HSDEMONZ.com

Anyone remember my F*ck Vista article? Well, I finally broke down and bought Windows Vista. Blasphemy I know. In a moment of weakness, with money burning a hole in my pocket I did the unfathomable and purchased Windows Vista Home Premium.  It installed easily enough, taking about an hour, maybe longer to complete the install.  While the install was simple and painless in and of itself, I was left with a sour taste in my mouth and a lot of disappointment that first night a week ago.

For example, being a dual monitor a user I have become accustomed to certain features, first and foremost being span.  Span provides me with two key features, the first being to use a single wallpaper that crosses both monitors.  The second feature of interest to me is having the start bar or taskbar cross both screens as well.  I have a decent two year old Nvidia card which under XP worked fine with those two features, however vista with its default drivers appears to have broken that feature.  New drivers from Nvidia have not corrected that problem.

This for me was a huge disappointment as dual monitors are becoming more and more commonplace. Dual Monitor Features are no longer a niche market feature, and should be given due consideration from both Microsoft and the Video Card makers. Hopefully Nvidia will correct this issue with new drivers with their next monthly release.  I’m not concerned that they won’t fix this issue, as Nvidia has a decent track record with updating drivers even for ancient hardware.  I “fixed” my problems temporarily with UltraMon utility. While it doesn’t fix proper spanning of the taskbar, it does mimic it and even adds new features going across both screens. To my delight, it does however allow me to once again use and enjoy my large dual screen wallpapers.

I hadn’t played any games yet so I cannot comment on how well vista handles games while juggling resources.  I’m not much of the PC game player anymore, preferring of course to play Xbox 360 almost exclusively.

The Aero glass interface does little for me as well.  I find it’s ugly and garish.  I also have no use for the use of transparency in Aero.  Something I do like is the ability to enlarge icons to a scale much larger then we’ve been previously used to.  When viewing photographs for example I preferred to play with the range in size of the displayed images depending on my particular needs at the time.

Being a fan of widgets, I of course had to try some of the gadgets.  The default selection of gadgets is OK, and is about as good as I can expect for a first release.  Hopefully some of the widget makers will jump on the gadget bandwagon and hook us up was some really sweet gadgets.  There are a lot of widgets I miss currently and I don’t see any replacements in the gadget gallery available online.

One thing Vista has broken for me, or at least I’ve had little luck finding and correcting is streaming media from the Vista to the XBMC xbox’ on my network. I can FTP into the xbox’ easily enough and watch stuff that way, but I really got to figure out what’s holding me back from streaming media like I’ve done for years now effortlessly. Screwing around with the firewall, defender, and other crap in Vista hasn’t done it for me yet. Clearly it should work, and I’m just missing something obvious hidden away under all these new pretty eye candy things MS has thrown at us.

So, aside from the dual Monitor issue, and the XBMC streaming issue, I’m not a fan of the overall goofiness of Vista. It seems in their effort to pretty up Windows, they forgot that we still need to find the stuff we are used to. In most cases, we have an option to use classic mode. It’s a shame though that the new interface isn’t very intuitive, and that some thing I can only easily find when I switch to classic modes.

Something else I miss was how the Programs Menu would fly out and eventually span out across the screen. I see how they see it as an improvement having it move in the same pane, but I liked seeing it branch out. I suppose if I cared enough I could switch the interface to a classic mode and see that. Of course, giving up on many Aero candy features along the way.

Something that I had completely forgotten about Vista was that it included MCE (Media Center Edition).  It was nice to boot up my Xbox360 and find that Vista sees it automatically as an media center extender.  As with XP’ MCE, Vista’s MCE marries to the networked 360 easily.  Something I will now have to do is buy a TV input card so I can tryout some of MCE’s PVR like abilities. I haven’t used TV input on a PC in years, so it will be interesting to see the state of the art in action. Feel Free to send me some recommendations as I won’t be doing it for at least another week or so.

I found something, hidden away where many might not look that might be a hidden piece of treasure. Voice Recognition, an accessibility feature, isn’t even promoted. It’s not new to windows. MS has played with this plenty over the years. I remember buying my last Phone modem in the late 90’s and getting a copy of some MS Voice/Phone software as a toss in. Back then, the software was bad, training was practically nonexistent and the demand on machines was too high. Today however, voice recognition is right at home, and hardly shows on the radar PCU wise on today’s typical machine in the 2+ Ghz range.

