InfiniteTides

With the benefit of hindsight and poor short-term memory, Wednesday flew right by.  Kept busy making inspection cards and tweaking the inspection card template allowed me to ignore the clock.  Jeff was nice enough to remind me of break times. C

Before work, I read a little bit about Google’s Chrome OS that won’t be released until this time next year.  To this point, I have been less than impressed by Google’s Chrome browser.  It lacks support for extensions, little applications that extend the abilities of the browser.  For instance, there is no way in Chrome to block all advertisements, and why would there be?  Google makes most of their money through online advertising, so they would be reluctant to give people the ability to eliminate their main source of revenue.  I like the idea that Chrome OS will be opensource (read: FREE), but until Google has released an alpha build of Chrome OS, I think it’s far too early to speculate on how successful such an operating system will be.  Remember, Chrome OS will compete with Windows 7, OS X, and the many flavors of Linux.

So far tonight, I’ve slept about 6 hours.  I expect that I’ll take a short nap a bit later, probably around 3am.  First, I have some TV shows to watch, including Stage 5 Tour de France highlights, the Warehouse 13 premier, Big Brother UK, and Torchwood: Children of Earth Day Three.  I just watched That’s Impossible, and that show straight up sucks, mostly padded with obviousness, speculation, and conjecture.  Oh, did I mention it’s on The History Channel?  I should have known!

Two more days of 1st shift, followed by a short weekend, then it’s back to the anti-social vampire sleep cycle of 3rd shift.  Yay!

In my never ending quest for making minor tweaks and small improvements to my Linux experience, I decided I should add the OpenSUSE 11.1 KDE 4 factory repository to my repo list and use it to update my install.  When I ran the online update, after “fixing” the few conflicts that popped up, I found that I had 2 GB of updates.  It’s going to take all morning to download and install these updates.  When they are done, I understand that there’s a risk that my install could possibly be messed up in some way.

So for the rest of the morning, I’ll be sipping on coffee and catching up on episodes of Stargate: Atlantis.  I can’t help but believe that in some alternate reality, some other me has something better to do.

It took some hair pulling (my own), some arm twisting (OpenSUSE’s), and some persistence, but I’ve finally got OpenSUSE 11.1 running flawlessly on my HP Pavilion.  At first my screen resolution was set to something ridiculous and sound didn’t work at all, but I found a fix for it on the OpenSUSE forums.  Right now I’m installing video codecs.

Josh will be happy to note that I’m running the KDE desktop, and I’m liking it even more than either Windows XP or Vista because it’s not a resource hog AND I can have widgets.  It’s nice to have the current weather and a graph of my wireless usage always visible.  The fact that I can resize both icons and widgets easily is also a big selling point for the KDE 4 desktop.

This is by far the best OpenSUSE experience I’ve had, and I’ve used several versions since 9.something.  If you’re like me, someone who wants to delve into Linux, but not too deeply, just enough to get your feet wet, OpenSUSE 11.1 is the one you want.

Have a lot of fun!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with Windows 7, trying to tweak it to suit my needs.  At first, I was very pleased and mildly impressed by how fast Windows 7 is in comparison to it’s bigger, mildly retarded brother, Vista.  But then I started to see the annoyances that ultimately pushed me back to using Vista again.

Starting with the toolbar…I don’t like the way that a program shows up as open in the same spot it is pinned.  That doesn’t make any sense to me.  It’s counter-intuitive to me that a program is already open should sit in the same spot on the toolbar as the link that launched it.

After that, I ran up against the lack of a way to change the folder options to show extensions of known file types.  As it turns out, you can change those options from the Control Panel (just as you CAN in Vista), but it’s a long way to go to tweak something in Windows Explorer.

Then I came up against the “start” menu.  I guess I still want to call it that since I’ve come so used to calling it that in every other iteration of Windows I’ve used.  It’s crap.  No way around it.  I hate it, and I want the classic Windows XP start menu back.  I don’t often use that start menu, but when I do, I want it to be intuitive.  Windows 7 really drops the ball when it comes to ease of use.  Unless you’ve decided to put a crapload of shortcuts on your taskbar, or created another folder to launch things from, or cluttered your desktop with links to your most used apps, then you probably won’t like Windows 7 very much.

I’m finding that programs that crashed in Vista continue to crash in Windows 7.  Pidgin 2.5.3 tends to crash every time I close it, but at least in 7 it finally does close without me loading task manager.

Shut downs are very fast with Windows 7.  That’s not enough to keep me using it except maybe to surf the net and check my email.  Sure it’s shiny and looks pretty good, but Microsoft really needs to let the user decide whether or not to use such things as classic menues and how we want to view our folders in Windows Explorer.  It seems that Microsoft has once again moved too far in the direction of simplification and dumbed down their operating system just a little too much.