I got a DVD burner yesterday. It’s quite nice. I’ve already been able to free up about 50Gb on one of my hard drives. I got a Sony DRU-800A. Ashley got it for me for my birthday along with a 50 pack of 4.7Gb DVD-R’s.
It’s a lot quicker than I thought it’d be. Only takes about 15-20 minutes to burn a full 4.7Gb DVD. I’d been wanting a DVD burner for a while, thanks to Ashley I got one. I hope she doesn’t attempt to buy me anything else for my birthday, I know she will though.
I also installed Windows Vista lastnight, it sucked. It sucked from what I saw anyway. Display was horrible and for some reason 192.168.1.1 isn’t a “proper” internet gateway address. So I couldn’t even get online to get drivers. I hate it when software tells me something I know isn’t true. My router’s IP is 192.168.1.1, so it IS my god damn gateway address. It was basically just a good reminder as to why I use Slackware.
I got in a little accident the other day in Ashleys car. Ashley and her sister Amber were with me, I was driving. We were stopped at a stoplight. One car was infront of us, one car was behind us.
As we were coming to a stop, Ashley says “God, I hope Steph doesn’t back right into us”. Steph is the girl that hit us. Ashley and Amber know her somehow. Anyway, Steph didn’t stop backing up. Apparently she was fighting with her boyfriend over a radio station and didn’t even look behind her before backing out of her parking space.
Before we knew it, we could see the freakin tail pipe of Steph’s car directly in our window. I don’t know how her car managed to get as high as it did, but it was up there. She pulled forward after hearing Ashley scream and her car basically fell to the ground. She pretty much backed right into Ashley. I’m surprised the window by Ashley didn’t break. The mirror outside was being forced into the window. The windows flexed and twisted some, but never broke. I thought it was definately gonna break.
Since it was Steph’s fault, we don’t gotta pay a thing. Ashley got an estimate of $900 some dollars today. $500+ of that being just for the service, no parts or anything. I doubt we’ll actually get the car fixed at the place we got the estimate from. You can see a picture of the damage below.
So, the Windows Vista Beta 1 was released yesterday. It hit MSDN sometime yesterday morning. It’s all over BitTorrent networks now too. I’m gonna give it a shot tonight as I have an extra PC to try it out on. I really don’t think I’ll like it that well. Probably just more bloatware.
I can’t really comment on Vista though as I haven’t tried it yet. Jeremy Wright’s Ensight has some good information about Vista though. He’s got a few links to screenshots.
I am mostly interested in what Microsoft has done with the user interface. Does it have a dashboard? I know there was talk a long time ago about a dashboard in Longhorn, dunno if it came through into the Vista Beta 1 or not. I stopped paying attention.
I hope Gnome officially adds some sort of dashboard soon. I think the Longhorn dashboard was different than the dashboard in Mac OS X. The dashboard that was in Longhorn and may be in Vista (I dunno yet), is more like Beagle, which looks awesome. Beagle is similar to the Spotlight in Mac OS X. I’d actually expect to see Beagle in Dropline Gnome sooner or later, even if it’s not part of the official Gnome. The Gnome people seem to be really good about scheduling releases and sticking to those deadlines. I’m not sure if they plan what new software to include in future releases. I’d bet Beable will officially be included with Gnome around Gnome 2.2 or 2.4, if the releases continue being numbered as they are now.
This was supposed to be a post about Windows Vista. Maybe I should have touched on that subject after actually trying Vista. Doesn’t matter, cuz Gnome kills Windows in terms of UI.
Oh, and for those of you who don’t want to validate your copy of Windows to get updates, see below. Found this via BoingBoing.
Before pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:
javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’)
It turns off the trigger for the key check.
After doing that, the page where you select “Custom” or “Express” is reloaded. Select your option and you can get the updates you want (not just the critical updates) without validating.
Red, the only Scared Monkey I’ve had a conversation with, is going to Aruba to assist in searching for Natalee and will also be reporting live.
I haven’t really written much about Natalee Holloway, I guess it never really interested me. Lastnight though, I flipped over to Fox News for a bit and of course they were covering the story. At the time, there was a camera crew watching some guys drain a pond in Aruba. It had to be around midnight in Aruba at the time. I couldn’t stop watching that. Obviously they had a pretty good clue something was down there as they wouldn’t have bothered to drain the pond if there wasn’t. Especially at that time of night. It looks like this guy knew about the pond being drained before FoxNews even did. Way to go!
Hyscience is reporting that Natalee could possibly in Venezuela. I could believe that as it’s not too far from Aruba and the rest of the Netherland Antilles (50 to 100 miles maybe?). They’ve got a whole bunch of links to related items, lots of those links going to Scared Monkeys.
I just can’t believe how much Scared Monkeys has grown. I started reading them a couple months before the Natalee Holloway thing started. Their site is now being cited in major publications and Red or Tom even appeared on Fox News once I think…
I linked once above, but Dan at Riehl World View says Jug Twitty (Natalee’s step-father) thinks this is going to be a big week in the investigation. I’d say so as the FBI now has a bigger say in the investigation.
Apparently some people are getting pretty angry over the performance of the Direct Traffic Center (DTC) piece of Yahoo Search Marketing (or Overture). As usual, the Search Engine Roundtable brought this to my attention. There’s even some guys wanting to pull their ads for 5 days in protest. They want something to change, I’d like some change in the DTC. Search Engine Roundtable has a list of 10 things some PPC managers want to change about the DTC. There’s also links to discussions about this on a couple forums.
I manage all our SEM stuff at work. I work with the DTC a lot, it’s crap. The Google Adwords interface is so much better and quicker. Reports can be easily customized in Adwords so you can get the info you need.
The DTC in Overture is slow. Brian took over managing our Overture/Yahoo account while I was in Colorado. He said the scheduled maintenance for Friday (7/22) evening. During that period, access to the DTC wouldn’t be available. I get into work Monday morning and I can’t get in. I had just gotten an e-mail from Overture warning our funds were getting low. No shit! Your DTC is down so it’s impossible to add funds! Sometime around 4:00pm CST yesterday I was finally able to login. And then it was slow as could be.
Other complaints I have with it are the reports. There’s only a few possible reports you can get. And they can’t really be customized. In Adwords you can choose what data to show for which adgroups and so forth. You can get a pretty much totally customized report in Adwords. The reporting in the Overture DTC is pathetic. You’re not even able to choose specific data to show as far as I can tell. EMP also has a bit to add.
