Oh, People, Where Art Thou?

Personally, I was selling some stuff on eBay.

Much of th' rest of the progressive blogosphere hasn't been terribly engaging for me for the last couple of weeks. Last week, I was keepin' an eye on the local water table. Doing just fine, thankyewnotverymuch, Mr Bush and you boobs at FEMA, but really, we never had too many problems compared to the rest of Iowa. And certainly nothing like China, which is still smarting from that earthquake to boot.

I mean, really, the most engaging thing politically to me has been that He-Of-The-Voice got hitched. Barry White may have been an aphrodisiac to millions of couples (and groups) around the world, James Earl Jones may have been the stuff of GenX nightmares as small children, but I grew up thinking the best bad-ass voice in TV was George Takei.

Occasionally I've pushed some technical stuff at our 6 readers - my favorite Internet browser just pushed out a new version today. Unfortunately, my favorite add-on for Firefox, Google's Browser Sync, hasn't been updated so it works with Firefox v.3.

My eBaying has also been technical. I've been getting rid of a huge freaking mistake of a notebook computer plus some other hardware, and will be buying a MacBook after all the cash clears the various banks. Why? I like OSX; I can install WinXP in BootCamp (or Parallels); a MacBook doesn't have a pile of godforsaken drivers cluttering memory; and I hate Vista.

I've hated Microsoft operating systems before, Windows Millenium was a big steaming pile of code, but Vista is evil. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 evil. I think we forgot how bad Win95 was - it took a full revision version (Windows 98), a complete redesign of the Intel processor architecture (Pentium), a geometric adoption of supporting hardware standards, and finally the creation of the Win32 kernel in Windows 2000 before Windows as we know it became not a hell, but something worth apathy or bland acceptance in the part of the average computer user.

Vista has been mostly stable since release, moreso than Windows 95 ever even dreamed, but the system is an absolute pig for resources, and that's an insult to pigs because even they don't eat nearly as much. It was like an SUV that got 2.5 miles to the gallon while having a performance of a 2 cylinder Yugo. I still have not personally seen a new notebook computer that boots into Vista faster than a crawl.

The notebook manufactures are partially to blame however - the laptop I just sold had 32 applications loading on startup to run all the doodads as well as the 'helper' apps designed to assist the less technically able. Even my wife's newish Acer, which I reloaded with XP, has a long drag of startup apps that are needed to make some things run right. Otherwise, you can't make the screen go to a projector or turn the WiFi on and off.

The simple message to computer manufacturers: make it run fast, from the switch, don't get in the user's way excessively and make everything you bundle in the computer work consistently with minimal hassle. For a while, just prior to Vista, we had that with XP, and it was glorious.