Right after Halloween I began to notice something strange that occurred this year. Hints of the holiday season began to pop up ever so vaguely. By last week, it was blatantly obvious. Last Wednesday I woke up at 7am like I usually do. As I drove to the train station, I noticed some scattered homes with Christmas decorations already up. I figured that those homeowners had taken advantage of the unusually nice weather we were experiencing. I took the train to the Loop and went into Dunkin’ Donuts as usual to get my coffee. I was only half awake, but my senses immediately picked up the Christmas carols playing on the radio. Annoyed, I proceeded to campus and walked into DePaul Center. As I made my way through the Barnes & Noble to get to the elevators, I noticed that a section had been set up dedicated to children’s Christmas books. Trying to ignore this Christmas Early Warning System that society was implementing, I made my way to my Marketing class. I sat in my usual spot and lo and behold, the girl who sits next to me was drinking Starbuck’s. This wasn’t unusual, but her cup was. Her Starbuck’s cup was now red with white snowflakes printed around it. I could no longer hold it in.

“What the hell is that?” I asked as I pointed to her disposable cup of coffee.

“It’s a double soy latte…” she began.

“No, the cup. Is that Starbuck’s?” I interrupted.

“Yeah, I guess they’re using their Christmas cups now that the season is here,” she replied.

Excuse me, but I still haven’t finished all of the Halloween candy I robbed from the trick or treaters who came to my house. Hell, Thanksgiving isn’t even here yet, but all this holiday season bullshit is popping up everywhere? Maybe I just wasn’t as receptive to my surroundings in previous years, but this year this Christmas crap seems to be coming at us full force a bit too early. I did a bit of research and it turns out I’m still perfectly sane. Reports of an “early jump” to the holiday season this year were already popping up even before last week. There was an article in the Chicago Sun-Times about WLIT (93.9) switching from adult contemporary to Christmas carols the first week of November, the earliest it’s done so ever.

I’m not against Christmas or the holiday cheer. In fact, one of my most favorite moments is when I am on the Magnificent Mile in the evening, it is dark out, and it is snowing light and puffy flurries. Cheerful faces are everywhere, there are Santa’s here and there, Christmas decorations, the Big Tree, carolers, and horse-and-carriages all enjoying the holiday season. However, this is supposed to happen during the holiday season, not now. There should be a law stating that the holiday season doesn’t start until the day after Thanksgiving. Anyone who puts up Christmas decorations, promotes holiday merchandise, plays or sings Christmas carols, or asks me for Christmas donations should be fined and imprisoned.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re still in the “Tis the Season To Be An Asshole” period. We just celebrated a holiday where we dress up our children as characters of death or evil, exploit candy from our neighbors, and try to invoke fright upon others (whether it be with haunted houses or teenage mischief). Halloween is one of the biggest burglary nights of the year. There’s nothing to be happy about during this time. We’re still recovering from it. This is the final stretch before the holiday season. It’s crunch time for everyone. Work is busy as hell, school is more of a pain in the ass than it will ever be during the rest of the year, and everyone is running on overdrive. We just got out of an election where the main goal of it was to prove your opponent was a bigger dick than you and to make the public hate their candidates and each other even more.

Thanksgiving is the official start of the holiday season. This is when we put those feelings of hate, mischief, stress, and malice away and embrace a more cheerful, thankful, and loving mood. Yes, we unfortunately become hippies. But that’s how it goes, and that’s how it should be. That is when Christmas carols should be played on the radio. That is when Christmas decorations should be put on houses. That is when Christmas books should be put on display in bookstores. We shouldn’t have to see anything holiday related before Thanksgiving, just cause some asshole businessperson thinks he or she can boost company profits by promoting the holiday season earlier, or feeding the public some “Christmas in July” bullshit. Nobody buys into this shit cause everyone is still too pissed off at each other. And that’s precisely why I’m writing this. Keep the holiday season promotions within the holiday season. Otherwise, fuck off.

If curiosity killed the cat, then Windows Vista killed my computer. It’s really not dead, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting this. Well, here’s the rundown. I saw Microsoft was offering a free download of Windows Vista Beta 2 RC1. I figured…why not, most bugs are probably sorted out at this stage, and I most likely will have a free version of Vista! So I download the compatibility checker and with the exception of my webcam and some software (like McAfee and Nero), my computer was perfectly qualified to run Vista. My comp is fairly old…it will turn four in March. It’s a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz, with 1GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 1700 128MB video card, and a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum sound card. Basically, it still can hold its own pretty well against new software of today.

