Had a spectacular dinner with my wife Robin last night at one of the swankiest (and priciest) restaurants in the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas last night. The food was outstanding (one of the top ten I can remember, and we eat out at a lot of great restaurants on travel and in DC).

The restaurant was Aureole, and one of their unique features was the four story high, four sided tower of wine that dominates the center of the restaurant. In order to get your bottle of wine, the wine steward, wearing caribiners, hooks into cables and gets hoisted up to wherever in the stack the bottle may reside.

That in itself was pretty cool, along with the great food, but what was interesting was how they manage presenting their extensive (and frequently changing) selection of wines to the customer. The wine list was brought to us as a Tablet PC running an internal web app that you could use to browse the hundreds of choices of wine, and even get additional background information on any that you are interested in. It had a bookmarking feature so that you could select any that you might be interested in as you browse the entire collection, then review your short list to make your final selection. You did all this with simple point and click with the pen.

My first thought, being a smart client zealot, was that they should have made it a smart client application. But the fact was that it was truly just a browsing app, and used a lot of graphics and animation to enhance the experience that would have been more difficult to achieve in a WinForms app.

I was just happy to see yet another powerful user experience enhanced by tablets and technology.

And the wine and food rocked.

It was time at last to upgrade. I love my tablet, and will continue to use it whenever mobility and flexibility is key. But too often I found myself coding on a postage stamp screen, missing the real estate of my old 15.4” behemoth laptop.

So I went out yesterday and bought a Toshiba Satellite M35-S456. 1.7 GHz Centrino (feels about twice that fast), 80 GB hd, DVD Multi-drive (RW for CD, DVD, and the upcoming dual sided DVDs), 4-5 hour battery life, lots of other nice features. Probably the most striking feature is the screen. 15.4” wide screen with a glossy, bright screen that looks like you are looking at a plasma screen. It is marvelous. I haven't had this clear and bright of a picture on a computer, let alone a laptop, in a long time. All that and only weighs just over 6 pounds. Nice trade between functionality and portability in my mind. All the P4 models sucked the battery like a vaccuum and weighed at least another couple lbs.

I have yet to try any games or DVDs on it, but since it is honed for that kind of thing with the multi-drve and the nVidia G-Force FX, I'm sure that will rock too. For now, I am just reveling in my fastest, brightest, most functional machine yet.

Despite the fatbody appearance that I sport due to an affinity for junk food, beer, and wine, I actually spend 40-60 minutes a day on cardio machines in the gym about 6 days a week to try to offset said affinity.

I typically have been spending the time reading MSDN or Code magazine or other books and tech materials. Now I have found a way to be even more productive, have more options, and save a few trees. It seems that my tablet fits perfectly in the plastic book/magazine racks they have for the machines.

Sure I get a lot of stares from people giving me that “now you've just gone too far” look. But hey, it works for me. My buddy Scott, prez of CapArea.net, says that is the geekiest thing he has ever heard. Well, gosh, at least I don't have a SPOT watch... yet.

You gotta love the advances in storage.

Dilemma: You have a tablet/ultra portable laptop, but you need to carry around virtual machines for Whidbey, Longhorn, Oracle/Java (shhhhh....), etc. development.

Solution: FireLite SmartDisk 40 GB drive, no power cord, runs off USB power, pretty fast, about the size of a PDA and lighter than one.

Very cool, dilemma solved.