Hills of Hayward

Your life is not complete until you have witnessed the Stars Wars Stars 2008 Dance Off.

My trusty $600 Sony Vaio NR-110E laptop came with Microsoft Vista pre-installed. If I had a choice then, I would have asked for Windows XP. I have come to believe that the current crop of new Operating Systems does not make me more productive.

At Yahoo, I tried a MacBook Pro. My boss then requisitioned a MacBook for me, and when I found out that changing to a Windows laptop would take them another month of doing god knows what, I decided to give the MacBook’s Mac OS a try. Although the hardware was a notch better than your usual HP or Dell fare, the operating system did not improve the quality of my digital life.

My experience with Linux systems is mostly with running web servers and databases. Outside of those roles, I cannot comprehend living and interacting in the digital world without Microsoft Office, Adobe graphics applications, and the possibility of enjoying the latest games.

This brings us to Windows Vista. Have you ever had the experience when you bought a product whose product packaging was A+, but the actual functionality was a C-? Windows Vista fits the bill. I certainly didn’t expect Vista to make me more productive, but it was surprise to me that Vista would be so poorly designed as to hold me back.

One minor example. Since Windows XP, Microsoft has built-in compressed folder feature to allow you to unzip “.zip” files or zip up any amount of folders and files into “.zip” files. Windows Vista’s performance when unzipping a 250 megabyte file was 3X slower than Windows XP. Copying large directories from one location to another is also painfully slow.

Whatever reason for this slowness, whether it is because of constructive (but hidden) new features or lack of proper design oversight, the degraded performance for every-day tasks in Windows Vista is inexcusable.

After half a year with Windows Vista on my Sony Vaio, I gave up and “upgraded” to Windows XP. The Sony VAIO NR-110E was not originally constructed to be compatible with Windows XP; however, due to overwhelming demand by consumers like me seeking to “upgrade” to Windows XP from Windows Vista, Sony has made drivers compatible with Windows XP available on this laptop. It is nice to see a company that does respond to consumer demand.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will retire Windows XP on June 30, 2008 in two weeks. Retailers of computers and laptops will be slowly be forced to sell Windows Vista exclusively, and people who don’t know better pay more for less performance.

我給寶寶買了幾個手指玩偶想演戲給他看，才洗好呢，他就拿來當糖果，還大演特技呢！

I realized that the loss of our dear Nanny Wang has also affected my day-to-day activities greatly. Taking care of Anders, and the summer seasonality of our business has increased Christine’s workload, and I try to in whichever way to find projects related to the business to take more off of Christine’s plate.

It also feels that my field of vision has narrowed considerably to mostly family and home, and I have less time to day-dream and twiddle around with theoretical business ideas that may not yield fruit. I find myself focusing on small multi-day projects that I feel I can complete with minimal time/ego/resource loss if I fail.

Some of my latest home improvement projects that I was able to complete with body and mind undamaged were:

1. Install four outdoor mission-style lanterns to the gazebo in our backyard. Electrical Wiring for the gazebo had me swinging from post to post like a monkey.
2. Put together a costco 4 chair and gas fireplace set for the gazebo.
3. Ripping out the ugly old hardwood floors in the three bedrooms to fix the squeaking subfloors. Hopefully Anders won’t wake up as we tiptoe out of his room at night after the new carpet is installed.
4. My application for our home business certification as a GREEN business had me replacing our existing 3.5 gallon per flush toilet with a modern 1.6 gallon per flush toilet.
5. Tearing out an old rotting bench that was integrated with our deck, and repairing the resulting holes.
6. Demolition of existing shelving and countertops in our supply room downstairs. Replace with home depot garage shelves to better organize our inventory.

Although my back and legs complain the day after, I am getting exercise again.