Windows Vista

I have upgraded to Windows Vista. The following post is a collection of my thoughts so far:

Pros:

• Fast, easy install. Roughly 15 minutes.
• Nice looking user interface.
• All that other stuff.
• "Details" view in the file browser now has little arrows in each column header to allow more flexible file viewing. Ie: Only show files, or folders, or things in a certain date range, etc.
• Start menu's search box is awesome. Searches apps, folders, documents.
  

Cons: (This is what I really came here to write)

• New start menu is incredibly annoying.
  
• The "pop out" menu style is gone, now replaced by expandable folders, much like the directory tree in the File Explorer. FIX: search box is way better anyway.
  
• Due to permissions/security, it's impossible to organize your start menu to get rid of all the clutter that's there by default. FIX: Right click on start button, choose Explore All Users
• Neither of my soundcards officially work.
• Creative refuses to make a Vista driver for the SB Live!
• My motherboard's onboard sound card has no driver either
• TightVNC doesn't work as a service. This is due to new security features. It runs fine in user-space though.
• (This is the kicker) With Aero enabled, The contents of Firefox "jiggle" constantly. By this I mean, constantly move up and down by about 2-3 pixels. FIX: Different version of nVidia's display driver.
• Beloved tools like TweakUI are gone
• Keyboard & Mouse volume keys don't work by default FIX: Install 3rd party tools
• Wallpaper management is awkward. Use any 3rd party application (Firefox, ACDSee, etc) to set a wallpaper, and the Wallpaper preferences window won't recognize it.
• The Age Old home directory layout has changed.
• c:\Documents and Settings is now c:\Users
• All "My _____" folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc) have the "My" removed
• The paths have gotten insanely long and painful, and confusing.
  
• Old Start Menu:: C:\Documents and Settings\AJ\Start Menu\
• New Start Menu: c:\Users\AJ\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
  
• The new "AppData" has 3 items: Local, LocalLow, Roaming. Wtf are those?
• Explorer windows (the file browser) have no menu bar (File, Edit, VIew, etc) (It can be turned on in the options, but without a menu bar, that's a little hard to find)
• More Start Menu insanity. The "All Users" Start menu contents has a Games folder. But only some of the contents of that folder show up in the "Games" section in the actual start menu.
• Folder vs File sorting in Start Menu. For the first time, ever, folders are listed after files. There is no "Right click-> sort by name" either. There is no drag & drop sorting.
  
• My old USB Bluetooth adapter caused a bluescreen of death. No Wiimote + Vista for me!
  
• I'll post more as I encounter them
  

Amusing conversation

I saw this in the comments to an article on Digg and thought it was pretty darn funny:

Person 1: 1996 called, they want their material back.
Person 2: 2006 called... i think they wanted their "1996 called" joke back.
Person 1: oh ya? well the jerk store called, they're runnin' out of you!
Person 2: What's the difference, you're their biggest seller!
Person 1: oh yeah well i had sex with your wife.

Why the middle east is so messed up

This website (www.mapsofwar.com) animates the known history of a region in a 90 second clip. Here is the last 5,000 years of the middle east:
http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf

Call back from insurance!

I am impressed.

The person doing my medical review called me back this morning around 8:30am. We talked a little about me getting the day off and him having to work, just light chat. I asked him what was needed, and how to get it going since it's taken so long.

He said he needs 5 years of medical history from my current doctor office and my previous one (at CSU). He gave me HIS fax number, so I can avoid the Anthem mail & fax sorting/filing system.

Like I said, I am impressed. Rick was nice and professional. If Anthem is the one holding the process up, it is not his doing.

So, since I have today off, I will be going to my doctors and having them fax stuff over. He may have woken me up early on my day off, but it was so worth it to get this process moving and RESOLVE it.

I can taste the victory

Many months ago, I was informed by my health insurance provider that my claims would not be paid due to my account being under medical review. Luckily they still pay for my insulin, but they are not paying for my diabetes education ($1000 roughly) or my bloodsugar test strips ($150/mo).

My account is still under "medical review". I call weekly to check on the "status" and am always told the same thing:
They are waiting on my medical records from my primary physician.

They claim to have sent the request to my doctor twice, and my doctor's office claims to have never received the request.

So I went to the doctor's office, filled out the forms myself, and had them fax the papers to the appropriate location.

That was 3 weeks ago, and they are still "waiting for medical records" from my doctor. Oh, and they added a second doctor to the list (a doctor I haven't seen in about 5 years, back when I was in college).

Today though, there was progress. By some miracle, a very sweet customer service rep (whom I'm sure will be punished for this) gave me the full name and phone number of the person doing my "review".

My next call will not be a nice one. I will plainly ask what is taking so long, explain the efforts I have taken to accommodate their incompetence, and make it clear that I am ready to take this issue to the Colorado Health Insurance review board if the issue is not PROMPTLY resolved.

There, I had to get that out of my system. A breakthrough like this deserved a rant. It's not often you break through the customer service 1-800-# hell and bureaucracy to actually get a name and phone number of the person responsible.

What "Made in China" really means

It's pretty amazing to see how sunglasses are made in China.

And the snow bragging rights go to...

Well, I am relinquishing my bragging/complaining rights regarding the Colorado blizzard of 2006. We had it bad, but not as bad as some

Go check the link out, the pictures are pretty crazy.

The Most Important Image Ever Taken

Just a few thoughts...

• Don't let the "oddball" clip a few seconds in stop you from watching the rest of the video. I think it's there to demonstrate how blissful and ignorant mankind is.
• They neglected to mention that almost everything in the night sky visible to the naked eye is within the Milky Way. We can't even see most of the galaxies without telescopes.
  
• It should go without saying, but just to make sure this is clear: The Hubble Deep Field was not a specific part in the sky that happened to have so much in it and everything else is empty. The entire sky is just as dense with distant objects.
  

A scripting tip for the nerds

I don't know how many of my nerd friends read tihs, but if you're not one of them you can pretty much just skip this post.

I love writing bash scripts. I run cygwin on windows, so I have the ability there too. One of my common tasks in bash is a task such as "For all the files in this directory that match some pattern, do this to them".

Previously my script would have been in the form:

for x in `find . -name '*pattern*' | sed -e s'/ /@/g'`; do
 realname=`echo $x | sed -e 's/@/ /g'`
 dostuffto $realname
done

Notice how I had to use sed to replace spaces with some character, and then unreplace it? That's cuz "for" uses space delimited input, and if there's a space in a filename it screws up.

Last night I accidentally discovered this. It works better in some cases, not as well in others:

for x in *; do
  dostuff $x
done

As it turns out, file wildcards (*) automatically escape spaces and other weird characters, whereas ls does not. I even tried ls -b (which adds escape characters), to no avail. Of course, '*' isn't as flexible for finding files as 'find' is, but for smaller scale searches this kicks ass.

Update:

I finally figured out how to use the -exec option to find, which also fits into this problem.
Here's how to use find to execute commands on the files:

find . -name 'whatever' -exec ls -l '{}' \;

The file is substituted in for {}, and the '' around that takes care of spaces. the \; at the end marks the end of the command to execute.

Generation gaps and the Internet

I just stumbled across a blog by an elderly man in Nova Scotia. He's 93 and has a blog AND a Wikipedia page.

I'm more amazed by the fact of his net-presence than the actual writing. It's just so shocking I guess that someone that old would know or care about blogs and Wikipedia, and really incredible that he's using these mediums to give himself some virtual immortality, and maybe to bridge a huge generation.

I kind of wish all my elderly relatives would start a blog now. Not necessarily for the typical day to day life stuff, but just to share their thoughts on their lives and the world.