2010 — 18 November: Thursday
A mere placeholder,1 as the shades of night are falling as fast as my eyelids are drooping.
Let me just state, for the record, that I quite like Win 7 so far... I was far less impressed by Vista, and by "Kick Ass". Can't win them all. G'night.
There was a strange light...
... up in the sky but, not to worry, it's now disappeared behind a thick bank of rain clouds. I'm currently playing a CDROM compilation of MP3s (a mere 65 tracks) I must have made six or seven years ago. It works fine in the NAD CD player, though its companion was spat out with the terse assessment "Bad disc". Can't win them all, either, it seems.2 My taste in music is pretty static... Time (08:35) for breakfast and a second cuppa before I resume my assessment of Win 7. I have 29 days left (and that can be extended somewhat) before activation locks it down. As it's a 64-bit build I fully expect some issues with hardware drivers, specifically my HP printer and my Epson scanner. I have nothing more exotic to worry about. Besides, I'm retired — I don't do worry any more :-)
People with a particular background should appreciate this clever little graphic:
Lunch time bulletin
There are a few patches of blue visible in what's now become quite a bright sky. The MP3 compilation has reached track 61. The chicken leg and last of the sausages went down a treat with a salad and orange marmalade sandwich. There's now a very reasonable working set of applications up and running on the black beast. Including the vital TextPad, WildEdit, WinSCP, Ovation Pro (DTP) and Xara artwork programs. Sitting in the wings just waiting to go on are updated drivers for both the scanner and the printer. Network access to my other XP and Linux machines has so far been a doddle though I've yet to expose the beast to the iMac.
The temptation with a new PC is always to keep it as uncluttered as possible. The reality is usually a rapid descent into chaos. In this case, the horrors of setting up my email client with Google Mail incline me to leave email on "old faithful". The proprietary database program sitting locked on a third machine is also a bit of a nuisance. Mind you, all I really need is my trusty editor and a few flat files — who am I kidding? I'm still smiling at the novelty of seeing all six processor cores chuntering along, and still slightly boggled at the thought of using 1.2GB of RAM with (in essence) just the operating system beavering away indexing the hard drives. I shall see how good (or bad) the inbuilt search facility is before I unleash Copernic.
It's 13:19 so it must surely be time for my next cuppa? And now it seems to be drizzling once more. November, heh? What a month. [Pause] The shopping run had the intended effect of topping up the cupboard but — alas — didn't reveal where I've cunningly secreted the password to my external web server. Grrr! Apart from that tiny, tiny mishap, the black beast is about ready for Prime Time, methinks. A BBC lady is sitting in for NPR's Diane Rehm; is that ethical?
Tea time already?
Amazing. It's 18:19 or thereabouts and (of course) both pitch dark and rather cool out there. I'm shutting systems down now while I do some physical re-locating of the printer and scanner connections. And grab some food. Quite how I can once again be so hungry is a total mystery, and rather a nuisance. Ho-hum.
Back on the air, with vague proof of a working, transplanted, system. The scan of today's Blu-ray delivery was performed and processed by the Win 7 beast, though there were a few network shenanigans to get it over to the external server. Don't ask...
I've also just found my first bug. There was a window repaint issue on the beast. Tut, tut. Good grief, it's 20:57 already. And (just for the hell of it) this edit is coming at you entirely from said beast. My wonderful son managed to reset my external server password for me, bless him, and it's now written down very safely (just like the last time). Entropy rules here in Technology Towers, believe me. How about a cuppa, Mrs Landingham?
That Blu-ray, by the way, has eleven different language soundtracks, the English one being DTS HD and the rest Dolby 5.1. The accompanying SD DVD has a full-length director's commentary. You'd think, with a 50GB dual layer disc, they'd have enough room to put the same commentary on the Blu-ray, but it seems not. What a waste.
I bet I'm not the only person to see a fundamental flaw with this latest credit card wrinkle...