Training is well worth the time if you plan to use this software at all. It’s clear MS has done a lot of work on this as the training session is well thought out, and double as not just the voice training but as the command syntax trainer as well. When done with the training and the tutorial you feel right at home talking to the computer as opposed to typing and using the mouse. Honestly.

You’ll be navigating your Windows, opening programs, navigating the standard menus, opening and closing documents, opening and closing windows, etc all just by typing. I spent the night on IRC “talking” to the regulars who idle in #xbox-scene on efnet. Over the course of an hour, they watched as I “talked” to them. They saw the initial mistakes the program makes. They all saw how it was learning and correcting issues. In some cases, where it wasn’t learning, I was able to add to it’s speech dictionary and get it corrected that way. Eventually, I was able to swear and laugh and potentially kick people from the channel without interacting with the keyboard and mouse.

There is a downside to Voice Recognition. I learned this first hand last night when the family visited to return my daughter to me from a daytrip they took. While I was wearing my Logitech Headset/mic and talking and showing off what I could do without using my hands, the software was also listening to everyone else in the room. The software appears to have no intelligence to differentiating between different active voices. This is a shame, as it wrecked havoc on my ability to dictate to Word or Notepad or IRC, much less command and instruct Vista on how to navigate the PC. While my place is by no means ever quiet, it became painfully clear that just having one more active, but distant voice is enough to confuse the shit out of the Voice Recognition software.

Pen computing, while not new, is still a niche feature. Vista has what appears to be the full complement of Tablet PC features included. While I don’t own a Tablet PC, I’ve always had a Stylus and have used it on occasion as a navigation tool on top of it’s graphical chores. Not much has changed, but when you tie the Stylus with the Snippet Tool in Vista, Capturing part of a screen and making notations is now so much easier than it’s ever been. (works equally well with a mouse btw) I can now see myself pulling out the stylus and cleaning the dust off of it more often and using it with Vista. The OCR capabilities of the Tablet Pc functions are about what I expect for a toss in.. poor.

For the record, half this article was “written” in word with Voice Recognition, and the second half was done using the Pen applet. Given a choice, I probably won’t use the pen applet for writing articles again. It easily took twice as long with the stylus, making multiple corrections over and over. Working with the Voice Recognition package and word was pretty much a dream under ideal conditions. Fortunately, the wife went out with the kid so I had those ideal conditions.

I’m now one week into owning Vista. I don’t love it yet. I however, don’t hate it nearly as much as I did before. Is Vista growing on me? Or am I simply bending to the new ways Vista wants me to work and use my machine? I’m not sure yet.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Vista in the following weeks and months.

No comments »

I don’t know how I get conned into these situations. Last night I had a great night drinking and shooting the shit with some co-workers. This morning I awoke with an ever so mild headache and then the wife hammers in on me..

“let’s go shopping”

Fine. I needed some new work socks anyways. For those that have been living in a hole and don’t know, I’m a forklift operator by trade. with that, goes alot of old bullshit rules, not the least of which is the necessity to wear safety shoes. With that, comes the need to wear heavy duty work socks. Turns out though, that my newest pair of work safety shoes are murder on the heels of my socks.

What I did not know, was the wife has been performing surgery on my socks for awhile now. This morning, I quite literally woke up to find that short of the pair on my feet (yes.. I sleep in my socks) that I had nothing that wasn’t “holy”. Fine. I clearly needed new socks.

So, off to Walmart.

with daughter and wife in tow.. we make our way to the closest of 3 Walmarts. This one I commonly refer to as the welfare walmart. reason for that is, it’s about 20 minutes away from me, sitting smack in an area I would walk alone at night in.. much less flash any money around in. not to mention, it was one of the first entry Walmarts into Canada. that means.. Walmart Bought the location from Woolcrest/Woolco at the time to get it’s foot in the door. With that purchase, they got a shitty little store in a shitty little area.

Most Walmarts in the GTA have been built new.. or at least the ones I prefer to frequent. But I have alot planned today, so heading out to one of the better stores just wasn’t in the cards.

So.. we hit the shithole.. er… Walmart and right off the top we head over to the mens section. We spend about 5 minutes surveying the choices, and determine I need Work Socks in 10 packs.. Kodiak Pathfinders.. and I need a lighter and thinner sock, Fruit of the Looms. If I had stopped there.. I’d have gotten out of Walmart with only a 50-60 dollar bill after taxes.

