oct17.com Blog

Vista is so bad, my teeth hurt

We’ve bought two new computers recently, one is a photo workstation for Nine Rubies and one is a home PC for me. (Aside: I needed a new PC because my hand-built Shuttle SB61G2, which I love, got very flaky after an upgrade to 2GB of RAM. The details would bore everyone, but my attempts to fix got nowhere and I think something’s wonky on the motherboard.)

I bought both PCs from the local Best Buy, which was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve had in a while. Best Buy is a big advertiser at work, and I loved the San Francisco store, so I wanted to give them my business. My machine ended up an HP Pavilion a6030n, a quite decent home PC with Vista pre-installed.

Vista is the dullest new OS I’ve ever seen. I like new computer stuff.; I’ve excitedly upgraded to every Windows operating system since Windows 3.1 (including Windows ME — I’m not picky). Vista is the worst. Just a giant snooze interrupted by periods of “why did they change that?!” frustration. I may return with details later, but for family and friends: take my advice and don’t bother.

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Who knew? There’s a www.Oct17.org, which is the home page for an apparently European effort to get a lot of people to sign a “Call to Action” that involves some vague sort of personal commitment to end extreme poverty. They have a podcast, which highlights the plodding difficulty of getting signatures from public officials and private citizens.

Poking around their site — a sort of cousin of this one, I supposed — I discover that Oct 17 became an official sort of day because of a UN resolution.

A gas is a fart

[As a sort of poor-man's scrapbooking, I'm going to start blogging the funny things that Brij says. For posterity.]

A gas is a fart. A fart is a gas.
A poopy is a poopy. A soo-soo is a soo-soo.*
And they’re all stinky!

* “Soo-soo” is the Hindi babytalk for urine. Engl. trans.: pee-pee.