Fiat Lux
I started writing this yesterday but the power outage (now thankfully resolved) sidetracked me.
Recent IM conversation with Scott:
Me: Microsoft announced six different versions for Vista. What a support nightmare that’s going to be.
Scott: yep
Me: I’m going to stay the hell away from Vista for at least 12 months after it’s releases. You, OTOH, will upgrade to it as soon as you possibly can
Scott: You got it. Probably on my new $4000 dream computer.
Me: *shudders*
I’m the kind of Windows user Microsoft probably hates: I just want my OS to run the applications I choose to install on it, and to stay the hell out of my way the rest of the time. I don’t need a high-end desktop searching feature — I know where my personal data is and how to find what I’m looking for. I don’t want fancy 3-D versions of the alt-tab app switcher or funky integrated media capabilities. I have iTunes, an iPod, and a very nice TV and TiVo in my living room for that. I just might end up with the lowest-level version of Vista just so that I don’t have to deal with all the add-on crap the other versions will include.
Buying the low-end version of an OS kind of goes against my grain, since I more or less consider myself to be a power user. But in this case, I suspect I’ll be much happier without all the bells and whistles.
At any rate, I am quite serious about waiting at least a year post-release to upgrade (I waited a lot longer than that to go from Win2K -> XP). I have no intention of upgrading until the inevitable missed bugs, security issues, and driver problems all get resolved. Let some other schmuck do the sweating and swearing; I am not going to waste my time dealing with Microsoft’s mess for them.
There’s a nasty storm blowing through the Bay Area today. At first the reports had it that the worst impact would be up by Napa, where flooding is always a problem with heavy rains. But no, instead we got nailed with a bunch of power outages, including one Chez Lux.
As I was driving back home from work I saw some flashes of lightning and hear reports of a few small outages, but didn’t think much of it until I pulled off Highway 92 onto El Camino Real and BLAM! out went the power. I was passing by a Safeway at the time — one moment it was all lit up, the next moment nothing but a few emergency lights. A bit shocking, but also kind of neat to watch. You don’t get a front-row seat to the show like that very often. It seemed to be a fairly localized outage, because everything was still lit up as I pulled up to my intersection, but as I was waiting to make the left turn onto my street, POOF! More blackness. Not quite so cool; we have plenty of candles & energy bars in the emergency kit (plus a propane grill), but I really wasn’t in the mood for trying to make a hot meal under the circumstances.
Instead, I drove a few more blocks until I found a parking space, called Scott, and found an open restaurant for a bite of dinner. The lights were still out when I got home, so I changed into jeans, grabbed a flashlight and my laptop, and moseyed over to Starbucks for some coffee, electricity, and Internet access.
It’s not quite the evening I thought I was going to have, but it could have been a lot worse.
Still, this is worth posting:
Scott and I were talking about Iraq in the context of Lebanon instead of Vietnam the other day. What bothers me is that it took less than 300 US casualties of Marines to get the US out of Lebanon, yet with this set of jokers in Washington, the kind of attack that killed 241 Marines in one day in Lebanon will be seen in the context of Iraq as a reason to throw even more members of the US armed forces into harm’s way.
Civil war in Iraq, should it come, is not a good thing for anybody. Not for us, and definitely not for them. Whether it can even be stopped is the question at hand. And I really have no idea. I’d like to hope that a full-out civil war in Iraq is not inevitable, but the cynic in me says that cooler heads generally don’t prevail until after a lot of blood has been shed.
We’ve dumped Comcast for Internet connectivity and gone back to DSL. It’s not as fast, but 4 multi-day outages in less than 2 months is just way too much downtime.
Between work and school I’m finding myself more and more squeezed for blog time these days, and the semester is only going to heat up more over the next several weeks. I want to try to keep to a minimum of a post a day but it’s getting really hard to do even that some days. I’ve also cut the blogroll down a bit to help reduce my read time.
On average, probably not:
The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.