Flat3D

Vista

So I installed Vista a few weeks ago once exams finished.
It’s pretty nice, the interface is much more sophisticated than ol’ XP, Aero is very nice with it’s translucency and funky effects. But interface isn’t the be all and end all really, theres a bunch of stuff you’ve probably heard of from elsewhere… like the quick search on the start bar for handy file finding and program running.

But the one thing I don’t like about Vista are the mac users…;-) If you are a windows user, you’ve probably been depressed by all the McGeeks saying “That was on mac, that was on mac…”
The common ones are the photogallery mimicing iPhoto, the calendar and the start search.
But lets get real, quick search has been available on the PC for years and years if you install Google Desktop (since 2004, a year before Tiger introduced Spotlight) or Copernic (since 1996!) or one of the multitude of free indexing programs. Free photo gallery’s aren’t hard to come by, and even now I am using Picasa over Vista’s (and probably would over iPhoto) because all my pics are in there already. And Calendars? If you can’t find 101 free calendar programs out there and can’t find one of them to match your desired working patterns, then you need to try this site. Don’t even get me started on the gadgets I had floating about on Windows 95 back in my “messing about on the computer” days…
So now Microsoft have put them into Windows (last time they did this, they got dragged through court by Netscape).

I know Macs are nice computers, I know that OSX looks nice and has some nice features. But I also am competent and savvy enough to know that when it comes down to rubber on the road, the economy and flexibility of the PC (to someone like me) is going to outweigh the off white and silver animated-minimizing of the Mac. I know that for my everyday tasks a mac or a PC isn’t going to make that much of a difference. But it is nice to have a sexy interface and some nice toys built in here into Windows.

I’m not going to get into any further details on here cos I don’t want people I don’t know getting into some mac vs pc war…

So yeah, I’d say Vista is good, probably not worth getting til you need a new PC or something, XP isn’t that bad. But it’s nice. I suspect a big chunk of the niceness is the new factor, like when you first try out linux and it feels exciting cos its all new and differentand explorable, then you explore and find out that, while great for serving, it sucks as a desktop OS (although my recent Ubuntu experience seems to point towards a gradual shift to the contrary).

One really funky feature is the selective volume mixer. If you are running Vista now, open a few noisy apps and click the speaker on the taskbar, click Mixer on the volume control and you can individually control and mix the volume levels of each individual application! Much more useful than the array of sliders for every input and output you never used on your computer!

Taste of Tokyo

A taste of Tokyo

I dunno how much of a taste that is, but it’s an interesting idea that makes me wish I’d thought of it!

If you did it here the camera probably wouldn’t come back…

Last weekend…

A bit of video action from last weekends river running…

Laptop update…

I told last week of the laptop my friend lost her temper with and thumped into submission…
This week I bring better news! With the cheap eBay hard disk I was able to resurrect the beastie and install Ubuntu proper (someday soon maybe windows). Then with the further purchase of a cheapo wifi pc card I can proudly say I am posting from the re-homed laptop. Perhaps I should start a charity for abused pcs…

I am very impressed with Ubuntu’s performance. When I inserted the cheap no-name wifi card into the laptop I fully expected it to not work easily and that it wouldn’t be worth the hassle as I’d hopefully be putting windows on here (gonna donate it to mum to replace the noisy cumbersome desktop she now uses…) But Ubuntu rose to the challenge and detected the card automatically, and by simply entering the SSID of our network it picked it up and connected itself without any issues. Even easier than configuring a card under XP… Let alone the mess I waded through back in the days when I set us up a redhat server to share out our broadband via wifi… Back when adsl routers were too expensive for students (another RSPCPC success story!)

Six miles of joy

For those of you not from Antrim (or without knowledge of Antrim), our local river is the Sixmilewater, so called bcause it is six miles across. Or not.

Anyways last night Tommy and Steve and myself began at Muckamore and paddled as far as the Antrim Forum. the river was very swollen thanks to the downpours and continuous rain through the week and it was a blast as we headed down, myself in my kayak and Steve and Tommy in an open “canadian” canoe. We didn’t stop to play too much as we were late in starting and wanted to be done before dark. Steve and Tommy had a clean run without any swims, but some spectacular wier running. Unfortunately I capsized 5 times and only came up once… that meant 3 swims (and one standing up in very shallow water…)
Two of those swims came at weirs, the very first and very last that we ran.
The first was a dodgy one with a vicious stopper, that we found out later was the one that an experienced kayaker had been drowned at (had I known, I, an inexperienced kayaker, would never have considered it!).
the last was a long wier with a concrete fish chute.
Now in my defence this was the first time I’d paddled a river in my new recoil, it was also the biggest moving water I’d ever been on. However when I watched the video replay (not gonna be one the site :tongue2_tb:) of the first swim I realised I hadn’t waited for the boat to settle before trying to come up… Anyways…!

Today we headed down it again, this time Lyle came too and Tommy switched to his kayak. Steve stuck with his canadian and paddled it solo in true Bill Mason style
By this afternoon the water level was several feet lower that last night which made the weirs tamer and easier to run and play on for the more inexperienced paddlers among us. Also having Lyle’s experience and advice meant that I could learn a bit more!
This time I only had one capsize and had the patience to wait for the boat to settle before rolling up. We also had a bit more time to stop and play on the weirs.

All in all a great way to spend a weekend!

To see more, check out this google map!
(It might not work, I saved it in “my maps” as public and linked to it, let me know if it doesn’t…)