Thought those days ended when I stopped working in JustMac, but yet again I find myself in work on a Saturday (to install a shiny new UPS, which involves cutting off power to servers which generally people don’t like happening in the middle of a working day)

Remarkably it takes only 45 mins to get into work from home on a Saturday…. As opposed to my usual 1 hour 15 mins - 1 hour 40 mins ish

Well it would appear that JustMac has closed it’s new store (I never even got to see inside it when it was open :P).

This is going by the big notice that’s gaffa’d to the door… They haven’t updated the website yet though which seems more than a little disorganised but we’ve come to expect that lately.

It may not be the end of JustMac, I’ve heard of other possibilities, but it will change that’s for sure.

Worse still, Mike of JustMac is actually apparantly leaving Glasgow completely. I hope he finds whatever it is he’s looking for, which many of us believed was a little Mac shop on a lane… but maybe not.

No updates in ages, mainly because i’ve been ran off my feet … however thanks to my wondeful (if slightly balding and peretually stressed) dad, the bedroom is now pretty much finished as well… 

Only kitchen and bathroom left now, so it’s coming on quite well… just taking longer than we’d hoped it would :( 

It’s being going on too long now, we’re just wanting to get it finished and move now… still, I know I’ll miss the place.

Warning: this post is waaaay too long (sorry)

Anyone who knows me will know I freely admit to disliking Windows for a great number of reasons… However, I thought I’d give the latest beta (sorry, Release Candidate apparantly) a try and see if Microsoft truly have managed to clamber above the mediocre at best standard that we’ve seen in Windows 95,98,Me and XP.

In a word… erm, no. 

The installation process for Vista was considerably smoother (and simpler) than previous versions of the OS, however it still took around 45 minutes and needed to reboot three times. Despite this it was incapable of detecting my (fairly standard) NVidia graphics adaptor or indeed my (even more standard) sound card, meaning when the install eventually did complete it started up in 640×480, silently… What makes this more confusing is the actual installation process made a far better attempt at graphics.

So, two visits to the Control panel, multiple “Confirm Access” dialogs and a restart later, yes apparantly you still need to restart the entire computer to change certain video settings, I have it running at a proper resolution, and with sound (the start up chime is the same as always sadly!) 

So now that I actually have Windows running, what shall I do? Well there’s a number of applications included in Windows now like iPhoto Windows Photo Gallery and iDVD Windows DVD Maker (to go alongside iMovie Windows Movie Maker)

Well Windows Photo Gallery actually works, and seems like a reasonable piece of sofware, it’s not on par with iPhoto or even Google’s excellent Picasa. But it’s nice to see them trying.

Windows DVD Maker and Windows Movie Maker would not run. My computer apparantly isn’t powerful enough (AMD64 Athlon with 1GB of RAM)… this is worrying considering iMovie and iDVD will run happily on a G3 iBook!!!

Internet Explorer 7 is impressive, well at least the rendering engine in it is … The actual UI of the browser is sooo inconsistent with anything else (they’ve dropped the menu bar for once, or at the very least moved it into a sort of drop down menu of menus) and Microsoft Office 2007 (also now menubar-less and toolbar-less) is even more ‘interesting’

At WWDC 2004 Apple poked fun at Microsoft with banners like “Redmond, Start your Photocopiers” and “Introducing Longhorn… Today” and sadly it seems VERY obvious that the photocopiers were indeed started (but they must be the really slow Canons from the 1980s to take this long!) and some features are just direct copies of Apple’s OS X.

• Windows Search -> Spotlight
• Aero is very “inspired” by Aqua
• Sidebar -> Dashboard (but implemented badly)
• iPhoto / iTunes / iMovie etc… - Win Photo Gallery / Win Media Player / Win Movie Maker etc…

Also if Microsoft’s idea of improved security is to dim the ENTIRE screen and ask me to verify I want to do what I just asked it to do, then they’re really not trying hard enough.

It took me about 20 mins of playing with Vista to get it to crash in one form or another … and Matt managed it (admittedly by being cruel and trying to get it to do more than three things at once, a 300% increase in previous versions of windows however) in about 10 minutes. At least when it crashes it tries to fix itself, and the blue screen of death so far hasn’t reared it’s ugly head.

Oh I started typing this post on the Windows box, but I couldn’t bluetooth the pics of my phone, windows kept throwing silly errors at me… then IE7 crashed twice on the Wordpress admin interface.. so I gave up and went back to my PowerBook.

