Microsoft Propaganda Convention 2007

So today I went to the Microsoft "Ready for a New Day" launch convention. It was interesting, I got to see some cool features of Vista & Office 2007. From a development standpoint, I think the new Windows Presentation Foundation stuff is pretty interesting and will turn out to be more than hype. From a user's perspective, I think Office 2007 will make it a lot easier to make nice-looking documents/presentations/what-have-yous, and the side-effects of that will be the extra effort that professional "make-it-pretty" types will have to show the "it's-3d-so-it's-pretty" types why they spent all that time in school learning how to make it pretty.

All in all, it's a good thing. But that's Office.

Windows....ah, Windows. I was amused to no end when I saw that the most hyped thing about Windows in the keynote address was the highly improved search functionality of Windows. Don't get me wrong, I think it'll be fantastic. But I was amused that the keynote speaker was talking about the newfound ability to click the Start button, then type "calc" and as you type it narrows down the search results until it shows you the application you want.

So...yeah. Launching applications in Windows just went back to a command-line paradigm. I found that absolutely hilarious. (Of course, I've had my Start Menu optimized since the early days of Windows 95. Here, let me give you a breakdown of my Start menu's contents.)

• Start
• Programs
• Applications
• ASUS Probe
• C++ Builder
• Dia
  
• Eclipse
• E-Sword
  
• Force 2.0
  
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
  
• Scientific Notebook
• TI Connect
• TweakUI
  
• Virtual TI
• VMWare Player
  
• Entertainment
• American McGee's Alice
• Descent II
• Diablo II
• DOSBox
• Emperor - Battle for Dune
• Freespace 2
• Half-Life
• Half-Life 2
• Homeworld
• KotOR 2
• Outlaws
• ScummVM
• Steam
• UnrealTournament
• Warcraft III
  
• Internet Stuff
• Filezilla
• Net Transport
• PuTTY
• Serv-U Administrator
• Skype
• Trillian
• Ventrilo
• Windows Live Messenger
• Zone Alarm
  
• Multimedia
• VidEditing
• {various ripping/encoding tools}
  
• Audiograbber
• CloneCD
• Cool Edit Pro 2
• ID3-TagIT
• IrfanView
  
• Media Player Classic
• Picassa
• PowerDVD
  
• Startup
• {This space intentionally left almost blank}
  

The point of all this is to show an example of an efficiently laid-out Start menu. How many folders are in the Programs section of your Start menu and contain only one item that you ever use. If you only use the one item, then why have it in a folder? Wouldn't you be better off just moving that one item up a level? That's basically what I did - I organized all of the items that I used into categories. Now if I want to launch (for example) Media Player Classic, I use the following keystrokes (in sequence, not all at once). [Winlogo] [P] [M] [M]

The first pulls up the start menu. The second selects "Programs" and opens the next level of menu. The third opens Multimeda, and the fourth launches Media Player Classic (since it's the only thing in Multimedia that begins with "M").

Personally I still like my system better than Vista's way of doing it, but I've always been one who likes to do march to the beat of a different piccolo.

Anyway, as I write all of this, I've got a virtual machine busy installing Vista. My poor computer's freaking at me because it doesn't have enough RAM to support the VM and do this massive file copy operation I told it to do AND let me post on my blog and work with IM and browse the web in tabs.....

At least I'm nice enough not to be making it play MP3s for me....though I was watching random video clips I found earlier. But I stopped doing that a long time ago.

Anyway, I'll take a few weeks and fiddle with Vista. If I get it working the way I like it, I might just Ghost the VM and install it natively.

Revamp

Thanks to Jade, Google, and many others, I've got this website looking much cooler than it did this morning! That picture you see? That's all Jade. She is a master with Photoshop. I tried to use the image you see here, but you can tell hers is a heckuva lot better.


Anyway, if you want to visit this site in all its glory, you have to access it via http://ra226.net/~turbo - that way you get the really sweet favicon to go with it!

Thanks, Jade! Thanks all my loyal readers! Thanks mom for giving birth to me and allowing this day to come to pass!

3:28

I look at my clock, and it stares back at me.

..OOOO
.OOO..
O.OO..

Yeah, I actually have one of those blinky-LED binary clocks. I don't really use it much for actually telling time since I'm usually too tired to want to try to figure out which lights are lit and what values they represent and what their sum is. Mostly I just have it positioned right beneath my monitor so that I notice when it suddenly goes real dark because it went from

.O.OOO    ......
OOO.OO to ......
OOO.OO    ......

and that tends to shock the ol' eyes when the room is dark.

Anyway, I just looked up and saw that pattern and remembered the old days when people had clocks that had blinking dots between the hours and the minutes. You know, the stone age of clocks. They were dim and red and big and somehow always magically came on at the exact same time the DJ decided to announce that it's 7 o' clock. Or maybe I'm confusing real life with the movies again.

Anyway, in conclusion, I wish to state that I believe that all frequencies in the EM spectrum deserve equal status as consideration for the term "color" - we should not reserve that term only for those frequencies which we can see unaided with our eyes. That is all.

And now 3:28 has come and gone. It does that.

Because I can....

I'm going to put something else on the internet.

Hahahahahaha! Feel my power! *flex* The internet is now bigger, and it's because of MEEEEE!

The weekend departs

Sleep schedule is almost straightened out. The work...well, I still have 6 hours before the weekend is technically over with. It'll get done.

In other news, I've almost finished reading Eldest - I've decided that though the cross between atheistic and pantheistic views that the author tries to push on the reader are pretty weak, the characters are interesting and the plot is thickening respectably. Plenty of conflict, not much deus ex machina, and dragons and sword fighting too! Too bad he had to come up with theism and a system of magic which I absolutely hate in a way that goes beyond literary opinion.

The weekend

The weekend arrives. Time to get caught up on all the work that I should have been doing over the last few weeks. I just finished filing my taxes - it's so nice to have the feeling that I'm getting money even though I'm just getting back the money that I never should have given them in the first place.

Oh well, such is life. Maybe by the time Monday rolls around, my sleep schedule will be all straightened out and I'll be awake all day and asleep all night. One can only hope, right?

Still alive

Look at me. I didn't die. I post! I LIVE! I'll probably never post here again. I hate blogging. Don't you hate bloggers? They just put their thoughts up on the web for people to read. As if anybody cares what I think about whatever random thing is going through my head at the moment.