Insert crappy Staind lyric here

There's been a whole lot of nothing going on since I last posted a blog. I had a craptastic New Year's Eve wherein I did something literally unforgivable, but that's not really an excuse since I haven't posted since mid-December or so and it's late January. I'm certain that no one particularly cares why I've been absent for so long, so let's just blame Rock Band 2 and more recently, Fallout 3. Oh, and Plurk. I didn't stop using that since it's pretty much everything in a micro-messaging service that I want (namely, threaded conversations).

Technologically, I've gone and made some significant changes. I've gone and changed my operating system as well as my browser. Not only have I switched from Firefox to Flock, I've also given up both Windows XP on the desktop (Ubuntu lost its ability to connect to the internet on an update and I was too n00bly to know how to fix it) and Vista on the laptop. I'm now running the Windows 7 beta on both systems.

The running concensus on Windows 7 is that it's what Vista should have been. Unfortunately, that's not very descriptive. So, allow me to relay my experience of it. Everything that I've installed on it that worked on Vista or XP has worked just fine on Windows 7 with a sole exception. The software to access my Sprint Mobile Broadband card wouldn't install on my laptop. No internet at work is a deal-breaker for me. However, it turns out that with some digging, I was able to discover that an older version of that same Dell program would install just fine. Lo and behold, it did! There are a few things that don't work *quite* right, but I attribute that more to being a beta than anything. For example, when I'm running both iTunes and Flock, sometimes the top bar of Flock will occasionally flicker. Not that big of a deal, just mildly annoying. Also, iTunes seems slow to respond when songs change over in a playlist. Now that I think of it, it seems like the annoyances mostly have iTunes in common. Hmmm.

The things I've really liked so far with Windows 7 are small, admittedly, but some of them are ridiculously useful to me. For example, the ability of Windows to change its desktop background every x minutes/days is now devilishly simple, but little more than a cosmetic change for me. The taskbar is now very reminiscent of Apple's Dock. This is also nice, but not that big of a deal for me. For me, the best thing I've noticed is how simple they've made it to have the Documents/Music/Pictures folders become "libraries" and now can include multiple folders and, more importantly, it's two clicks to change which of those included folders is the default save location for that kind of file. This is a big deal for me because I always put my data in a partition separate from my OS because you never know when you'll need to re-install your OS and you can easily wipe your OS drive without worrying about losing any data. Oh! That reminds me. Windows 7 takes your old Windows installation and puts it in a folder called windows.old if you do keep all your data on the same partition. Nice touch.

Going onto Flock, the best thing about it is that it's based off of Firefox, so all of my Firefox add-ons still work (though Ubiquity's a bit wonky. It's still in alpha though.) The other cool thing about Flock is that it makes certain web stuff really easy. RSS feeds, mail, social networking, all of it's made pretty easy. Anytime you get something new to read, the icon changes color to indicate you have something new to read, be it Facebook status, RSS feed, or e-mail. For me, this is extraordinarily useful for me with regard to RSS since I'm horrible about keeping up with feeds via something like Google Reader. If I have a little glowing icon, I know I need to read it. Otherwise, I'll just forget about it after a while.

Blogged with the Flock Browser