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Of course immediately following my Mac Poo-Pooing post I decide I want to switch back to Windows Vista. I figure now that SP1 is out that the kinks may be ironed into relative oblivion, or at least the ones that niggled me when I first ran it. Full disclosure, I’m going to format and do a clean install of XP when I get home today.

First thing I noticed that was positively nifty upon vista’s first-boot, and well worth noting if you want to give Vista a try, is that it saved all of my oldXP-installed software in a folder called Windows.old. All the installed software worked without any reinstallation necessary. That was really nice as I didn’t look forward to downloading hours upon hours worth of World of Warcraft patches. Very slick, and should definitely be mentioned to the user on Vista’s first boot, though it isn’t.

The niceties wore off quickly, though, as my hard drive wouldn’t stop reading and writing. I’m talking 30 minutes straight of “rrrzp click click rrrrzp rrrrzp”. It drove me nanners. I disabled system restore, set a hard virtual memory allocation (never let the computer determine the size. Give a hard min and max that are the same amount), disabled what I read to be problem services and still had no luck. The worst part of it all, though, was an an otherwise-awesome feature in vista that lets you see exactly what the computer is reading and writing at any given time. I could tell exactly what file was causing all the commotion, but I could not tell it to damn well stop. Why is this a bad thing? Because HD thrashing can cause considerable wear in a short period of time on the hard drive, rendering it inoperable much earlier than it would otherwise be expected.

Plus it’s loud and annoying.

Tonight, lady and gentleman, I backup a few more things to an external drive, perhaps the WoW folders themselves, and format my C drive. I will then reinstall Windows XP Home with slipstreamed SATA hard disk drivers, and go through the process of getting all my updates in a row and my ducks downloaded. The best part? I can’t really surf the net or do jack all on my laptop while I’m resetting my desktop, because I discovered yesterday that my laptop is totally dead. No power from the AC or battery is getting through, and it didn’t die while in use. Good times indeed.

The above was recently posted on Dear Toronto, this morning in fact. It’s just some footage of some Kids on TV having fun with some Men. good times at Pride Toronto, and more videos showing the fun over the next week.

On another note I’ve witnessed a large number of my relatively small twitter friends publicly decrying their Apple hardware recently. A large number of Macbook Pro systems, in particular, seem to be EPIC FAILING on them. These people chose to go with Macs not only because they look pretty, but because of their reported reliability. These people are power users, not your grandmother.

I haven’t been a regular Mac user since OSX first came out, a period that many would call the Mac’s rebirth. I’ve been a steadfast PC user largely because I like being in control. Not being a Mac power-user I can only go on what I’ve read and heard others say about the platform, but I’ve never been a fan of anything that just works and doesn’t need your input on how it works.

I need to know how something works because when it breaks, I like to tinker around to try and fix it. I like to customize registry settings. I like to use a non-glossy interface that lets me do my work (and surprisingly enough, the operating system itself isn’t what I use to produce, it’s what merely enables the production software to be used).

I hope my friends get speedy fixes for the Mac gear, whether it be non-recoverable hard drives that won’t spin, iPods that won’t sync, or blue tooth devices that won’t latch. In the meantime, if going the PC route I heartily recommend Gateway, specifically for their customer support. Over the phone they allowed me to open up the computer, flip jumper switchess and do hard resets to the computer’s bios by removing the motherboard battery without voiding any warranties. The computer ended up being a lemon, and they exchanged it for a new one within two weeks, but still, it was the first time a level-1 tech didn’t tell me to turn the computer off and back on just in case.

So I just started reading Gibson’s latest book, Spook Country, and while it took a couple of chapters for me to get into it (right around when Blue Ant was mentioned. Oops, was that a spoiler? Suckah!), it’s starting to get interesting. There’s talk of virtual reality never having left, instead it’s evolved into what you’re viewing right now.  And then there’s the talk about “the grid”, and how the net has always been more than just what’s on screen, but where you’re sitting right now.

It’s fascinating stuff. I thought Gibson had lost it for the first few chapters. He’s been quick to prove me wrong. More on this when I’m done.

Since attending Podcamp Toronto I’ve had a t witter account. I’ve amassed over 110+ followers but I’m only following about 60 back. Most of my followers aren’t spam bots, so why don’t I reciprocate?

