Absolute BS

THEN WHY IS THERE A CANCEL BUTTON??!?!

I’m trying out the windows 7 beta. After all these years of usability testing, you’d think Microsoft would have learned not to write horrible “confirmation messages” like this. In fact I would argue they shouldn’t put a confirmation message at all. Maybe just show me the file. Maybe ding. Certainly not this.

Also on the first screen of the export contacts wizard, the default button is cancel. So I typed a file name and hit enter and the whole thing closes.

I’d just like to quickly thank Barack Obama for propping the Dow Jones up today. The talking heads out there who blamed him personally for its recent tumbles are conspicuously silent today.

So I wanted to play Fallout 3, which my friend Jeff told me is totally bad ass. Unfortunately it is, like pretty much every other PC game out there, only for windows. I could have monkeyed around with WINE for a while, but since I had a copy of the Windows 7 beta sitting around already and Jeff gave me a spare hard drive, I figured what the hell. So here goes:

At 7:45 I reconfigure the BIOS so that windows thinks my newly installed HD is the only one. It somehow discovers the other drives, but at least it thinks it’s drive is #0, so I think I’ll be ok. After picking my language, it starts installing. It sits at the first step, “Copying files” for about 4 seconds and then moves on to “Expanding files” where it sits at 0% for 5 minutes and then slowly creeps up to 100 over the next 35 minutes. It reminds me that my computer will “restart several times” during the install. No problem.

After the files are done expanding, it says it reboots, but I don’t see a POST or hear a beep, i just get a black screen. The hard drive is furiously spinning, so I wait it out another 15 minutes, during which time num lock flashes on and off sporadiacally. Now it’s like 8:45 and I’m starting a black screen, so I kill the power and reboot. The “Safe Mode” menu briefly (and I mean briefly) shows up and then it picks safe mode. Windows boots up, it says it’s continuing installation, and then a dialog pops up that says it can’t continue installation in safe mode. Restart. Windows comes up, eventually tells me that the install did not complete successfully and it needs to reboot and start over. Restart. It comes up and tells me the same thing, so now I realize it want’s me to reboot off the dvd again. Restart.

Now it’s almost 9:00. I restart the installer, this time I find the advanced menus and format the hard drive it’s installing to. 2 seconds of “copying files”, only 10 minutes of expanding, and then another reboot. This time windows comes up and continues the install. I’ve only lost 90 minutes of time, maybe I can still play fallout tonight

9:12 - While windows is “completing install” it decides it wants to up the resolution from what looks like 800×600 to the full 1920×1600. It ups it alright, but only the top left quarter of the screen has anything and the rest is black except for a “Windows 7 Build 7000″ in the bottom right corner. It sits like that for another minute or so and reboots again.

9:15 - Setup is preparing my computer for its first use! After entering my product key, it guesses that the time is 4:17 AM, which is strange because its really 9:17pm. I tell it that it’s a home computer and it sets up a “Homegroup” with the easy to remember password of “pw6IU3gV1u,” and no way to change it.

9:21 - Windows spends 4 minutes “preparing my desktop.” What took so long you ask? 2 icons (one of which is the recycle bin) and a fish background. Also a message about how it needs to install 4 updates. Not too bad I guess, only 23 megs. And I can start the fallout install now.

9:28 - It finished downloading updates about 5 minutes ago and wanted to reboot. I clicked “later” and started installing fallout. Then all of a sudden right in the middle of the install windows says “Logging out” then “Installing updates” then “Shutting down” and reboots. This is garbage.

9:31 - Back up, IE opens up and tell me without a hint of irony that my “last browsing session closed unexpectedly.” Yeah. Thanks for the heads up.

9:45 - Fallout is installed. Sweet. 2 hours isn’t that bad, I guess. If thats the price to pay to play the one good video game that comes out every few years, I can deal with it.

Copied from an email. I’m just going to stick this here for a while just in case I need to point at it in the future

For valentine’s day this year, MB and I went backpacking for 3 days/2 nights down on Mt. Lemmon in Tucson. We were joined by my buddy Simmons, another couple, Eve and Eric, and the new dog, Barñardo. It was quite a fun trip, and we want to go back once it warms up so we can jump in some of the pools. We found a couple great campsites, but the best was the second day where we were off-trail a little, perched on a cliff overlooking Bear Canyon towards Tucson. It’s pretty neat that you can be this close to a huge city and still feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.

More pictures here