A good day for chagrin
July 26, 2007
To my deep and almost overwhelming embarrassment I am currently installing Windows Vista.I know, I know. It’s probably not the smartest thing I could do. And of course I’ve posted some pretty damning stuff about Vista. I still think it’s a bloated and oppressive operating system. But the fact is the operating system that I’m running, Windows XP Professional X64, never really caught on. Software companies didn’t like supporting it either. Sometimes I would download a program, and when I would try to install it, It would claim I wasn’t even running Windows. That gets old real fast.
With the release of Windows Vista, I really can’t expect support for my current operating system to improve. So it’s either upgrade or downgrade, and while a case can be made that Vista itself is a downgrade at least it’s a living product and will let me continue to use most of the hardware and software that I own. As long as it runs Photoshop and World of Warcraft I’ll be happy. Well, maybe I’ll still want to be able to take screenshots from my DVDs.
Anyway, deciding to install Windows Vista is not the only surprising thing that I have done today. Listening to the Rachel Maddow Show today, I realize that I’m becoming more sympathetic to Hillary Clinton. In fact, I might even vote for her in the Democratic primary. In the drafts of this weblog is a post I was working on about why Hillary Clinton is not a particularly good choice for Democratic candidate. I never finished it because I found myself disagreeing with myself before I was two thirds done. And the clips I’ve heard from the YouTube debates sounded pretty impressive. I like John Edwards’s politics, and I like Obama’s style, but neither of them seem particularly capable. Hillary Clinton does seem capable, and she seems to be getting the message that the country’s mood is more progressive than it had been previously.
Just like I don’t expect my operating systems to do much more than let me run my software, I don’t expect my representatives to believe what I believe. I just want them to do what I want them to do. If Hillary Clinton can do that, and she is a reasonable candidate after all.
Posted in Politics
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July 27th, 2007 at 9:04 am
My new university offers $10 OEM copies of Vista to faculty members. I’m still afraid to install it, but I think I’ll pick up a few copies on the assumption that a service pack must be on the way soon…
July 27th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Looks like it’s time to move to Mac!
July 27th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I’d love to, Jeremy — my work computer is a Mac — but I don’t have the extra three grand I’d need to replace my software laying around. Sure I could run parallels, but there’s little point in buying a Mac if I’m going to spend all my time in Windoze anyway.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
I am curious as to how your transition goes. My home computer is a Mac but at work we use Windows XP… I don’t think much of it. I quite liked the Windows 2000 Pro we had before so the move to XP seemed like a downgrade (at least to me as an enduser).
But since the company as a whole is working on moving all of the servers from Unix to Windows, I feel that a move to some form of Vista may be in the future couple of years and I’ve heard very mixed things about it, though that seems to happen with every operating system.
Good luck on the transition!
In terms of other transitions, I agree that Hilary is easily the most skilled and capable candidate the the Demo’s currently have, I just hope that enough people can get over any subconscious issues that they may have with her being a woman, because I think that is more prevalent than people might want to admit to.