HSDEMONZ.com

Sorry it’s been so long since my last rant. My health isn’t the greatest, fighting a cold, congestion, fever blister, and the sty from hell. Managed to score some topical shit to treat the sty and the blister. Now to nurse the cold and I’ll be all set.

In other health news, I am officially on a fad diet. Well.. Pills anyways. Doing well.. moving into my second week.. with good results so far. It’s a two pill combo, one to block carbs and fat, the other is a thermogenic to burn fat. I’m particularly fond of the fat burner as it’s definitely given me a boost of energy. I basically feel like I have 4 more hours of “life” in me per day before the tank runs out.

I don’t currently add much in the way of additional exercise to my regime.. yet. However, I’ve cut food intake in half. Not missing it too much either. I probably should have set some hard goals, but I’m just playing this by ear at the moment.

That’s my update.. now the reason I bothered to post tonight..

Vista.

I avoided most of the hype of the last year or so when it came to Longhorn/Vista. The last time I did pay any attention to this new OS it was still supposed to have a new state of the art SQL based OS that was supposed to make archiving and tracking our documents and everything else easier.

That is gone apparently. So are so many other promised features we listened to Microsoft herald over the last 3 years or so.

What are we getting? 5 or so versions, in some sort of plastic or acrylic case in rainbow brite colors and black. We can expect to shell out anywhere from roughly $200 cdn for a crippled version that isn’t much different than XP.. or we can spend a whopping $500 and get all the bells and whistles.

I’ve spent weeks agonizing over the decision to upgrade my perfectly fine PC to Vista. even spent most of the weekend backing up the old MCE installed on it and the flurry of key files I give a shit about.

I’ve had funds allocated for at least the Premium Full version (Green box) for 2 months now. Sitting on the wallet as I type this.

With all the hype, hoopla and glitz that Microsoft has managed to cover this event with, they’ve yet to show me anything in the package worth even half what they are charging for their many SKU’s.

If I truly believed Vista would make surfing the web truly safer for my machine.. I’d buy it now. If I thought I really needed some 3D view of my active apps and docs, I’d buy it. If I thought a 3d flip system for app selection and navigation was going to make things better, I’d buy Vista.

I don’t see any features whatsoever worth the money.

Ok.. so maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.. maybe features aren’t the reason to make me part with my money.

Aero.. the new look and feel I can reasonably achieve with other 3rd party tools, and I can do it for free.

Gadgets.. (wow.. Widgets.. whoopiedoo) been there, done that.. and have been doing that for awhile.

IE7.. Not touching it. I’m a Firefox convert, and I don’t see any reason to switch back to IE. for years, IE has been the root of so much internet evil.. or at least… the weakest block in the wall that separates me from the world.

Do I really Need Vista’s half assed DVD maker? or it’s Bitblocker Drive Encryption? Vista Backup and Restore?

Come on now.. toss ins are cool.. and add to the feature count.. but they aren’t giving me anything I need.. or don’t already have. (and have better)

For me, I really feel that so much of the wait and hype of the last bunch of years for this OS was for naught. they stripped it of so many things that were originally promised. Any one of those missing items would make me a Vista fan.

So, where does that leave me? Same place I was in when XP appeared on the scene. I was sitting in Win2000 heaven, and did so until 2 years ago. From the looks of things, I’m sitting pretty now on XP.. and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

I do fine Bill Gates enthisiam for the product entertaining though. I can’t imagine how disappointed he is in the final product, and how much less of a product the release candidate ended up being compared to some early pre-RC stuff we saw and heard about.

Vista, comes across as a glorified pretty facelift with little to offer. I do like pretty though, but I’ll have it on my terms.. and keep my money for the time being. I have no doubt somewhere down the road I will open my wallet, shake the dust out and part with some money to further fill the coffers of Redmond’s biggest geek.

Today, is not that day though.

fuck Vista.

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I finally got the Year In Review Posted on XS news page..

2006 year In Review

dont forget to digg it for me.

Thank God I only do this once per year. It would have been up sooner but I was.. and still am in the middle of getting 32 new moderators fully situated on XS.

i’ll have something new to read here by the weekend. I gotta get back into game shape on this page now.

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