Sabbatical
I’m putting my blog on sabbatical since I haven’t felt the urge to broadcast my personal life in a while. For the 4 people that read this, I will post stuff irregularly until such time as I feel like posting more.
Working sucks
Well, I just found out today that they will be doing away with 2nd shift at my place of employment. They probably think they’re going to save money, but I don’t think we have the equipment or manpower to get it all done in two 8 hour shifts. If you run the numbers, it looks like we should be able to do it, but with our high turnover rate, I don’t think we can hit the numbers they are expecting. My prediction is that we will be running two 12 hour shifts for the foreseeable future which is nice on the wallet, but terrible for my sanity. There is one benefit though, I should have a backup for my job once they consolidate the shifts, so I might actually get to take a day off for the first time this year.
The end is nigh
In case you haven’t heard, a larger black spot was recently, er, spotted on Jupiter. Preliminary analysis indicates that it was probably caused by the impact of a comet or asteroid (and not millions of self replicating alien computers attempting to ignite a fusion reaction in the planet as I first suspected). The impact was completely unexpected and just goes to show how blissfully unaware we will probably be when the next comet or asteroid comes barreling in on Earth. Live for today people.
Stupid act of the day
When I came home from work this morning, I stopped by the grocery to get a few things. When I got home I was so sleepy that I forgot my groceries in the back seat of my car. Eight hours later I suddenly remembered that I had left my groceries in the car. About $10 worth of frozen items were ruined. Sigh…
How Microsoft will destroy the web… again
First, I’m sooooo tired of nerdball, I’m kicking it to the curb with this post.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m all about making dire predictions. I predicted our current economic crisis and even pinpointed the cause being the mortgage meltdown. I also predicted that it would be revealed (too late) that Dick Cheney is an alien robot mastermind bent on enslaving the human race. I’m still waiting on that one.
My next dire prediction is that Microsoft will destroy the web… again. In case you’ve been sleeping under a bucket the past couple of days, the big interwebs news is the release of Firefox 3.5. One of the most talked about features of this new release is support for the HTML 5 audio and video tags using the patent free and open Ogg Vorbis and Theora codecs. Originally the plan was to include the Ogg formats in the HTML 5 specification, but Apple and Nokia threw a major warbler about it and so the Ogg specs were removed from HTML 5 and replaced with some kinda ambiguous, wishy-washy crap that I haven’t bothered to read.
So here’s my prediction. Microsoft will indeed support the HTML 5 audio and video tags in Internet Explorer, but it will only work with their proprietary codecs and not the free ones. There may or may not be support for the Mac platform, but there will certainly be no support for Microsoft codecs on Linux or other platforms. Since they won’t be supporting the Ogg codecs, web developers will be forced to use the Microsoft codecs to encode their content since Internet Explorer has such a large market share. That market share will increase once people start to migrate towards Internet Explorer so that they can watch videos and listen to music.
This is the same crap they pulled with Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was released with only partial support for CSS, and even the stuff they did support was plagued by rendering bugs. They had a huge market share at the time and so they didn’t bother to fix any of the bugs. They let IE6 rot for 6 years while the web stagnated and webmasters catered to the IE6 bugfest. Microsoft only started working on IE again after Firefox ate into about 10% of their market share. The new innovation really helped the web take off again (remember Web 2.0?).
The only question now is how long with Microsoft hold us back this time?
It's all the rage in Europe
The Weather Channel FAIL
Check out this screen capture of my The Weather Channel dashboard widget from today. Hilarious.
