Just to let you know, much like drunk-dialing… also a very bad idea…
There are many reasons MySpace is the devil. This would be one of them…
Did I mention my head hurts? Oh, the humanity…
Happy Memorial Day
Welp, yesterday was Memorial day. Now that it’s come and gone, we don’t get another vacaction until July 4th rolls around here at work. Fortunately, I think I’m nearing the end of the list of crap I have to get done ASAP… which will return me to the even longer list of crap that I have to get done… sometime…
Anyway. As I was sitting at home yesterday, enjoying my day off, I got to wondering something. When US companies are closed on major holidays such as this (or July 4th, Thanksgiving, what have you) that fall on days that have no significance to other countries, does it affect anyone outside the US?
Since I know many of you readers are actually foreigners (to me… to you, obviously, you’d be a native), I thought I’d ask. Does it affect your place of work when the US is closed? What if you work for a company that’s based out of the US but has offices abroad? Do any of the offices ever actually close? Just the ones in the US? All of them?
For some reason I’ve actually started asking these kinds of questions lately, and they usually get met with a “Huh? Who the hell cares?!” kind of response from the people around me. They’ve started to think I’m more and more weird lately, but the truth is… I’ve always been this way, just quieter. Maybe I do think about things too much. I guess it’s true that ignorance is bliss…
Screw bliss…
Yahoo! Featured Searches...
I skipped over to Yahoo!’s Preview Site to check out the news on their homepage, and caught this interesting tidbit in the very top corner:
At least I’m not the only one with Katie Holmes on my mind all the time…
Middle Schoolers Are Laughing at You, Cambodia...
When reading Engadget Mobile earlier today, I found it amazing that Cambodia was able to ban their 3G network because of… get this… porn.
Heaven forbid that a country’s legal residents would find it desirable to view pornography. And by all means, let’s ban 3G cell networks so they can’t view it on their phones. There’s no way they’ll get it anywhere else, right?
Middle schoolers everywhere are laughing at you, Cambodia… laughing…
The best part?
Yikes! If being forced into 1xRTT and EDGE purgatory for the next 10 years isn’t a good reason to overthrow the government, we don’t know what is.
A Tale of Vista Beta 2 - Part I
UPDATE: I fixed links and images after re-uploading cropped images to Flickr.
Introduction
Now, to be precise, this is all actually based upon build 5384. The build actually released as the official “Beta 2” may differ. Still, it calls itself Beta 2, so for arguments sake (as well as brevity), we shall as well.
Installation was painless. Whereas Beta 1 was unable to format partitions, forcing installers to trudge out to the command line with a myserious key combination during the installer, Beta 2 was faced with none of these problems. My existing installation of Windows XP Pro was blown away without any complaining, and merely two clicks of the mouse in the lovely Vista GUI installer. (Speaking of which, am I the only one who found it odd that Windows was the last major OS left with a text-based installer? Apple and Linux have both had them for many years, while XP was installed entirely through a white on blue textual interface.)
Installation was surprisingly speedy. It took about 20 minutes to complete the entire process from format to desktop, which I dare say is better than the average Windows XP install time.
The first thing I noticed when Vista first boots is that my second monitor doesn’t flip on a few seconds later, as I was accustomed. No problem. I probably just need to dive in and click the ‘Expand my desktop onto this monitor’ button in my Display Properties… Unfortunately, that wasn’t it; but more on this later.
Welcome Center
You’re initially greeted with the Windows Vista “Welcome Center”. Basically this is a lot like the “Manage Your Server” concept in Windows 2000 Server and 2003 Server - a central point of some basic information, letting you branch out into the most common areas you’ll likely want to customize first. Notably present is the option for activating Windows, which I swiftly scoffed at and ignored.
Network Settings
The second thing I noticed was a prompt asking me what network I was connecting to. Vista had detected my network card, DHCP’d an address, and wanted to know with what security settings it should treat this connection - sharing or not.
Next Up…
That’s it for now, folks. Next up we’ll look some more at my driver problems, get some screenshots cleaned up in Photoshop (oh, like you didn’t notice all the white space…), and have a lot more fun with this beta. Stay tuned and if you want to spoil some of your fun, check out my Flickr Photo Set of all the Vista goodness, as it gets uploaded.