Dammit Delevi!

Morning found me at 1 o’clock, and after some deliberation, I decided that I was in fact going to embrace it.

Much to my delight, I found one of my oldest friends on facebook, and managed to chat her up for a while about the … alternative sleep schedule we’d managed to find ourselves in, and the variety of caffeine we’d chosen to procure, and things of that nature. My first attempt at a homebrew chai latte went fairly well. I will make Starbucks squirm.. eventually.

While i’m sipping my latte, i’m contemplating the rest of my day, and the rest of my week. I’m moving offices today, and meeting my new boss. I’m looking forward to meeting him, and finding out what kind of a man he is.

Further on down, I have the yearly company holiday party, at District Bar in Chicago. I’ve managed to steal a friend of mine for the evening - I have a feeling that by Friday, we’ll both be up for the open bar. Should be a good time.

I think I like this morning thing. Having a little time to sit and drink my tea is a good thing.

Rocks. So far.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the hardware that I cared about worked out of the box (somewhat expected, but still good) - dual displays. check. sound. check.

Still more impressive was the fact that upon downloading and installing my graphics drivers, I was not prompted to reboot. At all. I was actually dropped out to text mode for a split second and the monitor blanked and flashed a few times, and I came back up with the installation complete.

Would I have been less impressed if this hadn’t happened? No. Frankly, I never expected MS to care.

Nice work, MS. Very nice.

The default desktop was clean. I was impressed with the default background. It added to the overal feeling of clean on the system.

My initial impressions of the start menu/taskbar rewrite can be summed up in one word: Nice. Anything I’d normally put on the desktop, including the recycle bin (If I ever used the thing, I’d leave it on the desktop - the right click menu doesn’t work quite like I want it to - if I could get the proper context menu when I right clicked, instead of, or in addition to, the windows explorer “You put something inside this popup menu” context menu, this would be the -perfect- feature) is now on it’s own nice, neat little popup menu. Think OS X. It’s kinda like that.

One word for the windows 7 desktop: clean.

Installation of my apps (Firefox, Pidgin to start) went cleanly, and more or less 100% as expected. Some very small graphical glitches with pidgin, but nothing TOO obnoxious.

The UAC Improvements went largely unnoticed for me - I’ve been using Vista since not long after it came out, so I’m used to it. I think it functions appropriately considering what it’s supposed to be doing for you. Meh. *shrug*

One thing that i’ve noticed - things that would normally pop up and annoy me (such as the firefox “Downloads” window are conspiciously absent. They remain in the dock. I might like this. We’ll see.

It’s at this point that i’ll mention my first hiccup with Windows 7, because this is where everything just started to suck. Technical and detailed, I know.

I decided to install iTunes 64bit - this may have been a bad idea. Before the install really started, it essentially locked up my computer - first completely, for a few seconds, and then it caused some kind of  issue where explorer would chew up all available resources, and I was unable to get the installer to even start again. I was met with the same issue with the 32-bit version.

After some playing around, I was able to get it to install by running the installer as administrator and choosing Vista SP2 compatibility mode. Fun times had by all.

After the installation, my iPhone was detected correctly, and the application did work as expected, however, there were some audio skips, and a quick check confirmed that a decent amount of CPU was in use, possibly enough to cause the chopping. Why that’s the case when I have firefox, pidgin, and iTunes open (and not doing anything TOO demanding with any of them, as far as I know) I can’t tell yet. Maybe it’s time to pick up a quad core. I hate that logic, but maybe.

While I was ready to post glowing reviews of Win7, I’m not quite so sure anymore. This will be my first 64 bit instance of windows, and i’m not sure how much of my issues are due to the fact that this IS a 64-bit OS, and the rest of the world doesn’t quite have their head attached correctly when it comes to 64-bit.

Is Windows 7 the shizzle? No.

Is Windows 7 good? Maybe.

Is Windows 7 better than Vista? Maybe.

Expect to hear from me again.

Take what you can from the title.

I’ll be in on the first available train this morning. Should be interesting - Sunrise on the Jackson street bridge.

My apartment is an oven. I’ve moved everything that fits in into my bedroom in an attempt to make this place work.

Look up “Thermal mass”. This building has it. In an attempt to minimize the heat, I applied some of the reflective window coating paper to my windows. It’s helped a little, but not enough. Bleh.

On a more pleasant front, I’ve been reading about KDE 4.3, and i’m excited. For the first time in the last 18 months, I think KDE may actually be useable.

I love KDE. I really do. Unfortunately, I’m not a developer. I can’t deal with my desktop being severely lacking needed features. Since 4.0, KDE has been steadily adding features that 3.5 had, and it may once again become the desktop of choice.

Sadly, it could easily be over a year before I have a KDE desktop that I like. The recent release of Fedora 11 included KDE 4.2, which means that theoretically, Fedora 12 will include 4.3, if the release dates line up. Maybe when Fedora 13 rolls around, I’ll have myself a nice KDE 4.4 desktop.

Any bets on whether or not Fedora 13 will actually be named as such?

I’m lying in a basement, owned by the family whose youngest son is to be married today. I know the bride and the groom and I’m happy to see them married.

The week up to this point was all leading up to today. I’ve seen weddings happen before, but never from this close - I was privileged to participate in some of the setup of the Sanctuary and the Reception areas.

Getting past all of the business requirements of the trip and the wedding, hanging out with Tim, El, and their family was a blast. I’m happy that I have such awesome friends.

I’m headed out with the warlord to see some family in Newport Beach after the wedding is done - they don’t know I’m coming, I hope. Should be an interesting surprise.

For now, it’s time to start thinking about getting ready.

So, I’ve moved. Downers Grove. Main street.

I’ll be moving again next weekend - to someplace else in Downers - and then promptly heading off to California for a week or so. Would I like it if life were less interesting? No, no, I don’t think I would.

Would I like it if my finances weren’t getting utterly pwned? Yes.

It’s all for a good cause, though. Something about having a place to sleep that isn’t 80F constantly. Meh.

Progression continues.

I’m going to make a post here. It’s going to be the tip of the iceberg. The thin layer of cheese on an incredibly delicious bowl of french onion soup.

If you’re still taking me seriously after describing this post as a layer of cheese, you must know me. Either that or you like french onion soup.

I joined in festivities today to wish a good friend of mine a happy 30th birthday. It is now that I will define the “Winston Bagel” : I had one tonight. It was a plain bagel, grilled, and topped with cream cheese, butter, peanut butter, bacon bits, apples, cucumber, italian seasoning, cinnamon, sunflower seeds, and Tabasco.

I will leave you to come to your own conclusions about such a dish, but I propose that any experience is defined strongly by the company in which it is had.

Pasta is one of life’s more beautiful mechanics.

It’s easy to work with, it’s tasty, and I can make people stumble away from the table pleasantly sedated. And what’s equally important - I can feed four without any trouble.

Also, sierra mist (the new ruby splash stuff) is tasty. Add it to a some white wine, and you have yourself a drink that is incredibly tasty. I’m sure I should be shot for butchering a wine with soda, but It’s -really- good.

Progression - Check.

It’s 2am and I’ve got Jes - Ghost stuck in my head.

“I feel you calling me when I am alone
I feel you calling me it’s keeping me up
I wanna be with you now”

I think this is what blogs are for.

See ya around.