Because we’re likely using Twitter for very different reasons. I see twitter as a way of casually mentioning what’s going on every now and then, and occasionally partaking in very brief conversation that usually doesn’t extend more than two tweets. Anything more and I either blog about it, or email/contact the person directly.

There are two issue with Twitter.

First, Twitter users on the whole will often use it as a god damn instant messenger. There’s nothing I hate more than seeing my tweet wall filled with 20 tweets from the same person within the last 15 minutes. You do NOT need to reply to every single one of your followers with a “Ya @person, that’s nifty!” followed by a “I agree @otherperson!” Once, sure, twice, fine, 15 times? Buy a phone and spend a minute with them.

Second, Twitter’s much lauded awesomeness in terms of its ability to connect the people is fraudulent from what I’ve seen. The average facebook/myspace user does not use twitter. It doesn’t have the functionality they’ve come to expect from their social networking experience. Want to share photos? You can post a link to a flickr/facebook set, sure, but that requires something other than twitter, and that something is more often than not perfectly capable of allowing their users to carry on conversations in groups or one on one. Also, and this is a biggie, Twitter is seen by PR folk as the second coming Christ, and for good reason: it’s mostly PR people who use the damn thing! More than half (I’d wager 3/4) of all the non-spam bot people who’ve followed me on twitter are all PR PR PR. This mostly makes twitter not a social-networking site, but a business/PR-networking site. You do not reach the average person and you don’t reach the tastemakers either if the only people you reach are other people like you (ie. PR PR PR).

As a result the only PR people that I follow back happen to be people I know in some way shape or form, or because they tweet interesting shit.

I’ll throw one last nugget out there: Twitter is the new Digg, in that the only thing people on Twitter talk about is mother fucking TWITTER. It’s down again? BOO HOO! Can’t think of anything tweetable? Don’t tweet “I can’t think of anything tweetable”!!! The video below comes to mind.

There’s been much ballyhoo about proposed copyright amendments details in bill C-61. I won’t go into much detail about, well, the details, as it’s all covered in great, err, DETAIL on many a site, including the ever awesome Michael Geist goes into deep detail about why it’s so insane.

Many creators don’t have much issue with their works being used by educational institutions, for research purposes, or even sharing amongst friends or non-friends (ie torrented files). so long as they see some sort of compensation (also known as a reason to keep creating), it tends to work out. If it didn’t all those local bands playing local gigs selling their discs and other merch locally wouldn’t exist. somehow, it still works.

Read more

I got a notice that my subscription to Wired was done and tat it was time for me to consider renewing it. It didn’t take long for me to decide not to, though, it’s definitely not because of the content; Wired is easily one of the most interesting magazines on the market. Its central theme is generally “Cool schtuff from everywhere,” and each page rarely fails to impress.

But why stop then? Read more

I, like most every other PS3 owner, desperately want Metal Solid 4 to come out yesterday. My issue though, and I’m sure I’m not alone, is that I’d never actually played a Metal Gear Solid game before. Having read some reviews and previews it’s evident that while familiarity with the series isn’t required, it’s extremely satisfying as every single loose end (and from what I hear there were many) gets tied up in a sparkly bow by the end of the 4th game.

With this knowledge I decided to start at the beginning of the series by playing the remake/port for the gamecube, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Read more

Yesterday saw the launch of a new online “interactive video magazine” for PS3 owners called Qore. It’s been met with polarizing yays and nays on the web, and most people are citing the same reasons for their stance on either side. At the heart of the controversy is the pricing scheme: $2.99 per episode and $24.99 for an annual subscription (13 episodes).

But is there really any reason to complain at all considering what the service both is and isn’t? Read more

The TTC has decided to open up its redesigned site as a public beta test of sorts. It’s a definite visual improvement, but what about what’s under the hood?

first things first, it’s already lying to us. Read more

A Toronto electro-dance-punk-shock-awesome duo that sounds like Fischerspooner if Fischerspooner wrote consistently good music and had mowhawks.

CLICK THIS TO HEAR LOTS OF THEIR STUFF ON CBC

Note: Woodhands do not have mowhawks. They should, though.

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