I'm feelin' ick

I haven't been blogging much recently, since I've been feeling ick. My temperature started to bounce today, so I left work early. I suspect I won't be going in tomorrow, either.

I took yesterday off work as a vacation/comp day. I had to install a program at the local food bank. When I first moved down here, before I was gainfully employed, I volunteered to write the food bank's database. That was back in 2003. Late last year they found out the USDA changed their rules and they needed major changes done to the system. I installed that yesterday. I had to do some tweaking while I was there, but the folks there seemed to like the changes I made.

That's taken up a lot of my spare time. Much of the rest of my spare time has been spent reading Wild Talents, a superhero roleplaying game that we're going to start playing this weekend (okay, build characters...).

From a current events standpoint, I'm getting more than a little peeved at all the Windows Vista hype on television masquerading as "news". Okay, so Bill Gates was on The Daily Show. If big movie stars can plug a new movie, Gates can plug Vista (especially since Jon Stewart didn't let him talk much about Vista itself). It's CNN that really bugged me. What Gates did on CNN was nothing short of a product demo. I kept hoping someone would ask Gates to promise it was more secure... or to comment on the Vista exploit that's already out there... or to comment on Greenpeace's criticism of Microsoft for requiring folks to ditch perfectly good computers just to run Vista properly.

Hoping, but not expecting.

The best article I've seen about Bill Gates recently is one in The Scotsman. Instead of giving Bill the love, it lays out the criticism circling around him. It even mentions criticism of his charitable foundation, something you don't see much of, and certainly don't see it during this Vista love in.

The article is here: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=161002007

For the record, one of the reasons we bought a new laptop last year (other than the fact the old one was dying when it overheated) was so I could get it with Windows XP instead of Vista. Besides the fact that the hardware requirements to run a frigging operating system are hideously high (particularly for the Ultimate edition), the rule of thumb is never run something from Microsoft until the third version. This means waiting for Service Pack 1, probably sometime next year.

I got to bitch about something. Woohoo! I feel better already. Until I cough...