So tonight I took the plunge and installed Vista. Initial thoughts:

• UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate)
• Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, but step down in reliability. Maybe fixed if I get a new (non-MS) driver.
• Why do I need to do a full Windows Update to get a (very common) Sound Blaster Audigy driver? You think it’d work out of the box…
• Why can’t I turn off hiding hidden files and keep my desktop clean from desktop.ini files at the same time? XP did this…
• More reboots to get things set up than you can shake a stick at — but this is a failing of Windows in general
• So far, no incompatibility. So far.
• C:\Users! It’s like /home, but not! This is an improvement over C:\Documents and Settings.
• Whatever happened to the Run.. command?

Ubuntu worked out of the box with all this. It got my nVidia driver right. It got the network right. It got sound right. And it comes with a shitload of software. I’m not saying that’s perfect either — it doesn’t like my huge display until i edit xorg.conf, for example. And 36 updates is a light update cycle (in beta, at least) And individual apps break sometimes. But by and large, the fastest OS to install to get to baseline functionality these days is Linux, and that’s not at all the way it used to be.

Microsoft did whiff at Vista. Perhaps not as badly as they could have, but it’s nowhere near what a 6 year dev cycle should produce. Vista would have been about right if it was released with a little less graphical glitz but a similar feature set in 2003/2004.

By the by, I’m not saying Apple is a big winner either. Leopard comes out this month, so we’ll see what happens — but there they go for vertical integration.

More as I figure it out.

Earlier tonight, at Mari and Evelyn’s housewarming party…

This toast is a little nerdy, so you’ll have to excuse me.

Groans and laughs of expectation

There’s an old saying that goes “May your house always be too small to hold all your friends.”

Aww.

Now as we know from thermodynamics:

Laughter

Given a constant volume…

I gesture to the living room…

and a growing number of friends…

…which is absolutely filled with people.

The only way to keep the pressure down is to keep the temperature down.

So I say:

“May your house never explode by knowing only cool people”

The half of the room that gets it immediately laughs. The other half soon follows.

To Mari and Evelyn!

Cheers.

( The best response, moments later, came from Patrick:

Barak, that was absolute zero.

Laughs and groans )

…same as the old boss.

So I break months of silence with a post. So many interesting things happening! So many interesting people! And what did I pop up to post?

That, with my spiffy new headphones, I finally heard the method to the madness of Keith Moon.

And I’m more excited than I should be that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is in Rock Band.

…when I hear that old song they used to play

So life’s been sufficiently crazy. And by crazy, I mean in every possible which-way. And I haven’t been writing like I should. And all sorts of things; it’s just been absolutely insane.

With a little downtime I’ve picked up Frets on Fire and have gotten pretty good at it — it’s open-source Guitar Hero with a keyboard. So I’ve been playing using my white Apple keyboard, which is nice because the F-keys are all together. This is the result:

Today I scored at #11 on the world high score list for “More than a Feeling” — on Medium, which is exactly the same as GH on Hard.

Meanwhile, my E190 paper is done (for now) and there’s much swing dancing to be done. Live band tonight, 920 tomorrow.

I now have a tumblr over at http://tumblr.photonzero.com for quick one-off posts; mostly odd quotes and links. Should have a sidebar link up in short order

…Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Saw the incoming freshman from GV to Cal this weekend. That made me feel old; along with all the festivities surrounding graduation. Next year I graduate. This scares me.

The past week has been a mixed bag with regard to dancing. Last Thursday was awesome. This Thursday was a totally off night for me. Saturday wasn’t bad at all. Sunday (in Sac) was kinda off again. Le sigh. I start running LoS on Saturday for the summer. And then I move. All while looking for a job.

It should all work out okay. I’d feel better if I were on a more even-keel with dancing, and less worrisome in general. Staying at home actually doesn’t help that much, because I feel kinda powerless. My life is a screen session, and I’m currently detached. I’d be happier (and more stressed) if I were back in the driver’s seat.

One of my side projects is bringing back to Berkeley all of my old highschool photography, so as to scan it up in Soda. Hell, I haven’t shot film SINCE, almost.

We’ll see how it all goes. I’m going home to Berkeley in less than 24, so I’ll be back soon enough.

* 10,758,381 seconds
* 179,306 minutes
* 2988 hours
* 17 weeks

How do you measure, measure a year? (so far)

My camera ticked over to 1K today at LoS.

Coming soon to a photostream near you.

Wow. That works too well.

In my news cycle this week was this article on Improving your photography through classical art. I took the time to try it out today (and by “time”, I mean “five minutes”) and applied the first colorful art piece I could think of offhand, Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to an appropriate swing photo with similar colors. I find the theme of the pieces similar.

This is the result, “A Saturday Afternoon Dancing on the Plaza of Sproul”:

Pretty cool, huh?

Class is cancelled for tomorrow, so I can sleep in, which means I can blog before bed.

SwingCal finale tonight. Small event, but three separate follows (with large amounts of dance-cred) complimented me on my leading, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I’ve only been serious about dancing since January, but it’s amazing what I’ve accomplished in the intervening time. A major part of that can be attributed to the last two months or so in particular, social dancing in more general, public environments, clubs and whatnot, in Seattle and here in the Bay. Practice. Adaptation. Refining. Learning. Saturday morning, after Lindy at Night, I went to LoS for a few minutes pre-laundry and danced a few. It was then that I first noticed that with well-practiced follows (Movement is what struck me at the time, but it applies more generally) my swing-outs had become actually fluid. It felt better. It felt right. And what’s more is that I wasn’t getting dizzy; usually I do after more than a couple, but when it works, I could just about go the whole song and not mind. My first swing-outs were choppy — as James made an analogy, a slowly-sampled version of what should be a continuous sine wave (signals nerds will understand this comment). I’d also get dizzy after two or three. What’s more, I was merely going through the motions. Now I actually take the lead. This from a few months work.

Classes are wrapping up. Signals courses are going into special topics — namely, the same special topic (wavelets and image compression) which I have of late become a localized expert in, for an undergrad anyway, thanks to my project. Which I also spent some time this week fully understanding; a few days ago it was “oh, this is how I think it works” and now it’s “oh, this is how the code should be written” — which is considerably better.

yawn

Sleep. Sleep is good.

…gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues

So much I could write about. I could expound on any of the following topics:

• Kurobox rebuild
• HDHomeRun
• vimperator
• Lindy at Night/Big Swing
• Pictures
• Summer plans!
• SPIHT project
• Seattle post-mortem

But the only reason I’m posting right now?

Lotsa new pictures are up on Flickr!

And I’m listening to copious amounts of The Rolling Stones. For some reason they capture my mood of late.

Just me playing with panoramic mode. More from Seattle if I can.