This is supposedly “Release Candidate” software, meaning Microsoft are actually considering releasing this version… obviously we know they wont and there will be an RC2 and possibly RC3 before it get’s anywhere near the shelves. However Microsoft have announced a release date for Vista of November 2006 (Business Edition) and January 2007 (Consumer Editions) … Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is still considerably further away and from what I’ve heard… a lot more stable even at this early stage, and with some very impressive features.

Also remember Apple are currently keeping a number of these back from the general public eye… i.e. until after Vista ships and it’s too late for Microsoft to copy yet more innovations from the fruit company.

Yet again I am completely bemused by the persistance of Marika Klambatsea (Winner of Worst of the Fringe 2005)’s representatives in commenting on my blog (which after all is just my own opinion and documentation of experiences!) … maybe It’s because I’m second in a Google search for her name ;) 

(I am curious, however, to know how the people at Sweet ECA got on with this “diva” with her show “Snow White and The Seven Scars”)

No sooner had I posted my own rebuttal to their random and irrelevant quotation of one of Aesop’s Fabels (and subsequently closed comments on that article as it was getting out of hand) do I get a comment in both “Edinbrugh Parking” and “JustMac Cards..” which I consider to be nothing less than spam, the first line of which is “You are too young to argue with me, especially in the sound field you say you like” and they honestly expect me to leave that there?… 

Now disregarding the sound field comment, which frankly makes no sense, I dispute that I am too young to argue with anyone, I know 12 year olds that can argue with most people too … it’s not exactly an age-dependant skill is it?! … all they’ve successfully done is shown how backwards some cultures (or at least people) can be when it comes to age discrimination.

My reply was this;

Please do not continue to post comments in unrelated sections of my blog.

I have closed comments to the original post because I do not see any reason to continue this debate.

Your opinion is noted but your arrogance based on age is not something I am willing to tolerate. Furthermore the 5 star review she received this year is from an independent on edfringe.com. None of the respected journalists reviewed the show. I could just as easily post my own one star review on that site without even seeing the show.

Effective immediately you are not authorised to post comments on any site operated by me including but not limited to iRoss.net. 

Always one to have the last word, I recieved this in reply;

serious young man ?
tolerate ?  I’m 53 and Marika is 52. What do you expect then ?
you are speaking over your head or you forgot something about respect, hierarchical aspects, not to speak more.
you are right that this ”comments” must be ended, so a nice movement will be to delete all of them. You cannot understand that the Marika’s art is above your knowledge and generally of British opinions around this kind of art because the very classic is still in power there [ and not only there in order to not let you upset patriotically].
If you are in business, don’t tell me about respected journalist. The artist is the bread for them, thy produce nothing but word, nice or less.
Be wise and let’s finish this here.  

Now where do I start, can anyone decipher this?! “serious young man?  tolerate? I’m 53 and Marika is 52. What do you expect then? ” … how about a sentence for starters? and a few less question marks when the first two groups of words aren’t a question? 

Next up “you are speaking over your head or you forgot something about respect, hierachial aspects, not to speak more”… now I’m not an expert linguist by any means but all I can read from this is that they seem to think that age == respect or something to do with hierarchy… 

Then we get to the attempts at censorship, “so a nice movement will be to delete all of them” (not would, will… that’s arrogant if ever i saw it :P) not to mention a nice movement to me refers to a piece of dance :P 

“You cannot understand that the Marika’s art is above your knowledge” - Nope, I just agree with ThreeWeeks and The Scotsman that it’s not that good and certainly not to my tastes. Irrespective of this the only reason I ever criticised her in the first place is because of her actions towards techs and the public, not her art.

The rest of that paragraph doesn’t make enough sense for me to bother trying to interpret… “If you are in business don’t tell me about respected journalist. The artist is the bread for them, thy produce nothing but word, nice or less” … Now, lets drop the bit about being in business, it’s irrelevant and meaningless. And of course reviewers produce words, there wouldn’t be much point if they produced art would there? people would have to review and interpret the review? how would that work ? ; )

p.s. yes, i’m being sarcastic, but I do hope this marks the end of this pointless chain of events. I agree with the reviewers that don’t like Marika’s work, but that’s irrelevant. It wasn’t her work I was criticising… I just liked the fact that we made The Scotsman :)