Chicagoland got hit by severe weather on Tuesday evening with winds up to 90mph and threats of tornados developing. Luckily there were no tornados but the weather did a fair deal of damage such as taking down trees and pushing jumbo jets around. My area got hit the hardest and hundreds of thousands of people were stranded without electricity. Not me, though.
It seems like everyone was living in the dark but me. For some reason my power was still on and life was good. With ComEd bringing in electrical crews from other states ans pulling 16 hour shifts to repair all of the damage, people still didn’t have power 24 hours later. On Wednesday word got out that I had power so my neighbors came over asking me to store perishables in my freezer and pull extension cords to their homes. Of course, I had no problem with any of this.
On Thursday people still didn’t have power. I was working and doing my thing when suddenly I heard a crash and an electrical explosion outside. I looked outside and saw two electrical poles pulled almost to the ground and a garbage truck in between with electrical cables on it. It turns out some idiot hit one of the poles with their car just as the garbage truck was passing under wires. The wires got snagged by the truck and the speed pulled down both of the poles.
Yup, you guessed it, no more power for me. Fate has a fucked up sense of humor. If that wasn’t ironic enough, today the people who didn’t have electricity now have electricity, and I’m still in the dark. Delightful.
Master Chief from Halo makes a cameo appearance in Duke Nukem Forever. Well, his armor does. A Earth Defense Force soldier offers it to Duke Nukem and Duke has something to say about it. Check the video for the clip.
So when it first became an issue, Anthony Weiner’s weiner was a big deal. The media had a field day with it and eventually uncovered that Weiner had questionable online contact with six different women while his wife was expecting their first child. Now the latest batch of headlines are “Anthony Weiner admits he sent messages to teenage girl but denies wrongdoing.” When I first saw that headline I immediately thought “here comes Chris Hansen” but I couldn’t be further from the truth. It turns out that this isn’t the case at all. Both Weiner, the teenager, and the teen’s parents have denied that anything bad happened in those Twitter messages and there was no scandal or anything rising out of it. So why the fuck did this become news? What’s next, “Anthony Weiner hugs his niece, wrongdoing denied”? Since when the hell did showing the world your crotch and possibly being unfaithful to your wife make you such an evil person? How come Ron Jeremy isn’t being scrutinized every time he is around a teenage girl? Is it because Jeremy isn’t an elected official? Since when did elected officials become gods amongst men that we have to hold them to different standards than everyone else? Yes they were elected by the people to represent the people’s interests. Crotch shots and sexy Twitter messages may not be the people’s interests, but before he was elected he was just another civilian. Civilians get away with sexting, watching porn, using Ashley Madison, or putting up their profiles on Adult Friend Finder. I don’t see why elected officials need to be held to a different standard than any other human being. And I don’t see why the media must make a story out of a non-story just to continue the pressure on Weiner to resign.
After almost 3 and a half years, I finally finished what I inadvertently began so long ago. I never intended on watching every single episode of every single Star Trek series, let alone in semi-reverse chronological order. It all started with my curiosity for Star Trek: Enterprise, a show I had only watched a couple episodes of but never got into it. I figured that I would give it another chance. Upon completing the entire series I thought to myself, well, why not watch Star Trek: Voyager, as I had missed a fair amount of episodes in that series. And after completing that, I thought the same for Deep Space 9. By then watching The Next Generation was inevitable. Here I am now having just completed Star Trek: The Original Series with no more Star Trek episodes left unseen. I’m not counting The Animated Series for the same reason I don’t count The Clone Wars as part of Star Wars. Continue reading →
I was extremely disappointed today when I saw the first peek Microsoft gave the world at Windows 8. Now let me say off the bat that I find nothing wrong with Windows Phone 7′s tile-based UI. I think it is a wonderful evolution to the smartphone/tablet UI and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple or Google borrow such elements for their future versions of iOS or Android. In fact, for mobile devices the tile-based UI is a perfect fit. However, from what I saw in the video above, I am not entirely convinced that Microsoft is properly implementing it into Windows 8. When I first started watching the video I was under the impression that the tile-based UI was the UI of Windows 8. The problems began to pop up in my mind almost immediately. What does this mean for people who run multiple programs at once? Doesn’t this UI make the experience slower when it comes to power-users? I am used to saving files temporarily to my desktop for easy access, so what now?
It turns out Microsoft addresses those questions by showing you how you can multi-task using your finger to stretch the width of a running program app (yes, everything was called an app, not a program) and easily go switch to other apps in the sidebar. This includes actual apps as well as actual programs, like Microsoft Word. What Microsoft purposely doesn’t mention in their showcase is that underneath that lovely UI is a full running version of Windows 7 that can be accessed for apps that aren’t native to the UI. You can clearly see this in the video but Microsoft doesn’t really elaborate on it so the magic of the presentation isn’t tainted. So a tile-based UI running over a regular version of Windows? This is nothing new.
In fact, if you have Windows 7 or Vista (maybe XP, not sure) you can use Omnimo, a Rainmeter-powered skin that will do exactly what Windows 8 has showcased. It seems like Microsoft is pretty much doing what Omnimo does, except developing it in-house so it integrates seamlessly into Windows. Of course, what we have seen of Windows 8 is not going to the the final product. We won’t know for sure if Windows 8 is really just Windows 7 with a skin on top until the final release. Based on what we’ve seen though, this is exactly what it looks like, and unfortunately it isn’t the right path for Team Microsoft in the OS wars. At their simplest level, Windows, Apple’s OS X, and even Ubuntu are just GUIs for a text-based kernel. Microsoft is just adding a GUI to the GUI of Windows, not revamping their operating system as they claim. Is the tile-based UI of Windows 8 a significant change in the evolution of Windows? Sure it is, but it is nothing more than a sidehack that tries to streamline the Windows experience on all Microsoft powered devices.
For many people the new UI will be a cool new toy to play with. It will make things convenient and simple to use. However, the fairy tale will only last for so long. People will be dishing out $99 for essentially a skin for their already existing operating system. Sure, the full version of Windows running underneath Windows 8 will offer improvements upon Windows 7, but it won’t be long until the tile UI will become an annoyance for many. There’s a fundamental difference between a desktop operating system and a mobile operating system. We go back to our desktops or laptops because our mobile devices are lacking in many aspects, not only in functionality and power, but in the user experience. For now I will remain highly skeptical of Windows 8. I can only hope that as time progresses we will see future versions of Windows 8 be something more than just a skin with Windows 7 underneath.
