Monthly Archive for May, 2006

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:

Yahoo! Featured Search - Katie Holmes

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

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

Network Setup

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.

A Little Dream Analysis

There’s a bit of history there… Many years ago, we dated. It never became serious and didn’t last very long at all. When we didn’t get to see each other as often as I’d have liked, I ended it, and hurt her. I broke her heart, and it didn’t take me long to learn to regret it, as well as my somewhat mis-placed priorities.

Well, a while back, we started talking again. Nothing major, just general chit-chat. We caught up on some recent happenings in our lives and exchanged pleasantries about every day since.

Then the totally unexpected happened…

I hadn’t even seen her in over two years, and all of a sudden I’m having a dream about her. It wasn’t anything serious, and in truth, it didn’t make much sense at all (as dreams are apt to do).

I only remember pieces of the dream, as usual, but I remember we were at some kind of dance. She was wearing a beautiful white dress, much like a wedding dress. We had been talking about her potential engagement, as well as the problems with her relationship, so really none of that is surprising. I imagine my subconscious would focus on such a major event about to happen in the life of a girl I may still have feelings for lurking not so far below the surface.

It wa sjust a fairly unique experience in my dream world… almost like some scene out of the Hilary Duff movie A Cinderella Story, which may also have had something to do with it, since the last time I saw her, she had her hair cut to resemble Duff’s (and I think it looked much better than it does in the recent pictures I’ve seen of her).

Sigmund Freud said that every dream is a wish, either unconscious or otherwise. perhaps since she was wearing a wedding dress, the dream was trying to tell me I wish she were marrying me (since we were the ones dancing afterall).

Then again, since there was nothing else to suggest that I were the groom, the dream could just as easily mean that I want to see her hapily married to a guy worthy of her. Nah, that can’t be one of my dreams…

Freud also said that your wishes aren’t revealed in dream analysis for the purpose of conscious fulfillment, but rather for the conscious resolution of your inner conflict. If that’s our attitude, perhaps the dream was merely a sign that I want some type of female companionship in my life, not necessarily hers in particular. That in itself brings up an interesting prospect. It’s kinda like knowing the future, but not being able to change events that are about to happen. What’s the point in knowing if you can’t prevent bad things from happening and manipulate it all in your own favor? Why would I want to analyze my dreams, if I can’t find out some deep dark secret of my subconscious?

I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night (about 3 hours total) to dream, maybe I’ll have better luck tonight…

Reference: Dream interpretation at Wikipedia