Wifey then blurts out.. “you need underwear too”.

Fucking great. this is now a full fledged shop til we drop affair. Ok.. fine. I need underwear too.

My methodology to clothling shopping, is simple. Find out what I need, find it, and buy lots of it. So we find the appropiate underwear in 3 packs, and I buy something like a half dozen packs.

“That’s your last hat you are wearing..”

Damn.. nothing worse than shopping for baseball caps. You never find what you like. Worse, If you have one you like now, you are guaranteed to never find it again. Least that’s my experience. Found 5 different caps though. Some cheap, some not so cheap. I can’t really say why I’m so attached to caps. Been wearing them since Junior High. I’ve still got my hair so it’s not some dumb vanity thing. Guess it’s just my thing.
Socks, underwear, and baseball caps. Probably about $120-140 in the hole at that point.

Pullovers. Canadian Winter finally kicked in, and you can’t have too many warm pull-overs. Decided to show some of my Toronto Pride and grabbed some Maple Leaf branded pullovers and Hockey Jerseys.

Before I could escape Walmart, I cringed when I heard “dada I’m hungry..”

Damn. I hate McDonalds. McD’s is pretty much the only choice you have when at shithole Walmart for food. Least it’s cheap. That managed to drain another 20$ and an hour of my day.

So, we get to the cashier..ring up the goods in the cart.. at it was over $300. Good thing I had $400 on me.

Gonna need some more before my day is done. Figured I’d finish this redneck day with some classic Redneck dinner for two and a movie at the theater.

I suppose the topic of this article is a bit misleading. (I like the shock and awe sensationalistic titles) I do find it ironic that every time I go out with the Wife for something small and cheap, I end up dropping a fortune. If memory serves, last time she did this to me, I was in need of a single cap, and spent $400.

You’d think by now I’d get smarter and simply not shop with her. Generally, when I shop alone, I go in.. grab the item, and get out. I consider speed important. Faster I get back home the better. Maybe I should count my blessings. I can’t complain too much I guess, she manages to keep me organized and dressed properly. (that’s an article for another day though)

1 Comment »

Bet you never thought you’d see that as a topic on my site.. or any site for that matter.

It’s funny how things happen. In my last post, I whined and bitched about my health.. or lack thereof. I’m feeling somewhat better now that I’ve taken 2 sick days. I still won’t be going around kissing the ladies just yet but I’m definitely feeling better.

So.. back to the shaving..

I was online in a Gears of war Lobby with some Xs crew regulars, and a new comer to our little posse Mob Chaos. If you haven’t had time to listen to this kid talk about his Pizza Job, his Pubes, or his views on Fat chicks you are missing some funny shit.

Anyways, we’re in the lobby, and we’re shooting the shit around. admittedly, I was in no real condition to carry on my part of the conversation, so I idled while Modiller, Noremorse and Mob battled it out in our nightly battle of wits. Not that I was bored, but it was clear I had little to offer to the stimulating conversation they were having.

I reached for a tool my wife bought me a week ago. A Corn Plane.

I’ve never even had a pedicure, and yet somehow I’m now the owner of a Corn Plane. To tell the truth, before last night I didn’t even really know what a corn was, much less a corn plane. I did however know all about hard and callus’d skin on my toes, ball of the foot, and heels. It’s becoming a nagging problem, moreso in the last 8-10 month now that I’m forced to wear safety shoes all day.

So, with the conversation shifting from pizza to fat chicks to pubes, I whip out the Corn Plane and tackle the ball of the foot. To my surprise, this is a painless process.. albeit a disgusting one. Within moments the floor is littered with skin shavings. The Corn Plane acts much like some Wire Cheese Slicers, except I’m slowly shaving away hard layers of skin.

I move on to the heels, which needed much less work, and then to the toes. At that point, I was getting the hang of it, and felt a modicum of expertise with the corn plane. Then, someone says something that made me laugh my ass off, and with it, a section of skin was severed too deep that my toes bled like a stuck pig.

Off to the washroom for some emergency first aid on my big toe. Toilet paper, antiseptic, liquid bandaid were all up to the task. Once done, I covered it up with a typical bandaid to reduce friction and exposure.

So.. lesson learned.. do not shave your feet with a corn plane while online in GoW.

:)

Interesting reading for those wanting to learn more about Corns and Callus.

2 Comments »