone minutes every other day. Bottom line Toshiba has awful customer service.

Internet explorer sucks.

I am a website designer/coder/optimizer. We (web designers) have to adjust our websites to work both with Firefox and Internet Explorer (at least) as well as other internet browsers.

Optimizing a website for Firefox is very easy as Firefox is truly a great browser. They follow web standards and update their software accordingly often. But Internet Explorer doesn’t care nearly as much about the web designing. Internet Explorer is the most popular internet browser and it seems like that Microsoft doesn’t seem it necessary to keep up with web standards. As long visitors use Internet Explorer, us (the website designers) have to code our website to work with Internet Explorer (IE) too - no matter how much extra coding and work we have to do.

If being more web compatible and open source doesn’t interest you, Firefox loads pages faster than Internet Explorer too. Also, since its open source, you can be sure that Firefox is not stealing your web surfing data. I’m not saying IE does, but we don’t know for sure.

I used to have a Treo 650 that I got from my friend about a year and half ago. But it broke after 6 month. Actually the battery just stopped charging. No one could fix it and Palm said it would cost me $250, which I could buy a new phone for less than that.

I recently changed my phone again and bought the new (not so new anymore) Treo 700P. I’ve owned this one for couple months now and love it. Here are some cons and pros of the cellphone:

Pros:

• The applications. They are great. I use the Word and Excel applications on a daily basis. I love the world clock and can’t live without the notes, tasks, and calendar applications.

• The full keyboard. A lot of phone nowadays have all the above applications, but without the full keyboard I would never use any of them. The keyboard makes texting much easier too.

• The camera. I really rarely use it, but its a great feature.

• The external memory card. I use it to transfer files and download them through the blue tooth to my laptop.

• Records Audio. You can record audio and since it takes an external hard drive, you can record very long interviews.

• Touch Screen. I tried couple other phone that didn’t have touch screen and frankly once you use a touch screen phone (like the Treo 700P or 700W) you would never go to one that doesn’t have touch screen.

• Call Logs Saved forever. You can check your call logs from 5 month ago, and even before. This is great if you get a lot of calls from people you don’t know (business) and forget to save them or be able to dial that Pizza place you called last week.

• Web Access. You can’t forget this one.

• GPS and Map. You can add a simple application to it and a simple device to your car (for about $250) and turn the Treo 700 to a GPS device.

Cons:

• No Wifi. This is my biggest problem with Treo 700. It doesn’t have wifi. In today’s market every phone should have wifi (IMO).

• Large and Heavy. Treo 700 is rather thick and heavy comparing to other phones.

Like many other people I stayed out all night on the thanksgiving night in line to get the best deals at our local Circuit City. I ended up buying a Compaq Presario C700 laptop for $300 (after all the rebates and discounts - normaly $650 to $700).

The laptop has Vista on it as the operating system. It was my first time using Vista. It wasn’t as bad until I realized that Vista uses more than twice the memory that Windows XP uses. My laptop had 1GB memory and was using close to 700MB of it with just Windows Vista coming up. So I added another 1GB of memory to it myself and took it to 2GB. It is faster and better now. As for the vista, I still haven’t had any problems with it, but we’ll see if all my softwares run fine on it.

So far I have noticed one bad thing about the laptop. It gets extremely hot - the bottom part of it does -. I used to have a laptop (SONY) that overheated all the time and turned off by itself because of the heat. But that started happening after I had owned the laptop for over a year and used it 24/7. I haven’t owned this laptop for even a week yet.

One other missing feature is that it doesn’t have the middle button that IBM and DELL do (that is used as mouse instead of the mouse pad on the laptop).

The fan on the laptop is very loud too. Every 5 minutes or so, the fan works very fast and makes a fairly loud noise which is annoying.

I’ll add more reviews to this page as I use the laptop.

There is wide range and variety of computer notebooks available but before deciding its better to consider reading reviews about particular product and company. One of reliable machinery is acer laptop. But on the other hand compaq notebook is a part of Presario family of computers known for quality and rich experience.