My beloved husband got for me two presents tonight, one for Christmas and one for my name day (24th of December is the St Eugenia day for the Christian Orthodox).

So I got a leather office chair (the one I am currently using is very old and it’s losing pieces) with some massage programs in it. Too bad that we paid the full price though ($130) as we later found out that their online store has a $40 off currently on that model.

We also got a lightweight DirtDevil vacuum cleaner. I already have a full-upright very powerful one, but I can’t easily move it around. Each time I am to use it to clean up the house, I feel like I just finished an 8-hour mining work. So I thought this time I should get a lightweight one, see if it can be managed easier… Who knows… maybe I will vacuum the house more now.

I still haven’t found a present for my JBQ though. We looked around for a Nintendo Wii or a PS3, but these are nowhere to be found…

Update: Damn it, the chair’s box has two right arms. JBQ assembled most of it before he realized that… >:(

Tonight I played with a Zune for a while, and I must say that I am very impressed with the UI (I prefer it over the iPod’s). Very-very intuitive, good looking, fast and to the point. If only the Zune did not have the problems I outlined a few weeks ago, I would have bought one on the spot.

I was thinking how cool it would be if Apple was to work together with either VMWare or Parallels and create a free-to-download, combined demo of the VM and Leopard. The player/ISO would work for up to 30 days, just enough to get people excited about the VM and OSX. If they clean up most of the unneeded files, the compressed archive doesn’t have to be bigger than 1 GB (easily downloadable by most cable/DSL users).

I believe that this would be a great opportunity for Apple to get their OS to as many generic PCs as possible and introduce it to potential customers. Before, this was not possible because Tiger was already out and about when the port to x86 was finalized, and the engineers had too much in their plate. But now that a brand new OS version is coming out soon, a demo would be a good marketing move. And because it would run in a controlled VM environment, Apple wouldn’t have to worry about driver compatibility issues with the components plethora that exists in the PC market.

While BeOS was already discontinued by that time, when BeOS5PE came out it was downloaded 1.3 million times at a time where the overall userbase was not bigger than ~60,000 users. BeOS lived a pretty successful post-period for 2 more years because of that free demo, even if it was completely discontinued internally at Be. I bet that if Apple offers an OSX demo it would really help their sales by a huge lot.