Oh, Hi

Wow, has it really been two months since I’ve blogged? Sorry guys!

If you’ve been talking to me lately, you probably know I’m pretty busy with school. The assignments, papers, and midterms just keep on marching at me as fast as I can do them. Unfortunately, my schedule is extremely inefficient for getting things done. So let’s do a recap!

Christmas

Christmas was pretty busy, and unfortunately the weather played havoc with a few of my plans. There was a few storms around Christmas and on New Years, which forced me to juggle things around a bit. For those that don’t know, I got a shiny new Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi), and you can check out pictures on my flickr page.

School

I’m taking a few interesting courses right now:

• System Analysis, Design & Project Management
• Professional Practice
• Computer Organization II
• Operating Systems I
• Anthropology – Religion and the Sacred

This keeps me busy pretty much all the time, and I haven’t had much time to do anything but school work in the past couple weeks.

Programming

All of my current programming project are unfortunately put on hold. Thing’s I’d love to get done is qZDL, and OCam. OCam (name still under consideration), is a little program I developed during the Ottawa OCTranspo strike to look at the City of Ottawa webcams easily. The app lets me flick through all the webcams in a way that’s analogous to using a TV (including “stations”). I’m working to add more and more webcams to this, and maybe release it.

iPhoto 09 first thought!

Faces is really cool.

Places is neato too.

But you can’t make smart albums with Faces or Places? Why not? Why can’t I have “All Photos with myself AND dad” ?

Oh well. Otherwise it’s wickedsweet.

Windows 7 thoughts

I’ve been playing around with the first beta for Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts on it.

A little background: I’m primarily a Mac user, and I haven’t used Vista much at all. I’ve been running W7 in a VMWare image (because that’s where Windows belongs and lately Windows has been stupid about running on my hardware). That’s that.

Running in a VM with 2GB of memory I have to say it runs brilliantly fast. IE8 is nice enough, though I find the menus incredibly difficult to navigate. Paint has been revamped with the new Ribbon interface (world asks “why?”), which although questionable, it still works pretty well. Paint has become a lot more feature rich lately — finally Microsoft seems to have realized it’s actually a pretty widely-used tool!

Haven’t tried any games on it.

Taskbar: Here’s where things get interesting. I’ll start with the Notification area, which has been revamped greatly. Instead of being clustered with a billion icons, it arranges itself perfectly and lets you configure what shows up and what doesn’t. And it works. It works well. It works like it always should have.

As for the rest of the bar, for starters you can finally re-arrange items in the taskbar (why this took so long is beyond me) but it works great. You items are now arranged by app, represented by a single app icon. This is also where your quick-launch items go. So allegedly it’s a lot like the Dock on Mac OS X. I’d say that’s a fair assumption. It works a bit differently, but they offer mostly the same functionality. The new taskbar will also show you window previews for each app, as you mouse over its icon. A nice touch.

So while I would say it’s borrowed things from the Dock, it’s not in a bad way. It’s all been implemented in a good Windows fashion and it doesn’t feel out of place. Very natural. I think it’s a great step forward in terms of usability. One thing they have to fix is the way running/nonrunning apps are shown. They all appear in the taskbar, with only a tiny, subtle indicator denoting a running app (a little outline, very faint). If they fix this, it will be mostly perfect.

So it’s generally a solid beta. No UAC bullcrap everywhere. It feels pretty refined. Good on them.

I have to say this looks mighty slick

Even though I’m generally not a fan of Windows laptops (especially from Dell), I must admit this is a very pretty one.

It looks like the screen might be pretty glossy, but generally that isn’t a problem for me. Not that I’m really in the market to get a new laptop (and certainly not a PC), but I just thought I’d point it out. Looks nice.

I think they are launching either H1 or H2 of this year (it’s a PC, there had to be something stupid about it).

OMG Bio left his room?

Well, I’m at MacWorld in San Fransisco. Have been for a few days now. I’m just playing around on the interweb so I thought I’d post here.

Right now I’m in an InDesign class about Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool.