Vista grief, life update

 I'm a little too tired to post anything of substance today... Actually you can say that the trend had been continuing for quite a while now. It's been a long time since I actually had to stop and think before writing a blog post, though my posts on livejournal had always been a sort of scratch pad for freewriting, something to get my juice flowing after especially dull and dreary day... This is a worrying trend, though in my defense it's not entirely due to laziness on my part. Most of my insignificant musings these days had been in form of formulae and mathematical structures, and I don't really know how to translate LaTeX based mathematical musings into some format that works for livejournal... Jpegs I guess? Mathematical wanderings are actually quite good for decorating my idea notebook. It's beginning to look like some mad alchemist's text with essays on arts and philosophies, with very awesome diagrams I made while working on toy graph theory problems, the kind that organizes the premises into pentagram patterns and such. Who know, maybe I'll decorate it at some point and sell it as an art piece like some people do.... I don't have any links at the moment but I remember someone working on some really cool stuff that's supposed to be part of a general exposition on some fantasy world view of his... 

Oh yes. I've got to talk about the vista grief. It's part of the title of the post, so I've entered into a sort of sacred contract with the reader of this post that forces me to talk about that topic at some length. As some of you might know, I'm very sensitive when it comes to chossing operating systems and computers. It's not that I'm trying to define myself through disposable gadgets or anything (though the same probably can't be said of many people out there. They hold onto their choice of gadgets and platforms like a tribal shaman would his mystical fetishes). The reason is quite simply due to the fact that I really need to use these things at work and I need full performance out of these things while I'm at work. If for some reason I'm at work and I need to sit on my hands for an hour simply because my OS of choice decided to have a little freak out on me I'm royally screwed, the delay can set me back for days on my lab schedule and I already need to time my bathroom breaks and skip meals, so I can't have that.  
Well, my new laptop, the Thinkpad T400, is a marvelous piece of work in terms of mechanical design. I can practically replace any part at will using a screwdriver, and all parts are available for sale at the manufacturer's website, so no googling needed there. I once spilled grape juice on my keyboard. I simply turned off my computer, took off the keyboard, rinsed it in water and put it back after it dried. Voila, it works like a brand new machine (well, it IS a brand new machine). No replacement parts, no hassle with the customer service departments. The design is... 'Reliable,' something that can't be said for most other laptop manufacturers out there... If I spilled grape juice on a macbook keyboard I'm not sure I've gotten the same kind of experience. Those 'unibody' designs seem like a pain to take apart and fix on my own.  
The problem with my machine, is the operating system. Sure, the machine itself is a godsend. It's light, hardy, and does what i expect it to. The operating system, windows vista, however, is simply one big piece of trainwreck.  It takes around three minutes to let it restart, and on battery it runs so much process at once that the restarting process shaves off whopping ten percent off the machine's total battery life, ridiculous amount considering that this laptop lasts a little over six hours on full charge and wifi browsing (it basically works out in such a way that windows vista sucks through an hour worth of battery life during three minutes or so of startup period). Ballmer can say whatever he likes on the 'success' of vista. The truth is they really dropped the ball on vista, and whatever the defense M$ comes up with make them sound like used car salesmen spinning stories to sell a really crappy product. Except of course, these used car salesmen earn millions of dollar per year and run a global conglomerate. I just hope they worked harder for the upcoming windows seven. Seven's getting rather positive reviews from the press on their beta releases so far, so I'm guessing whatever they come up with won't be worse than vista....

Ok, that's it for the obligatory vista bashing. I'm getting a little sick of those posts myself. Hopefully I won't have to put up any more of such rant in the foreseeable future (did I just hear a collective sigh of relief around the internet?).

I was supposed to open the new year with the blog posting on the concept and practice of minimalism in variety of genre, but the post isn't working as well as I hoped it would. It's almost finished but it seem to lack some coherent 'zing' that I try to have in my writeups, so I'm keeping it on my computer before I decide I can't do anything else to it. I always found it interesting that most minimalists (barring industrial designers) seem to have some of the most complex goals in mind when designing their medium, whether it be visual art or music.

My processing language study is coming along nicely. I'm working on something that utilizes gene sequence input to generate graphics and sound. I still need to work out a bunch of kinks but I might put up the finished product on vimeo someday. It's shaping up rather nicely I think. The processing language itself is very friendly to people new to programming. I'd suggest it as a good candidate for the first programming language for any student to learn to use.


I've been really into reading Neil Gaiman lately. He's released his Coraline on to the web as part of the promotional campaign for a new movie based on his book (Coraline), and it's quite a good read. It's basically what the author says what it is. A fairytale for adult. If you're looking for a grand secret of life and the universe you won't like it all that much, but then would people looking for secret of everything in fairytales actually like anything? I'm also in middle of reading through Neverwhere, and so far the experience had been wonderful. He's not the first one to write fairytales for adults, but he's the first one that made me realize that I actually enjoy that stuff. There's something wonderful about being able to write a story that's capable of maintaining it's own sort of coherent world view without resorting to cliched antics of fantasy. The same goes for the experience I had with the Invention of Hugo Cabret, a book so charming that I'm still having trouble simply reading through, instead taking time to savor each and every moment of the experience.