Redeeming creation one byte at a time
Archive for January, 2007
Article up for Urbana.org
3http://www.urbana.org/_articles.cfm?RecordId=1033 is an article I wrote for the website Urbana.org. Check it!
“I’m not a man, I’m a MACHINE!”
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(taken by dof recently). This is what happens when you stare at computers far too much. I love this picture, it makes me giggle like a schoolgirl. Filed under *way* random.
“The Ropes” – Disney’s employment handbook in 1943
0http://www.cartoonbrew.com/archives/2007_01.html#002683
From Margaret Feinberg’s Blog pointing out a terrific new site Bag of Nothing.
It’s disturbing at points, hillarious at others. At yet other points, it reminds me that war is war regardless of the generation and that oft people are prone to act in certain ways.
My take on Vista
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Since today is the official birthday of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s newest OS I thought I might take a minute and share my opinion.
In a nutshell, it’ll be a while before our shop goes to it. I’ve been running it for about a month now and I’ve been underwhelmed (have I said that? I distinctly remember saying that…). For a business customer, there are some signficant issues with the interface. Also, it greatly dissapoints me knowing what was not in Vista and yet it still took them like 5 years to get the thing out of the door.
After a growing look at the OS, the best and worst thing it has going for it is that it changes the interface signficantly. Paradigms are shifted as well in that some commonalities to previous versions of Windows are now gone. Chief among them is the idea of drives. Your C drive and all network drives a bit more hidden in the interface, and I’ve still yet to find a way to map a drive efficently (maybe I’m missing it?). Run is missing as well, which really irks me.
I’ve been going through a number of programs that are not uncommon to a normal user and there are a number of issues that I’ve been running into in getting them to work. One such example is iTunes/iPod; when an iPod is plugged into the system, it initially wants to scan it for errors and, in my experience, caused some disk issues on the iPod itself. iTunes has been a bit more cagey than it normally is.
Then there’s the issue of missing components. I’ve been waiting for the update to NTFS, a 10 year old file system, for a while and from the sound of it, the planned FS that was going into Vista was going to be great, but they just simply didn’t have time. I trust that much of what they did have time for was security issues.
Overall, as I’ve said before, it’s pretty and cool looking. The worst part about this release is that there are stable, viable alternatives out there (including Windows XP) that do the job better than Vista. Steve Balmer said in an interview last night that they plan to have 200 Million copies of Vista in production this year; we’ll see.
To me, it reminds me somewhat of Windows ME only with the NT Codebase. I can only hope I’m wrong…
Put in my place by Aidan
0One more Aidan post:
I’ve found that as he’s growing older that it’s been really fun to start to interact with him as a talking, walking, person (e.g. we’re having conversations) and I find that I’m amazed that we do that given that just 3 years ago he was a helpless little baby that didn’t know much.
Anyway, he was asking me to play with him on Sunday while the Bears were on. I’m not normally a football person, or even a sports person for that matter, but there is a certain amount of ‘home town’ pride that comes with seeing a ‘local’ team going all the way. Heck, it’s just an entertaining game to watch.
Aidan had awoke from his nap and was wanting to watch a video that he had started before and he was wanting to play with me as well. Basically I told him that he wasn’t really watching the video if he was doing something else and asked if it would be o.k. if I shut it off so that we could play. WELL, I realized that I was asking him not to do something so that I could do the exact same thing, so I kept quiet and let him finish the video.
You can imgine how I felt when the video finished and he said ‘o.k., daddy, it’s your turn to watch your bears game now. My video is all done.’
Grace in the hands of a three year old is a dangerous thing. 