About a year ago, my trusty desktop PC, Lenny, started having issues. It was really just a one issue, anytime I tried to start him up he would reboot before loading Windows XP.  It didn’t bother me too much at first since I wasn’t home very often and had my work laptop. Eventually I got sick of having to use my Uncle’s computer to print boarding passes and decided it was time to fix Lenny.

Running an XP repair did nothing, so I installed a second copy of XP alongside the original to let me back up my files. When I was done backing up, I was just planning on doing a clean install of XP. Before I did though, I remembered that I had a copy of Vista from my RIT MSDN account, that I had never gotten around to installing. I’d used it once or twice while fixing other people’s computers but had never actually used it for more than an hour or so. The biggest reason for that was Lenny.

Lenny is about 7 years old now, and not exactly top of the line anymore. At the time I got Vista he was sporting an Athlon XP 2400+, 512 Megs PC2700 RAM and an nVidia Geforce ti4600. XP ran well enough and I knew Vista would run like crap. At some point the ti4600 died and was replaced with a Geforce 6600GT. About six months ago, I was dropping off some stuff at Goodwill and happened to arrive just as someone was dropping off a PC. I checked it out and discovered it was a Pentium 4 2.4GHZ with 512 DDR RAM. Being the scavenger I am, I promptly stole it. When I got it back home I discovered the only things worth keeping were the processor and the RAM. Anyway, the moral of this story is Lenny got an upgrade to a gig of ram and it is kind of sad to see people throwing away computers nearly as good as the one you have.

OK, back to Vista. Freshly upgraded with a new video card and the extra 512 RAM, I decided Vista was with a shot. It was surprisingly painless and I only ran into one major issue. nVidia in their infinite wisdom, decided they weren’t going to release drivers for nForce2 motherboards but Vista figured something out and made it work anyway. Everything else went smoothly. The performance wasn’t blazing but it was good enough for about 90% of the stuff I do on a computer.

After fiddling around with it for a few days, I ended up reformatting again and putting XP back on. At the time I was heavily into TF2 and found it didn’t run very good, partially due to the unsupported motherboard.

Overall, I liked Vista. It’s not amazing but if I had a better PC with up to date hardware, I’d still be running it now. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s been made out to be by the media and public in general. It’s my opinion that Vista got a bad reputation for many little reasons mostly out of Microsoft’s control. Mainly because of driver and software incompatibilities. Of course, since I didn’t get around to installing it until it was nearly two years old I missed out on many of the problems that likely influenced people’s decisions.

I’m looking forward to checking out the Windows 7 once I get the chance to install it.

So, Once upon a time there was this groundhog named Wilbur. Wilbur was a stubborn old groundhog who lived in a cage all year round except for one day when some old guy in a top hat pulled him out of a hole in the ground and waved him around a bit. After about 10 years of this he got fed up and decided to escape

When the day came he was ready. As the old man reached into the cage to pull Wilbur out Wilbur bit him and jumped out of the cage. He ran as quickly as he could towards the door. Once outside he quickly took off towards the woods.

As Wilbur was running he looked back to see if the old man was following him and promptly ran into a tree and passed out. Sometime later he woke up to the sound of someone giggling. “Morning speedy” a voice said.

Wilbur looked around and saw a squirrel looking at him. “Hi, I’m Wilbur. Where am I? and who the heck are you?”

The squirrel walked over to him and replied “I’m Marle, and you’re….somewhere special.” Marle then proceeded to explain that after Wilbur passed out the old man had found him and taken him to the animal shelter where he was promptly euthanized and tested for rabies. “So yeah, you’re kind of dead and I’m your new roommate but don’t worry about it too much. We’ve got cable up here.”

I started this post almost 3 months ago with the tentative title: Twitter Shitters – No one cares. The original post was heavily influenced by this comic & post at Penny Arcade. As well as a friend who decided to link their Facebook status to Twitter which caused them to show up in my news feed every 20 minutes. The whole concept of micro-blogging seemed stupid to me. I mean who really cares that you’re sitting on a bus waiting to get home? I sure didn’t. Luckily, the post didn’t turn out that great and I ultimately decided not to publish it. Since then my thoughts about Twitter have changed quite drastically and when I discovered this post sitting the unpublished queue I decided to revisit it.

My conversion from Twitter-hater to Twitter-liker (I’ve yet to tweet while taking a dump) started when I created my account way back in January. I did it mainly because I’m just plain interested in the web and create accounts for almost every service I come across. At the time I didn’t see much of a use for the service and quickly forgot about it.  I didn’t think about it again until after I made the decision to go to PAX.  I found a group of people in the PAX forums who were trading Twitter IDs and forming an official Twitter group appropriately called the Twitter Shitters. I joined in since I figured it would be a good way to get connected with the PAX community and give me an easy way to keep track of anything I wanted to write about while I was there.

Before I left for PAX, I linked Twitter to my cell so I could update via text message so I wouldn’t have to rely on my phone’s crappy WAP web browser to update. My lack of a decent web browser kept me somewhat isolated from the community aspect but throughout the day I found myself updating more and more. Since it turned out to be such an excellent way to keep track of everything I saw and is probably the main reason I wrote so much about PAX . While I couldn’t regularly check out what everyone else was up to it was neat to get a glimpse of what everyone had done throughout the day and their thoughts were. There was even a meet up of the TSers which I unfortunately had to skip due to a very early flight.

Since then I’ve become hooked on the service. I follow Wil Wheaton who in addition to posting amusing thoughts also lets me know when he’s written something new on his blog. Felicia Day keeps me up to date with the Guild and Dr. Horrible news. Even CNN has a Twitter account for breaking news. Beyond the news and updates I get Twitter is actually a lot of fun when you have a group of semi-connected people like the TSers. I get a kick out of some the “conversations” that spring up. Which range from frustrations at work and puppy cams to the latest video games and to strange observations on life. I find myself compelled to update or respond to others several times a day.

As much as I like Twitter, one thing I refuse to do is link it to my Facebook status. I don’t want to be the guy who updates his Facebook status every 20 minute with the current status of his commute, that’s just annoying. I figure if anyone is that interested in me they can always create an account and follow me.

*Update*

So the reason this was required was because in my copious spare time I put together a Dr. Horrible costume for Halloween. I think it came out rather well although almost no one recognized the costume and I was called everything from a spaceman to sperm man.