Hate squirrels!

I had one break into my apartment when I lived in Florida and was gone for Christmas vacation... he ate all of my chocolates, pooped all over the living room+kitchen, and then went upstairs and died in my roommate's robe, presumably of a heart attack.


As for a real life rave..

I'm glad I finally get to see the seasons change again. I love autumn! It has Halloween in it, my birthday, and Thanksgiving, which leads to Christmas. It's one big thing after the other.

Making homemade pumpkin pies. It's a lot of work and time and I only do it once a year but they taste sooo good and it's always fun trying not to cut yourself when cutting a large pumpkin into pieces.

I love all things pumpkin.

Even the word pumpkin.

My rave:
Went to a Microsoft recruiting meeting here on campus, and won a new copy of Windows Vista Ultimate through a random drawing.

That's a rave because you're going to sell it on ebay and laugh at the poor sucker who paid you to essentially nerf his computer, right? Though, I guess it also works as a really shiny paper-weight. That could be rant-worthy. I wish I could win a free $400 paper-weight.

That's actually my exact plan.

Besides, my University offers Vista Ultimate for free through their listserv. No reason to keep it anyway.

There is nothing like working for two straight days on a part of your programming project and FINALLY getting it working.

It's times like these I remember why I'm in Comp Sci.

That is such a rush. Especially when you're under the wire for an eleventh hour solution.

Friend's birthday tonight + party tomorrow + first driving lesson on Sunday (assuming I'm still alive)

Now, now, let's not start complaining about Vista. Really, when you compare it to *NIX and Mac OS, it wins in the majority of categories. It loses to MacOS for multimedia, and to *NIX for programming and servers.

That's about it.

Real life raves: finally figuring out how to interface correctly with Excel using OLE automation. In any modern language (java, anything .NET, VB, even C or C++) it is a piece of cake. Unfortunately, where I work I am not using any modern language. No, I get the fun of writing in an obscure language called Visual DataFlex, written by Data Access WorldWide. We have been using the same language since about 1985, with only interface updates to transform it from procedural to object oriented (that's right - it used to be procedural, but they added an OOP interface so now it is an object oriented language). Finally, though, I found out how to import an automation library and get the dispatch IDs for all of the methods/properties I need, so now I can actually interface like I want to! Now I just have to figure out how to capture events, and I might actually be able to fix the stuff that's wrong with our excel interface!

Metaphor for the non-computer people: I started trying to build a house out of rocks. Finally, I found the mortar. Because the house is built out of crappy rocks, it will still never be as nice as a normal house, but I am making progress!

It loses to all of the above for performance. Usability takes a hit for its over-protective User Account Control too.

I use ultimate, and turned off UAC, windows defender, and firewall. It's taken on less problems, even when I go trolling for trojans. Even IE is fairly watertight, and the MSRT removes almost everything. I like it far more than anything previous. It runs like a dream on mine, wether it's on aero, or vista basic, or classic.

getting a full nights sleep and waking up at a decent hour for the first time in months. Also, the breakfast burrito I had was pretty good.

There's a juvenile beaver in the creek behind the building I work in! We've been catching glimpses of the critter in the tall grass at a distance and wondering just what he was (he always scampered off before anyone could make a positive ID. Guesses ranged from it being a nutria to it being a groundhog, but beaver was always dismissed cause no one had spotted the distinctive tail until now). My supervisor just caught a picture of it sitting at the edge of the parkinglot eating something and it included the tail. It's so cute!

Sort of a silly thing to rave about, maybe, but I've mentioned my job is boring right?

Ah, the hunt for the elusive beaver

I wondered how long it would take.

I couldn't bring myself to say it, especially being a juvenile.



I agree with Yrael - set up UAC and use it correctly, and the usability is great. I don't recommend it for people who know nothing about computers, mostly because they are basically guaranteed not to use it correctly and get annoyed with it. I leave UAC on all the time, and haven't had any real problems with it.

It does lose for performance, but on upper-end computers it's not a huge problem. I have it running on an AMD Turion 64 X2 with 2 gigs of ram and have never had any problems. The biggest issue I have right now is stupid software companies that can't correctly update their software/drivers to work with Vista. Every time I plug in my Sierra/Cingular air card, my processor use jumps up to 90-100% on both cores, and half of the time the Cingular software doesn't even recognize that it's present.

If software companies would get on the ball and write things correctly and users were required to actually learn how to use their computers, Vista would be great.

how long it would take for what?

Here's a MUCH better real world rave: I just found out today that Carlos Mancia is playing in Little Rock, so I took an early lunch and went and got a ticket! I had an adventure too! I got lost twice and nearly got in three wrecks because no one in Little Rock seems to know how to use a turn signal or look before they try to merge and think that just slamming their breaks for no reason is fun to do.

But, anyway, I'm going to see Carlos Mancia tonight! And I've even got a fairly decent seat!

Interesting...what is he playing?

I hope it's a banjo. Or maybe a didgeridoo!

Ok, he's not playing, he's doing a show. Whatever!