So it turns out Blogger keeps these things alive FOREVER. Who knew, right?

Well I guess that means I can post something. I dunno what. Guess my plans to post two or three times a week went out the window. Eh, it happens I guess.

Of course this means that this blog is teetering on five years old. There should be some kind of achievement for that. I guess if I had really been doing it for five years I may have a job writing blogs and money to pay the rent lady.

But what to do with a rediscovered blog? I guess I could do the one post a day thing again. That sounds like a useful use of my time. Better than playing more video games and looking at more cat pictures. Stupid cat pictures, always so cute...

Windows 8

So old Microsoft has given us a good look at the upcoming Windows 8. If your not the reading type of person you can check out a video!

So the start menu is now a full screen series of tiles including the "Windows App Store". Of course its all just in a full screen (I'm guessing DirectX) window that shows us web pages instead of real programs. Now I've worked in those retail stores what that sell the shitpile computers from HP and DELL and what not and I see a theme here. Take a look at some pics.

Now this here is a picture of the HP Touchsmart PC. Notice the big, full screen interface that takes over everything once Windows boots. From this interface you can look at pictures, brows the web and launch programs. Of course once your program launches it minimizes this interface and you get to see your typical Windows interface. Now look at 3:05 in the video. Exact same thing.

Now whats real interesting here is that picture is from a computer released in 2008. If you head to Best Buy today you will see HP Touchsmarts without that interface and in its place a handful of touch friendly applications. The big overbearing interface was not accepted by Windows users.

Now take a look at another one, this time from DELL:

This contraption is the DELL Duo. It's a not-quite-a-netbook-not-quite-a-tablet convertible thing. When you flip around the screen to "Tablet Mode" you get that bullshit interface you see in the pic. I can tell you I've never seen one in the wild, I've never sold one and the one time I saw someone express any interest in it they asked if the tablet interface could be turned off.

I've said for years that Windows is great. That if installed from the disc on a computer you built Windows installed on a machine with even mediocre specs will outshine high dollar HP and DELL machines because of all the bloated crap they insist on putting on it. Sadly it looks like crippling bloat will now be built into Windows.

I understand the desire to build a product that works on phone, tablet, laptop and desktop alike, but I'm not sure who told Microsoft that something like this is a good idea. Who decided that a desktop with icons and a menu full of the programs you have installed was to be removed?

Lemme tell ya,

Posting everyday is harder than I thought. I don't think I'm cut out for seven posts a week. Looking back I see just how poor a job I've done just in the name of posting once a day. Well I think I'm going to dial it back a bit. Two or three posts a week is so much more than I have ever done and I think that at that level I can at least use complete sentences when I write.

Now thats not to say I won't write a little something every day. I have that expensive Microsoft Office program I've got to use for something. Hopefully I can keep doing it. The more I write the better I'll get, or at least thats what people tell me. Of course the fact remains I've got nothing really to write about. Guess that can't be helped. You have to go looking for something to write about and I don't really do that.

Guess the best thing I can write about right now is this computer giving me problems. I don't know what happened but my download speeds sunk to worthless. Laptop worked fine, a handfull of antivirus scans couldn't see an issue. Everything was slow in safe mode, too. Figured it was hardware related but every test I could throw at it came back with no failures. I've re-installed Windows and seem to have fixed the problem. My guess is it must have something to do with screwing with settings. Just when I had finally got Apache working to let me play with PHP without renting server space.

Had the problems started right when I had started with the server setup I would have blamed it right away but that wasn't the case. I watched as cascading failures relating to internet connected programs fell on me like a heavy rain. Started with streaming video, moved to Ventrillo, slowed World of Warcraft to a crawl, screwed with Ventrillo again but in a different way, then back to streaming video.

Each step of the way I would uninstall and reinstall. Return settings to default. I even changed firewall settings to only allow three programs to access the internet! I just never could track down the problem. Oh well. Solved now. Damn computers are the becoming the cause of a lot of problems around here. Routers go bad, internet goes wonky, hell I even have a hard drive in a laptop I'm going to have to replace soon.

Well at least I seem to have got things back up and working. I even learned a little about Windows 7 installation in the process. After spending an awful long time backing up documents, pictures, movies and music I found that the reinstall process saves just about everything for you. I guess its not a great idea to count on it, but there it was in 'Windows.old'. May never have noticed if it hadn't been for all the space taken up on the dive.

Learn a little something new every day I guess. Good to know that even if shit really hits the fan there MAY be a little reprive from data loss.