electric relaxation

Ok, so it doesn’t, yet. But it might.

So it’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of being fantastically wealthy. Anyone who doesn’t either (a) has one or more rich parents, (b) has never had a hard time getting laid, or (c) doesn’t listen to the rap music.

However, it’s quite sobering to realize that even if I’m handed a million little paper miracles, very few things are likely to change. In particular, (b) and (c) are in my experience, surprisingly orthogonal to the contents of your bank statement.

What’s more, I figure I’d be equally happy if I could just convince myself (perhaps via a combination of hypnotherapy and serious drug abuse) that I already have ridiculous paper, and that I just can’t spend the money because of some complex and unintelligible tax reason. It’d be like that movie The Game, but in reverse. Or something.

Especially when you’re at the Korea House on Post St. in Japantown. They have friends in high places.

One of my perennial New Year’s resolutions is to live large. I mean like f–king large, cash money millionaire large, 24’s on the Range large. I’m pretty resigned to the fact that it’s not really going to happen; I think at the end of the day, I don’t have the stomach (or the heart) to actually partake in the sort of wanton excesses documented by the contents of my iPod.

Every now and then, however, an opportunity comes along that’s just too stupid to pass up. Hence, the 50″ plasma which now occupies about a quarter of my living room. It’s just about 300% too much TV for my apartment.

Of course, one might argue that a man of our times hasn’t truly lived until he’s seen HD pornography from the courtside seats, so to speak: it brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “larger than life”.

P.S.
The dinky little silver TV is my old 30″ Sharp. Clearly no longer fit for the first world.

This printout is posted in the first floor men’s bathroom of VMware’s 3210 Porter building. I believe we inherited it in the Legato takeover, and I’m willing to give our people the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s no longer necessary. On the other hand, the fact that such a sign was ever required is a pretty damning (and embarassing) indictment of the Y chromosome.

On a related note, in the 71 Stevenson office, I witnessed some Sales douchebag cruise in while talking to his wife on his cellphone, drop trough, and mictorate, without skipping a beat. In fact, I’m pretty sure they were talking about what to cook for dinner. What an all-star.

Circa 1993, in fact. The track was “Musical Essence”. It got mad play on MuchMusic’s Rap City, since he was a Canadian artist. I believe he was funded by one of those Ontario Artist grants; I forget what they were called, some kind of cultural initiative thing for promoting local talent.

I used to bump this track all the time, especially with my family friend Vivek, who first got me into hip-hop. No less than ten years later, everyone’s hyping K-OS as the next Wyclef. But I done been dat, suckas. Or, as they say in Eshkoshkan, “Yee ain’t hot AZIMIZ”.

I couldn’t find a copy of “Musical Essence” on Rhapsody, iTunes, or any other music service; but YouTube came through with the video. I bet there’s also another copy on VHS somewhere in our basement in Albany.

So, after my tour of the world, the reason I finally came back to XP:

Cuz the s—-t works, dammit.

See my previous post for why I switched back from Vista to XP. To that list, I’ll add:

• UAC is a crappy, hackish bolt-on. They really need to rethink and revisit the hundreds of dialogs, control panels and configuration panes that make up Windows, rather than just having them respawn themselves depending on which button you press, with controls getting unlocked and locked accordingly. That’s clearly never going to happen, so I guess the next best option is to just turn off UAC. The current situation just doubles the number of windows that you have to open to get anything done.
• Vista’s ugly. Well, uglier than the Mac. It’s not even clearly better than Linux with Beryl, for god’s sake. And that thing appears to be written by a bunch of crack-smoking twelve year olds in Poland. Or something.

… on my Thinkpad T42, as my primary OS. Second in a series.

Looking back through old e-mails from college, it’s pretty amusing to see how much of a Linux fanboy I was back then. My, how times have changed. I fricking hate Linux as a desktop now. It blows. And unlike most miserable snots who make such bold claims, I can actually back it up.

I use Ubuntu as my primary OS at work. It works fine. With NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers and the Beryl composition manager running, I think it competes well with Vista in the looks department - some things, like the new Start bar, look great in Vista, but Vista is quite inconsistent in appearance.

So, after being cajoled by my office mate, Mr. Langdale, I gave Edgy on the T42 a whirl. Here’s why it sucked (and please note that I care very little about who’s fault this is at the end of the day):

• Power management in Linux still sucks. My T42 represents the best-of-breed in terms of supported laptops, but suspend/resume was still flaky, succeeding only about 80% of the time.
• Docking stations don’t work. Linux’s docking station support remains mostly a joke. RandR 1.2 solves most of the problems, but it’s Intel-only at the moment, so it won’t help me until somebody implements this stuff in the Radeon driver. I’m sure it will happen, but I’m not holding my breath.
• Wireless support still blows. Red Hat’s Network Manager applet works ok, but it still wasn’t part of the default install in Edgy. Plus you have to constantly re-enter your password because people are retarded.
• Bluetooth support is confusing and the UIs suck. Bluetooth actually seems to be quite stable and useable, but I have no interest in compiling packages or patching scripts in order to surf wirelessly over my BlackBerry Pearl. Or to charge the battery, for that matter.
• Graphics hardware support is abysmal. I’m sure that five years from now, the OSS radeon driver will work great on the 9600 M10, and I’m even more sure that six months from now, I will have completely stopped caring.

Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve spent at least 4 months using each of the major desktop operating system choices available as my primary OS:

• Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4)
• Windows XP SP2
• Linux (Ubuntu Breezy, Dapper, and Edgy)
• Windows Vista (RC2, RTM)

For Mac OS X, I was using a 12″ PowerBook (with the craptacular G4 chip). For the PC OSen, it was a Thinkpad T42 along with the IBM Port Replicator II docking station.

I realized recently that I’m probably one of the few people whose opinion I trust on the relative pros and cons of these, since most people who sound off on e.g. Linux versus the PC versus the Mac haven’t actually lived in all three for long enough to be worth listening to.

So, here’s an attempt to document my major problems with each. And for those who hate teasers, the punchline is that I now use Windows XP.

At any rate, here’s why I hate Macs:

The hardware is fragile.

That’s it. That’s the only reason. But it was huge. My PowerBook died within 8 months of purchase, and it was pretty flaky before it gave out for real. I dropped a backback that it was in from about three feet and it dinged a back corner badly enough that I had to buy an aftermarket powersupply because the stock one no longer fit. A couple of months later, I dropped it while it was running, and it proceeded into a slow death, first the superdrive died, then it would occasionally stop booting, and then eventually it just refused to ever boot.

I haven’t seen any sign of things changing in this department. I think Macs are nice, but the real price of a Mac is the base cost plus AppleCare, and even then, you’re not safe from accidental damage. I can believe a Mac is great if you treat your posessions better than I do.

For reference, my T42 has survived pouring bacon grease on the keyboard, me standing with my full weight on it, and a drop from nearly four feet onto a hardwood surface. And that was just in the last two months.