I just this second paid my reg fee for ecto. 12 shiny pounds. Aren’t I a good little boy?

The sunday times culture supplement has a nice little article about how TV shows being critically acclaimed guarantees that they will be axed due to poor ratings. This past month i became completely addicted to Arrested Development, which somehow managed to get more and more hilarious as it went along. I avidly downloaded each episode so that I could catch up. Then just as I reach where it’s up to on tv I discover it has been axed. Whaaaaaa?? Turns out that no-one in America actually watched it, you stupid corn-dog munching idiots. I guess that’s the final punch-line. So I’m rather down about that. I guess I should have cottoned on during the 3rd season when the shows narrator started pleading with the viewer to tell all their friends about arrested development.

Last week I got a cold. Then a few days latter I got a sore throat. Then the next day a pain in my ear joined the sore throat. Today I have aches and pains all over, especially around my shoulders, and I can’t turn my head.

Life is good.

A look at this weeks greatest links via my del.icio.us

• FreeMacBlog.com
  Funny vid of macworld keynote bloopers. Shame the editing it so schizo though, ah well, everything edits for short attention spans these days.
• Open Source Mac – Free, Open-Source software for OS X
  Super duper lemon scooper
• Digital Spy: China cracks down on animated characters
  Yup, the chinese are nuts.
• Severe security hole in Apple Safari Browser | 4null4.de – Blog around the world
  UGH!
• Texture Library
  très utile

Last night I went to see the Mighty Boosh perform at the city hall. It was a marvellous spectacle. Like a scattergun of obscenely silly happenings, they were putting it out there. So much so that I really dunno where to begin, so I probably won’t. Vince Noir was chased around the auditorium by a giant rabbit, who went on to rape him. I think that’s all you need to know. Oh and Howard Moon has become a bit of an expert in mime. huh, the audience was full of students, many of whom seemed to have big bushy castro beards. Is this the fashion with students now?

Some things annoying me right now. When Americans attempt British accents they always sound Australian, why is this? Eddie keeps leaving doors wide open, letting the warm air out. It’s freezing cold. Several dusty Dutchmen have dirty diamonds hanging from their dapper dungarees, I fear.

I have this overwhelming urge to port one of my favourite OSS apps (not saying which, don’t want to get any-ones hopes up) to the mac, with a completely overhauled interface, in cocoa by my design. I attempted to start it today and surprise surprise, didn’t get very far before giving up. Well maybe not forever but for the moment. Trying to make your way around other peoples code, around a project you’ve never seen the source of before has to be one of the most stressful activities. You start off so optimistic but EVERYTIME that optimism is turned to desperation, trying to piece the puzzle together. Hate jigsaws. I got so stressed that I started to scratch and had to give up, it was doing my skin no good at all. haha. Ah well. I think it was exacerbated by trying to import the project into xcode, which I’m still not entirely buddy buddy with and I had a great deal of trouble getting it to adhere to the include paths. It kept telling me it couldn’t find some header files and I was pointing to the screen yelling “They’re there! I’ve showed you them already!” Ah well.

I’m having a slow brain week again. From Engadget

Windows Starter 2007 – Vista without Aero, probably meant for developing nations.

Windows Vista Home Basic – Basic Windows Vista for your single PC fam, doesn’t sound like much going on here. Analagous to XP Home.

Windows Vista Home Basic N – European version of the same, but without Media Player (because of antitrust rulings against MS in the EU).

Windows Vista Home Premium – This is the one we’re all probably gonna own. It’s got Media Center functionality, Cable Card support, the whole home-media shebang.

Windows Vista Business – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista.

Windows Vista Business N – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista, but Euro.

Windows Vista Enterprise – Business version of Vista with numerous enterprise features, like Virtual PC, volume encryption, etc.

Windows Vista Ultimate – Love that name. This one does all of the above (and more); what else do you need to know? It’s ultimate Windows..

What a confusing mess. What I want to know is, which is the one for developers? Which is the one you have to get if you need a IIS server for asp.net testing? Anyone? Or maybe they will do the right thing and make the web server functionality free like with every single other OS on the planet.

I was bored so I installed a copy of vista build 5270 (yeah? what? I don’t care) and I cannot say that it was a pleasant experience. I must be getting old, I used to love trying out beta OSs but now it’s just hell of earth. Never again. Vista experience summed up in bullets.

