Come on Microsoft, don’t take this too seriously. I know that you want us all to pay for your software and stuff, don’t worry we do, eventually we either pay for ridiculous lisecenses at work, and sometimes even for our personal computers at home. But Vista isn’t even available to the public yet, I wanted to try it out, be the earliest of early adopters, I’m there for you, I applaud the leaps and bounds you’ve made with this release despite all of the woefully unfulfilled promises. So, fine, you got me this time, it’s not genuine and you wont let me look at Aero anymore… that’s ok, it’s your call if you want to cut out the enthusiasts from trying your products. But now my games wont even run! What? Did you think it was necessary to disable directX? Really!??! Ugh, well, I guess it’s time to go back to XP and then maybe never actually upgrade to Vista. I mean, now that I’ve seen it, is it really worth the trouble? Meh.

Note to self: Big soft gradients are weak. They always look soft, not bold and definitive. They can be great for subtle transitions between solid colors. But my new rule is, never, ever use them to fade from a photo to another photo, or from a photo to a solid color. It just doesn’t work. It’s totally the lazy solution for having a photo fill up some space. Without tieing it in as a design element. I suppose it can be done tastefully, but it’s going to just cause more problems than it solves.

So, I have been gathering pieces for a new computer, guided by the fine folks over at ArsTechnica and their System Guides. I have been trying to build something to use as a decent workstation and gaming rig for home, so that means some fairly high end recent parts. For my Christmas present Becca decided to get me all of the remaining parts on my list, including a few parts that were much better than what I had asked for.

So, now I present to you the unboxing and assembly pictures of my brand spanking new computer.

Since it’s a brand new box (my last computer was about 5 years old, and was still running on SD 133 RAM, lol. I am such a dork… man this is one really long parenthetical statement) I decided that it would be a good time to start using Vista. What? You say it hasn’t been released for retail yet? Bah! Why would I let a little thing like that stop me?

You can see a picture of the vista installer in that photo-set. It’s really a very slick interface, they did a good job of imitating the refinement of OSX. The worst part of this is the confirmation dialogs. Windows asks you to confirm or allow anything and everything. Any time you want to run an exe, there is a confirm dialog, any time a system setting or properties sheet is opened there is a confirm dialog, the number of clicks is really getting rediculous. If you want to rename a file in a Program Files directory, it takes no less than 6 clicks! I understand you dont usually want people renaming files in there willy nilly, but 6 clicks?!?

I will start hunting for the setting to turn some of those off soon. But in the mean-time it makes an aweseome gaming machine. BF2142 runs like a charm, averaging 41 FPS at very decent settings.

Oh, and I was able to get a decent stable overclock of the Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 at 2.7 GHz, up from 2.4 GHz. I had a little instability at 3 GHz, but the overclocking sites said it shouldnt be a problem, oh well.

I know what to do, say “bless you” or “gadzuntheit”. The latter sounds like I might be swearing at them in German, so that should be fun to say, but somehow I never get one out there. Someone sneezes at work (including me) and someone other than me always throws down the bless you, and I sit there and go, “What? Oh yeah I guess that was a sneeze…” I just tune them out. I don’t necessarily want people calling attention to the sounds my body makes, so why would I try to make verbal notice of theres.

I don’t know what the problem is, maybe my parents forgot to ingrain this “bless you” rule into me, or perhaps were just too busy trying to get me to remember slightly more important life lessons.

This is what our wonderful little christmas tree looked like before the kitten got into it. After the carnage was over we moved the tree into our room until we figure out a solution to guard it. The next morning I found a christmas ornament in my shoe, which was across the room.

That badge over there is a chart of how I have been doing on my goals. Yeah, really impressive. It’s like analytics for my life, but I’m the one responsible for putting in the data and I am not very good at keeping it updated. A lot of the stuff in my goal tracking list is fitness and activity related, such as working out, reading, not playing computer games, not eating at restaurants, stuff like that. So I try to weight the different aspects of my life as I see their importance and this little thing lets me know my score. I’m hoping to some day come off the balanced 0 line and hit a positive integer for my average.

You can try this excersise in futility if you want to.

I call it Timbly Mix

Originally uploaded by sirtimbly.

Originally uploaded by sirtimbly.

Taken outside a rest area in Nebraska on our way back from Thanksgiving. We are all so proud of her.