Courne Supremacy

I tried the Windows 7 beta a couple months ago. It didn’t work very well on my Sony Viao, but that’s because Sony requires you to use a lot of proprietary software to run their laptop, which is retarded.

I’m living on the bleeding edge here with Windows 7. It was easy to download off Microsoft’s website and install. Faster than the old windows XP install. I never upgraded to Vista since that was a joke. Win7 loads fast and shuts down even faster. The interface is nice and clean and nothing about it seems slow or painful. I tend to plow my way through user interfaces. That’s how I learned OS X. I clicked on everything and got a good lay of the land. I played with the settings and figured them out. So I did the same with Windows 7 and it passes that first test. I know where everything is. I can do some minimal customization with the desktop widgets and aero themes. I picked the 64-bit version of the OS since I run an AMD 64 processor and things run a lot faster than they did under WinXP 32-bit. A lot of the freeware software I use come in 64-bit flavors too.

There are some drivers that don’t work such as my Evoluent Vertical Mouse, but I think this is an issue where I’m running a 64-bit version of Windows. The drivers are janky to begin with. Under Windows XP those drivers installed but the certificate remained unsigned digitally and caused Windows to throw a warning.

Another issue I’m having is with my Cintiq tablet. I’m not sure if Wacom’s latest drivers are janky or if its Windows 7, so I need to go back and try the older Cintiq drives I have.

Things are, amazingly, going smooth, and it’s making my 3 year old desktop PC feel like a new machine again. I want to try some gaming under this new OS, but I just don’t do much PC gaming anymore.

Tags: Windows 7 RC 1

You’d think I’d learn after Ubuntu and Windows 7 beta. But no. Here I am again trying Windows 7 RC 1 64-bit edition. Is it better? Faster? I’m going to find out!

The reason I switched to RC 1 was because I decided to re-install Windows XP. It was getting a nasty case of the slowdowns, but my WinXP CD’s corrupt or falling apart thanks to the inexorable march of time causing the degregation of CD discs.

Tags: Windows 7 RC 1

My friend Mike Brinker got into blogging. He’s the kind of guy who gets into something, and he REALLY gets into something. He got his own webspace with HostGator. He’s got wordpress and hooked up with all these crazy plugins. So his mania for blogging has now become my mania for blogging. A couple weeks ago I changed the design of my blog — i.e. I grabbed a different theme cause I hated the bare bones one that comes with WP. I secured my blog against spammers as best I could. Now I’ve added stuff like Lifestream to my blog. It aggregates all the shuff and crap from my other online hangouts, not that I hang out at them often, but you can see my naughty doodles over at Deviant Art, read my non-existant Twitter feed, catch up on what I’m wasting my time with on my XBox 360, and view what kind of porn movies I’m getting via Netflix.

While I was doing all this updating another friend, Scrabecake, asked “You going to update it once and a while?”

“My blog or twitter?” I respond.

“Your blog!”

Consider it updated with much more to come. I’ll try and keep it down low with the random bits and bring this site back to what I originally intended it to be, a blog for sharing my short stories. I write every morning now and I try to get some time in during the evening too (I suppose this counts).

Tags: blog updates, Lifestream

I didn’t realize this was actually a somewhat big issue and has been for a couple of years, but organic farmers are using spiders for pest control in their grape vineyards. That means if you buy a bunch of grapes you might find cobwebs on them. And then you might find a spider.

I found one today washing some green grapes I bought a couple days ago. The bag didn’t say that it was organic. They’re seedless grapes from a company called Sun World and from the brief glimpse of their website they don’t say anything about being organic, but I’m pretty sure organic or not, you’ll find a spider in your grapes anyway.

Luckily, it wasn’t a black widow.

I always wash my grapes. My parents have a method of washing them and I’ve learned to do. First dose it with cold water and then use salt and wash them, finally rinse again. Some food boards recommend using warm water, so I guess I’ll add that to my list of things to do when washing them.

Tags: spiders in my grapes

So I got all the parts from newegg.

I’m trying to find the words to sum up how this PC experience building process went.

Oh right.

Dead on Arrival.

Thanks Newegg.

It’s quality, with a K.

Tags: computers, htpc, media center