• OK, started with the install. You still need a stupid RAID/SATA floppy to provide the installer with a driver, there’s a whole DVD half empty, why the hell can’t they provide all the SATA drivers? There can’t be that many? Ubuntu manages it. It’s a nuisance because I don’t keep my floppy drive wired up inside… I mean, whats the point these days? So I have to connect it all up just to install windows.
• Wasn’t this release supposed to have a super fast installer using some new fang-led technique? Well, it took freaking hours. It was largly unattended though, so I guess that’s a plus?
• It took me straight into the super cool graphic mode with transparent everything. However, I was a tad disappointed with speed. Some things were nice and fluid, windows appear on the screen in quite a tasty manor, they zoom towards you a teensy weensy bit all whilst fading. It’s effective. But, the usual test of dragging windows around the screen is a bit on the jerky side. I have a 6600GT with 128MB so I figured it would be able to do quite a decent job. This is in 1600×1200, which shouldn’t be too tricky in this day and age. I hope nVidia have still a lot of optimising to do.
• I occasionally saw corruption on the screen. Black lines appearing over the top of firefox’s toolbar was a common one.
• There’s a severe shortage of compatible drivers. And even vista drivers seem to refuse to install. I couldn’t get the beta of creative’s sound blaster driver to install at all. I had to use the KX Project driver, which despite working kept throwing errors.
• Almost all the software I use on a regular basis had issues. Nero wouldn’t install at all. Video apps have a huge problem with the graphic system, you can set apps up to trigger the new graphic system to turn off when they run, but even then the only video app which worked properly was VLC. Others were stuck with software rendering… blocky with lots of sheering. And windvd, if you enabled hardware acceleration would crash and you couldn’t load it again. Nice.
• WinDVD was unable to provide Media Player with DVD functionality. I then noticed that it was supposed to be able to play DVD’s straight off this time, albeit with a free software update from microsoft. But, windows update told me there were no more updates to install. So I was left scratching my head.
• It moans at you even more than XP! It keep popping up messages for every teensy little nuisense thing. Things like No virus checker (even though it has that defender thing built in). Oh and it kept suggesting that there was a problem with my hardware! The cheek! It got me to do a long drawn out memory test the next boot, and despite my machine passing it with flying colours it kept nagging me to do it again. Jerk.
• This might be a me thing rather than a Vista issue, but I found the sheer number of changes they’ve made to it to be quite daunting, even for a person who’s used PC’s as long as I have. Especially to explorer (the folders and files viewer I mean) and control panel, and display properties and all that gubbins. A lot of the changes seem a tad unnecessary too. And sometimes the organisation is untidy, especially control panel where it feels as if microsoft aren’t quite sure where to put things. They have to make a great deal of use of the sidebar panel to give shortcuts to other options because they don’t know where to categorise them.

So in the end vista stayed on my machine for less than a day because it keep making me cry. If this is the sign of things to come, all these driver and software incompatibilities it will probably be at least a year after vista’s release before I’d have a smooth ride with it.

Any no more being a guinea pig.

A look at this weeks greatest links via my del.icio.us

• Rejected Family Learning Channel Cartoon – Google Video
  OMG, Funniest thing ever! And my god the effort that must have gone onto it!
• Odeo: Listen
  OMG, this site is beautiful to look at. Might be my favourite site design so far.
• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Hollywood ‘resists gay US actors’
  I’m dubious about this. Sure there may be some big wigs nudging gay actors to the side, but i’m sure that cinema goers would support gay actors as much as the next. Or maybe i live in a dream world? Ack i dunno.

1.0 of Camino was finally released this week and of course I had to download it, and OMG it’s beautiful, in the looks department, it’s just, so so perfect. So i’m going to compare it’s fascia to that of other the other leading brands, it’s an extended entry and all that malake….
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All this talk of dognapping has driven Eddie over the edge. We first noticed a change of behaviour on Tuesday, suddenly out of the blue he decided to risk the stairs for the very first time. Unfortunately he hasn’t the guts to attempt downwards, so every time he goes upstairs someone has to help him back down. It’s getting rather tiresome as he’s really milking this new found freedom, following everyone upstairs as if it’s the promise land. It also means now that nowhere is safe from his prying jaws.

To add to this craziness and for the first time since the first week he arrived here he spent the entire night crying and scratching at the kitchen door, seriously, all bleeding night and there was absolutely no reason for it. No gale howling, nothing. He seems a bit touchy today as well.

Oh god, and, earlier today he brought in something from outside, I grabbed it from his mouth thinking it was a big lump of dried mud. It wasn’t mud. I spent what must have been 10 minutes washing my hands and I still don’t feel clean. I don’t think i’m ever going to get over it. Gross. Repulsive. Ugh. Dogs…

I’ve been messing with Trackmania Nations a lot and have come up with some circuits of my own, not only are they fast, challenging and lots of fun, but they are also multimedia extravaganza’s, with custom made music and silly little intro’s to the races. What more could you possibly want? Download Trackette.zip and extract it into the “gamedata” folder from within where-ever you installed Trackmania.

Apparently there has been a spate of dog-napping here in the UK, criminal gangs taking off with folks dogs and then demanding ransom money. Well, to anyone who fancies doing the same with my Eddie, just you try it, I can be pretty violent when pushed. I’m sure they’re shaking. It’s happened to both Lionel Blair and Dave II’s beloved Liz Hurley. Poor things.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add that the tracks say they are by a Mr John Pickles. Haha, well that’s the name i’m playing the game under. Um, don’t ask why, it’s a long story. Something about a mission caper.