A few weeks ago, with Winter Semester fast approaching, I realized I needed to buy more notebooks. For the last four years, I have exclusively used Moleskine's Extra Large Cahiers to keep all my notes. They're relatively inexpensive, so I could easily have one notebook for each course, and they're durable, with acid-free paper, stitch binding and a durable cardboard cover.

But, to my horror, when I popped online to place an order for more notebooks, my supplier didn't have them in stock.

Some sleuthing revealed the ugly truth. From what I learned, a giant paper products conglomerate had acquired the Moleskine company. In a bid to streamline the company — something I wholeheartedly support in most cases — the new corporate overlords had discontinued the less popular products, including my beloved Extra Large Cahier.

Initially, I thought it might be possible to find some dealer with lots of overstock product, swoop in and buy up all of the remaining Extra Large Cahiers. As it turned out, however, most dealers with leftover inventory were praying on desperate devotees, such as myself, by selling them with insane markup. (Even I'm not crazy enough to pay $70 for 3 composition books!)

Thus, I set about finding a replacement. My first thought was the French paper products company, Clairefontaine, more or less the official provider of paper products to French students. I like their products quite a bit — I've recently switched to their top-bound notepads from the comparable Moleskine products — but they only offer notebooks with spiral binding, which I find cumbersome compared to the Moleskine-style stitch binding.

Then I stumbled upon Minneapolis-based russel+hazel. They offer a wide assortment of paper products that appear to have been designed with neurotic people like me in mind. The pages of their signature SmartRule paper have line numbers, just like Xcode. The notebooks also come in a variety of colors, unlike the all black, all the time Moleskines, which would make finding the right notebook that much easier, especially when it's one of 50.

Unfortunately, ecru, a fantastic Portland-area stationary store, only had one russel+hazel composition book in stock. I bought it, though, and I'm impressed with the product. I suspect they will become my new note taking medium of choice. Not to mention, I will probably spend a small fortune on their line of binders, notepads and filler paper designed for type-A personalities like me.

As usual, the vast majority of the goods on display at CES were evolutionary and rather humdrum. Polaroid had a new digital camera on display that can print photos instantly. (Didn't a company called Polaroid invent that decades ago?) Dell, HP and Sony all took the wraps off more "netbook" computers — those miniature laptops with keyboards just small enough it's difficult to type. And, of course, Microsoft released the first public beta of Windows 7, otherwise known as "what Vista should have been two years ago."

One company, though, announced a product so great I sat through an hour-long video replay of the announcement event. That product, is, of course, Palm's new smartphone, the Pre. I would be surprised if the engineers down in Cupertino aren't working overtime this afternoon to catch up. The team at Palm has packed the Pre with a host of brilliant, incredibly well-engineered features that make my iPhone look clunky.

The Pre's hardware is nothing to write home about. Palm's industrial design team did a nice job on the device, though the Pre's design is inferior to that of the iPhone. The capacitive touchscreen looks more or less the same as the one found in the HTC G1, the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm. Granted, it appears Palm has done much more work than either Google or RIM on the software side, so that the touchscreen on the new Pre supports the kind of wonderful multi-touch gesturing that makes the iPhone such a fantastic product.

Palm did, however, make one interesting and decidedly brilliant hardware design choice. Unlike any other smartphone I know of, the Pre features a touch-sensitive "gesture area" underneath the screen. From what I saw in Palm's launch presentation, this gives the device a slew of extra capabilities.

For instance, reading long web articles, from the New York Times or Wikipedia, can be a chore on the iPhone. Of course, I have to keep flicking the page down as I read. Unfortunately that means I must move my finger onto the screen, estimate the correct amount of "scroll" I need to advance just enough to read the next paragraph, but not so much that I miss some of the article, and I have no choice but to obscure a quarter of the screen with my thumb, making what's on the screen difficult to discern.

Not a problem with the gesture area on the Pre. One simply swipes a finger downwards or upwards in the gesture area — leaving the display uncluttered by an extra thumb — and the device automatically scrolls the page one screen-length up or down. Genius.

