Windows 8

So I tried Windows 8 today at work. The operating system is pretty zippy even though I'm running it on a virtual machine on Oracle's Virtual Box. That is about the extent of the nice aspects of Windows 8 for me. Once I got to the DESKTOP (This is a DESKTOP OS right?) it all went down hill from there.

The DESKTOP starts out as a bunch of tiles on a single colored background. The tiles are bright and cheery and there are no menus to use such as the old faithful Start menu. Installing applications just adds a new tile to the pile of tiles on your desktop and you have to page through things when there are more tiles then the screen can hold. (Swipe if you were on a tablet or phone.)

Using non-Metro applications causes Windows 8 to go in to a stripped down Windows 7 desktop interface. This interface has no Start menu and is just a very basic version of the Windows 7 desktop. This whole experience reminded me of OS/2 and how fun that was going between OS/2 applications and Windows 3 applications. Talk about RETRO for a modern operating system.

Finding standard Windows things took a bit with me. I shudder to think how my own mother would handle Windows 8 on her DESKTOP computer. She has a hard enough time finding things in Windows 7 and when she switched to that from Windows XP and the changes there confused her for months.

I hope Microsoft stops dorking around and actually puts out a useable DESKTOP operating system and not some stupid phone or tablet interface bastard child. Right now I consider Microsoft in the same light as Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 when it comes to DESKTOP interfaces to avoid. The only thing that makes Microsoft's offering worse then Ubuntu's or Gnome's is they want you to actually pay for the rotten thing.

When fan made is really damn good.

For being fan made this video is really damn good.

I downloaded the whole video from the site they said it was at and it's 2 gigs of awesomeness.

In other news I'm digging back in to my Java programming roots from college as well as my first job. I'm diving in to Liferay portlet technology for projects. Once I got over the initial brain fart hurdles it's actually quite nice working with Eclipse and Git. Mixing that with some PL/SQL programming is turning out to be even more fun.

As for pointless fun, I built a castle in Minecraft. Even has a working iron gate.

I like keeping the inside of my castle walls practical yet somewhat decorative.

Full blown village, garden, smithy, apartments, animal pens, and I even made a central market area with nice colorful stands. The melon patch where the melons and pumpkins grow is hooked up to a piston system that knocks them all off the vines at the flick of a switch making for easy harvests.

Voting and Voter ID States

So yeah there's this lovely little Voter ID stuff going around for a voter fraud problem that really isn't that big of a problem. The University I work at had to deal with this issue and it's not a fun topic. Check out the video...

PS. This new interface for doing up blog posts is kinda annoying. Oh well.

P.P.S. Oh yeah.. wake the F up.

Fancy Blog Title *Bling bling*

FANCY BLOG POST!

I haven't posted in a while, life has been going well I suppose. I"m taking care of my mother and feel like I'm kinda bleh.

Anyhow I've been working on beefing up my Java skills as well as getting in to Portlet development for new stuff coming in at work. Part of me likes PL/SQL work better because I don't have to deal with JAR FILE HELL! *Scary Music*

You see, when you do Java development you can sometimes use extra libraries to create your programs. These libraries are stored in files called JAR files. Now a project called Maven has made this less of an issue but it is still an issue over all. Anyhow much love to the Eclipse development platform, it's really great for doing this stuff.

PS. I liked the old blogger UI better for editing posts and managing the blog. I knew where everything was.

It's all fun and games....

Till one of the logs you are tossing in to the back of the pickup truck bounces and hits the rear window. Then it's *CRACK!* and you see the beauty that is a spiderweb start to go all over the back window. Oh well truck gets fixed tomorrow and nobody got hurt.

In other news I'm bouncing between games right now. I've been enjoying the customizations available in Champions Online but also found Star Trek Online to be appealing. It's seriously awesome to fly around the galaxy in my own ship like that and it's not as complicated or demanding as I heard other games like Eve Online are.

I can live with this. CO has some decent RP in it, I need to find some in STOL. I've been keeping an eye out at Deep Space 9 but so far Quarks has been rather empty. I found out one thing though, when you do make contacts and get in to social groups you can not only meet in public places but also your own ship as well.

I've been exploring my own ship a bit. It's not as vast as a full starship might be but there's a bridge, engineering deck, and a crew deck you can invite people to and hang out at. My ready room is a bit lavish but nice.

I've played some of the PvE dungeon queues. So far things aren't bad, I like the fleet engagements where you rescue star bases. The only down side is when everyone goes their own way all over the place and people get caught in the initial second wave of assault ships that come in on their own.

Nothing like having around eight torpedoes and several disruptor blast take your back shield from 100% to 0% and cut half your hull away in about a second. :) That was a fun first time when that happened, I now stick more to packs of ships when playing those instances.

My tactical captain is fun but my Vulcan science captain will be interesting to play as well. I'll have him in ships named after famous Astrophysics people.

One final thing for the gamer types. From sitting around and listening to chats it sounds like there's more of an end game progression in STOL then there is in CO. I'm still leveling my characters but I'm anxious to go on these Borg Queen encounters. :P

Life slowly goes on...

Life feels like it's slowly going on. It's weird in a way since it was feeling like it was whisking on by. Then after all the crap that happened last year now it's slow. Mixed blessing I guess.

On another note I'm having fun preparing a media center type setup. I've bought several movies and TV shows on DVD for this and plan on getting a nice big screen TV for the rec room in my house. I'm pretty sure my selections wouldn't be that appealing to women unless they're in to old comedies like The Munsters, Gilligans Island, as well as really old sci-fi movies that are mostly before the 1960's.

Does it show that I'm really sick of what is on TV these days? :)

Education In Iraq

Here's an interesting little article on what happened to the Universities in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation. Have a look see.

On a personal note I'm still alive, well, and working. It's like I'm in some sort of bleh zone but not bad just bleh. Anyhow, have a good day everyone.

Edit: I just took a peek at the analytics of this blog. While it's nothing at all to write home about I noticed there are people from way more places in the world then I initially thought would be looking at this thing at least once. Anyway my gift to you in good will is a hello world program in two languages. :)

// Java
public class HelloWorld {

public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello world!");
}
}

--
-- PL/SQL
--
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON;

DECLARE

BEGIN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Hello world!');
END;
/

Huh.. my day feels a little better. Thanks!