howeird | Taking a few moments while the DVD/Dual test runs

I should be in bed, but Monday is elongated by BASFA. The meetings just keep getting more enjoyable, as I grow more obnoxious. I have taken to putting $1 in the pun tax jar (at 25¢ a pun) at the start of the meeting.

johnnyeponymous and I had a small bidding war over a pair of Tales of the City tapes, and he kindly gave them to me to view first. I think I'll capture them to the hard drive.

En route to the meeting I stopped off at the nearby Fry's. It's a large, narrow building and probably the poorest run of them all. The signs hanging over the departments are mostly incorrect, and there is less than the usual logic behind what is where. I did get everything on my list:

2x256 MB of PC100 RAM for the Mac
a combo drive for the Mac**
A new dual layer DVD burner for my PC**
A wired keyboard for the PC which has separate multimedia keys (so the F keys are dedicated to standard Windows F1-12)
A short blue UV SATA cable for the PC
A usb wireless network adapter for the Mac

**Stupid me, I'm taking a DVD-R drive out of the PC, so I didn't need to buy another one for the Mac.

Need to return the Creative wireless mouse/keyboard which basically sucked. And will return the unused combo drive

Installed the memory in the Mac, was surprised it was using only one SIMM, and had three slots free. So now I have 640Mb (the specs lied and said there were 2x64 and there were only 2 slots, so I was anticipating removing the tiny RAM and replacing it with the big ones).

The DVD drive in the PC was removed and replaced in about 45 seconds. The Mac took about 20 minutes, because it's mounted in a bay which requires disassembling way too much of the machine to remove.

But everything is now installed and working in both machines - except the Mac's wireless, which requires OS X. Anyone know if there is a <$129 upgrade from 9.2.2 to Tiger?

Today was the Vista/Office 2007 launch at Microsoft, and I was responsible in small part for getting the video feed streamed to the Silicon Valley campus. It was done in the cafeteria during my usual lunchtime, so I ate out, and missed the first 20 minutes. What I saw did not impress me. It was all aimed at families, a ton of marketing hype about how they beta tested with real people all over the world. But the real people they showed were all couples and families, and the family they chose to come up on stage and represent this vast international set of beta testers were lily white middle class Americans named Regan, a man and woman in their 30's with three children (one middle school and two grade school aged). One wonders why they were not allowed to bring their dog along - because you know they have one. In fact, one of the videos showed a dog apparently trying to use Vista (or maybe he was just trying to eat the keyboard).

For those of you who joined my LJ late, I tried Vista RC1 a few months ago on my dual core 64 bit laptop, and ended up removing it because there just was not enough driver support. Gates and Balmer were claiming 31,000 drivers have been written, but the 8 I need have not been released yet.

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when they did the demo of how easy it is to use the new Word 2007. The claim is it is now ever so easy to do complex layout functions with the click of an icon. The laughable thing is there are about 75 icons on the toolbar now, and finding what you want is anything but easy. Add to that several tabs which each have their own set of icons, and it's as steep a learning curve as Framemaker. I've been using it at work for two months now, and I still can't find things. And I've used word processors on six platforms for more than 20 years.

Well, my new DVD solved the problem it was bought to solve, so I'm happy. Also got Tivo desktop upgrade installed. Sonic Tivo2go is acting like it is not there, I'll probably need to re-install.