TWC is LOLtastic
Trying Windows 7
I thought I’d give Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 7, a try. The first thing I noticed was the confusing numbering scheme. It seems to me that there have been more than seven versions of Windows. Windows 1-3 were clearly named, so we can assume those are counted. Then came Windows NT 3.1, so I’ll count it as part of 3 even though it was completely new. I’m counting Windows 95 as version 4 and not version 95, but maybe I should count Windows NT 3.1 as part of version 4 as well. Or maybe Windows NT 3.1 IS version 4 despite the name and Windows 95 is part of that. Then came Windows NT 4.0 so I’m thinking it is definitely part of version 4. Windows 98 and 98SE came next. I suppose we are still counting those as version 4 and Windows ME as well. Version 5 probably started with Windows 2000 and its consumer version, Windows XP, will be lumped in there as well. Windows Server 2003 should also be part of version 5 while we’re at it. Windows Vista probably counts as version 6 although I’ve never used it and it hardly seems worthy of its own version number. Which all leads us to this latest and greatest version, Windows 7 (deep breath intake). The fanboys will notice that I probably left some things out here, but somehow I don’t think Microsoft Bob and Packard Bell Navigator are really worth mentioning.
The second thing I noticed about Windows 7 is that Microsoft is actually allowing people to download and use it free of charge (until June of next year when it will stop functioning until you pay for it). As far as I know this is a first for Microsoft and a good PR move. The only drawback is that they give you the Windows 7 Ultimate edition which is not the Home Premium edition most people will end up with. So there is probably some functionality you’ll miss once you actually pay for the darn thing.
To install Windows 7 you must download an ISO image and burn it to a DVD. This is not a functionality built into Windows XP, so you’ll have to download a third party program to do this. I used Active@ ISO Burner which was second on the list of two programs that Microsoft recommended (ironically, I could not figure out how to use the first program they recommended). Once you’ve made your installation DVD, you just need to open and run it to do the install.
Installation was amazingly easy. I simply ran the DVD, answered a few questions, let it do its thing, answered a few more questions, and it was all done. I don’t know how long it took exactly since I slept while it was copying files, but it certainly takes less that 4 hours which is how much sleep I got. There were some power features that were either missing from the installation or not readily apparent that I would have liked to seen. The first missing item was a partition manager. It gave me no options to create, delete, or reformat partitions. Boo! The second item that wasn’t readily apparent was the ability to create more than one user during installation. It’s not something that I need personally, but it would be nice for people with more than one user in their household.
Gratuitous Screen Grab
Upon bootup, I noticed another amazing thing. Windows 7 will actually automagically detect some of your hardware. It detected my faxmodem (big whoop) and ethernet adapter which was a big help in getting the first updates installed. During the first set of updates, Windows 7 also detected my graphics card and wireless card and installed drivers for those as well. The only things that did not work were the sound card and multimedia buttons. I downloaded the Vista drivers for my sound card and it started working (without a restart!). I haven’t tried to get the multimedia buttons working yet. Another thing that is funky is my trackpad. It works using standard PS/2 mouse drivers, but you can’t configure it.
After all that it’s really just a standard Windows experience. I found the interface to be less intuitive than Windows XP. I think in trying to make thing easier to use, they only succeeded in making things slightly harder for the tech savvy. The eye candy is nice, but it’s still just eye candy. Microsoft also failed to include its IM client, mail client, movie maker, etc. in this release. You’ll have to download those in a free package called Windows Live Essentials. They had about 2GB left on the installation DVD so I’m not really sure why they are not including those with the OS. Another disappointment was Internet Explorer 8. While it is much, MUCH better than IE 6 or 7, it’s still bloated with a clunky interface. I downloaded Google Chrome halfway through this article just because I found IE so annoying.
Umm.. an update?
Looks like it has been a while since my last update. I’ve been busy working, moving across town, watching Azura’s Mario ROM hack reviews, and just generally being lazy.
I updated the theme again for this site (let me know if you see a bug). It’s a modified version of the plainscape theme which has to be the most versatile, simple, and well thought out theme for WordPress. Basically I just changed the colors and got rid of the old sad sun face that everyone hated. It has been replaced with a non-committal cloud. In fact, I may make The Non-Committal Cloud™ my official mascot.
Holy crap!
I just found out that Faith No More is doing a reunion tour. That’s frickin’ sweet, although there are no American tour dates yet. Here’s one of my favorite songs in case you’ve never heard of them.