I had recently wiped my entire hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. The entire installation and update process of XP took about an hour. That includes all drivers, software, etc. From start to finish in an hour. Windows Vista took two hours just to install itself. Two freakin hours! Luckily, I was able to entertain myself with TV. White Girls was on, and then CSI. After installation, I realized that this was Windows Vista Ultimate; this was the fully loaded $300 Vista version. I was overjoyed. The Vista GUI is really cool. This is by far the best GUI improvement Microsoft has done since Windows 98. In general, Vista is very user-friendly…more so than it’s XP predecessor. It is also very secure….but a bit too secure. Any program that isn’t Microsoft certified automatically gets flagged whenever I try to run it. Xfire? I get the annoying “This program is trying to run” popup. Hell, it even did that with Last.fm’s audioscrobbler. It does get annoying very quickly.

In terms of functionality, ease of use, features, and interface, Vista is a winner. Many components are now integrated in Vista that weren’t in XP, such as Microsoft Update. Vista also allows you to tweak your system’s performance by adjusting what features you want to enable or disable. Although Vista is very secure, it also allows for a large degree of customization. You can customize almost every aspect of it’s GUI (what should work, what shouldn’t, how it should look, etc). You can even download third-party gadgets for your sidebar.

Now for the flip side of Vista. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Windows Vista, the resource hungry monster. If you have 1GB of RAM like I do, do not get Ultimate edition. Never have I seen my RAM and CPU usage reach red-line levels…and even max out. With Vista, my RAM usage is at 50% by default. That only leaves me with 512MB to do everything else. Try running Internet Explorer 7. RAM and CPU usage red-line, and it lags ridiculously. That’s just another reason to get Firefox 2.0. It isn’t advisable to run more than 3 programs at once. Vista lags even with one program running. And for us gamers, Microsoft has decided to nerf OpenGL in Vista. So any game that runs on the Quake 3 engine will not run on Vista. Gamers, do not upgrade to Vista. Stick to XP for a year or so, until publishers dish out patches for Vista.

The new burning feature sucks as well. If you want to backup files onto a DVD, Vista has to copy all the files to a temporary folder so you can then burn them. An entire DVD’s worth of files can take over an hour to copy to the folder alone. I never got past 5 minutes before canceling it. Unfortunately, Nero has not released any updates to make it compatible with Vista.

Overall, Vista has a lot of potential, but upgrading is only for those who have a state of the art computer (at least 4GB of RAM and a powerful Dual Core processor). And remember, you cannot downgrade once you’ve installed Vista. Your only option is to completely wipe your hard drive and do a clean install of XP. If you are positive you want Vista, and you have a supercomputer at your disposal, still don’t get it right away. Wait at least two or three months for software companies to release Vista-compatible patches or updated software so it can run smoothly on Vista. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with no anti-virus or burning software…like I am now.

Last night Alex, Pete, and I went to Grammercy down in Lincoln Park where Alex M. was promoting. It was a pretty cool club. It had a European theme to it. The inside was all white, even the couches. The bar was pretty cool too. Aside from being all white, the wall behind it was a single steel panel waterfall. The place runs pretty deep, and in the back is a smaller bar. I thought the place would be much smaller. Anyway, we got a decent sized group going of all genders and races, and we partied until close. It was weird cause I only saw two people that I knew in there….everyone else was a total stranger. Anyway, there’s pictures in the photos section and a video in the videos section from Grammercy.

I’m debating whether I should release it by Christmas or after the New Year. November just began, so we have a good month and a half of new house and club music being released. Some of the songs are becoming outdated as I write this.

And then there’s the whole issue of me not having a CD burner. My DVD burner can read and burn DVDs, but it can’t read or burn CDs. I’ve tried everything to fix it, I’ve pretty much been told “get a new burner.” My old CD burner which I replaced with this now broken DVD burner crapped out on me as well when I was making copies of O Porto 2006 for people. If I go out and buy a new DVD burner, I might as well buy the external hard drive I’ve been needing to store my growing music collection. In other words, $200-$300 will be spent. However, my computer is reaching it’s old-age mark of four years this coming March. So spending that kind of cash to fix it just so it can churn out perhaps another year isn’t worth it. Might as well buy a whole new comp this spring for a couple hundred dollars extra.