too many choices

"we should not make the intellect our god.
it has powerfule muscles, but no personality."
-einstein

Yeah, I'm always asking 'why', 'how', 'who'. But that's ok. My hero says, "the important thing is not to stop questioning." So, I ask, why am I so focused on productivity and efficiency. How come I have to keep a close watch on the time so that I don't "waste" too much time on pleasurable activities. Jewish work ethic, right?

Eh, I'm falling asleep as I write this. Better stop...wait, one more thing...I've been through livejournal, facebook, and myspace. Now I'm blogging, expecting different results? Right, why is it such a good thing to have massive amount of knowledge at our fingertips, and tons of choices of what to do with that knowledge?

Here's an experiment I'd like to do one day: take one group of people with PDA's and one group with traditional planner books that you write in. Does it take more time to get all the events into the PDA than it would take just to do one of those events. In other words, is there such a thing as electronic organization over-kill?

soy un perdador, i'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me

so, now I'm regretting all my technological purposes and the assets I have required thereof.
it always comes back to utility and efficiency, does the laptop cooler really improve my life?
Does "researching" windows vista really help my customers? oh, if my grammar or spelling bother you, then all I can say is "relax, life's too short to worry about grammar and spelling".

now, let's hear it for rationalization. 1) most companies "waste" money on inventory that is never used or sold. 2) as a computer consultant, I need to have a diverse range of computer stuff so that I can diversify my knowledge and anticipate the needs of my customers. 3) if all else fails, I can sell or give a customer some of my used computer stuff, mainly to make them happy

enough!

some useful discoveries:
-doing the file and settings transfer worked when done over my home network
-the printer sharing was messed up because the drivers that worked in vista were, of course, incompatible with any XP computers that tried to access said printer over the network
-IE7 didn't know what to do when I tried to make a printable version of Google calender

After several other frustrations and a Power Supply that I had to fix, I decided to totally disassemble and reassemble, adding two more hardrives in the process. Now, I'm installing an OEM version of Home and perhaps later I'll have a dual-boot system (if vista allows that)

All in all, this experience will serve me in the future, when vista might actually be ready for the everyday consumer... right now, it makes me think of Steve Wozniak's quote, "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"

more complaints about vista

I think this has been mentioned in articles about Vista before it was even released but the security features are overkill! I have to click through three confirmation dialogues just to delete a file.

Another annoyance that was no surprise was when I used windows update to search for vista drivers for my unidentified hardware. Well, just like in XP, doing that search is pretty much a waste of time and returned no results. I'll have to go to each of the manufacturer's websites to find all the vista drivers. On the other hand, I have to give kudos to Microsoft for keeping me in business. I can already see me helping customers getting there new computers working correctly with this new operating system.

One other thing I did this morning was go to some less-than-reputable sites to see if I could get the machine infected with some adware or something. I was again not surprised to find out that the pop-ups still happened.

You know, I really wonder what they do up their in Redmond, Washington. I really think the problem with the Microsoft Empire is that of hubris. Like any empire, success breeds complacency and eventually ossifies into obsolescence.

the vista experience

So, I created this blog with the goal of journaling about my windows vista experience. I recently (read: today) built a new PC and installed Vista Home Premium. I honestly built a machine that wasn't up to my exacting standards. If it was that, it would have had Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, a 300 gb HD, etc. etc. As it is, it's a mid-line AMD64 X2 with 1 gig of RAM and 80gb HD.

Partitioned the drive in half so I can put Linux on one side. I'm not going to even have room to play my computer games. As for the Vista experience so far, it's turning out like most installations, not that great. Glitzy and all that, but not much simplicity. The installation was fairly easy and easier to understand than previous versions. Ok, fast forward to my first snag when I was using the "Easy Transfer" wizard. Got all the old docs and settings from the old computer but then when they were being transferred to the new system, it hung up. Well, not exactly hung up, it gave me "invalid data file" on a bunch of random .mp3's, ok, make that numerous .mp3's. And the bugger of it was that all I could do was keep pressing continue (with cancel and retry being my other two options) they was no "skip all errors" button, and there seemed to be a lot of "invalid data" .mp3's. Well, that's one bug I can put down as "found" during this research.

So, I got frustrated and cancelled the operation; thus, the "easy transfer" wasn't easy at all. I think I'll try it again over my home network and see what happens for that. Good night.