On the software side, Palm has come up with myriad ingenious software innovations. Its Synergy technology automatically and — more importantly — intelligently aggregates data from all corners of the Cloud and presents it in a useful way. Rather than feature umpteen messaging applications — one for AIM, one for SMS, one for MMS, etc. — the Pre's software just lumps all the messages between you and a given contact, regardless of what service or protocol they came from, into one long thread. The Synergy software enables the Address Book application to pull data, not just from a single sync source, but from Exchange, Google, Facebook and many other repositories of personal data. So, no need to worry whether you copied someone's phone number from Facebook into your iPhone or Google account. If it's out there, the Pre will find it.

The new Palm WebOS, which powers the Pre, also deals with notifications far more elegantly than on any other device I've used. Whereas a run-of-the-mill Nokia, or even the iPhone stops everything and displays an intrusive box when an alarm goes off or a text message arrives, the Pre simply slides a small notification onto the bottom of the display, leaving the open application completely unaffected.

I could go on and on about how much I like of what I've seen of the Palm Pre. Jon Rubenstein — who, by the by, helped Apple develop the original iPod — and his team have done a fantastic job. I doubt I will give up my iPhone the moment the Pre goes on sale. The iPhone is pretty great. But I will not hesitate to recommend the Pre to anyone in the market for a smartphone. And I sincerely hope Apple has something spectacular in hand for the next version of the iPhone. The competition has finally arrived.

As if featuring Alan Colmes as a co-host were not pitiful enough, apparently Sean Hannity — on his new program creatively titled Hannity — will now feature a segment for irate viewers to call in and express their frustration with Sean Hannity's stupidity. To quote Broadcasting & Cable:

That Mr. Hannity complains about the "liberal media" sullying the nation's political discourse is ironic.

It has been a long, long time. Forgive me.

More topically, I just bought a fancy new MacBook Pro. I needed a bigger hard drive, but I didn't feel comfortable completely disassembling my old MacBook Pro to replace it. That and I felt compelled to have a 64-bit processor and more than 2 GB of memory. It just sounds good.

What I really love about the new machine, though, is not the zippy processor or the more capacious hard drive — as compared to my previous computer — but the build quality of the laptop's case. Unlike the aluminum PowerBook and original MacBook Pro — whose cases were cobbled together from a mishmash of stamped aluminum, plastic gaskets and fasteners — the top case of Apple's latest offering begins its life as a solid block of aluminum, which a series of machining operations whittles down to the final product. The result is something to behold.

My two previous computers, a PowerBook G4 and a first-generation MacBook Pro, never seemed as well constructed as their price tags led one to believe. To be certain, neither computer feet as flimsy as an inexpensive Dell Inspiron. But for $2000, a laptop should be constructed like a tank. Yet, both the aluminum PowerBook and the MacBook Pro would creak whenever I picked them up or warp slightly when the processors were running at full bore.

The new "unibody" MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels like a $2000 computer. There are no seams, far fewer joints and thus no creaking. The computer is built like a tank. Not to mention it looks great too. I especially like the sleep light, which disappears completely when it's not in use, thanks to some rather brilliant engineering on Apple's part.

Of course, the new MacBook Pro has a few flaws. First and foremost, Apple does not offer the 15" model with a matte display. Admittedly, I like the screen more than I thought I would. The glare is not that obtrusive, even in bright sunlight. At the same time, however, I cannot help but wish I could chop the screen off my old computer and superglue it to my new one.

A FireWire 400 port would also make a nice addition. While I appreciate at least having a FireWire 800 port, unlike the unfortunate folks stuck with no FireWire whatsoever on the new unibody MacBook, the absence of a dedicated FireWire 400 port annoys me. First, I can't use the FireWire hub on my gorgeous Apple Cinema display. The cable is built-in to the monitor and, so far as I can tell, no one sells a FireWire 400 to 800 adapter dongle. Second, without a dedicated FireWire 400 bus, the super speedy FireWire 800 will drop in speed if so much as one device on its tree cannot operate at FireWire 800 speeds.

All in all, though, I like the new computer. It's nice not to crawl along with only a gigabyte of free space on my startup disk and the new made-from-a-brick case is nothing short of wonderful. The glossy screen is not so irksome, both on its own and, in my case, when there is a big matte Cinema Display to use instead.