Matt’s News / Blog

This past Wednesday, my sister Amanda turned 21.  My mom throw a birthday party for her yesterday.  Alisse and I were drove up on Friday for the party.  I got back from Michigan a couple hours ago.  The party was fun.  Many of my relatives in the area came by.  Here are some highlights:

• Eating Dairy Queen Ice Cream cake
• Killing about 100 flies
• Holding 4 1/2 month old cousin (1st cousin once removed?) Daniel
• Spending time with family

Later after the family left Darrel came over.  It was good catching up with him.  Hopefully he can come down to Indiana and visit sometime.

Saturday morning, Alisse and I ventured over to the farm.  She had to take photos for her digital photography class and the farm provides lots of great photo opts.  Eventually, I should post some photos.  Maybe when my photo site (no flash photography) is up and running.
We had a little bit of excitement while getting ready to leave.  My rear passenger tie was very low again.  It seem to have a slow leak.  I guess that’s another trip to Cooper Tire for me…

Yesterday, I stumbled across a like to download page for Windows Vista RC1 on Microsoft’s site.  I downloaded the massive 2+GB install file and burned it to DVD.  I didn’t need a product key to install it either.  The bad thing is the installation will expire in 14 days.  Oh well, it’s just for testing.

My first impression was: Wow, I already have this stuff on my APPLE laptop!  Many things are a big improvement over XP. Such as the default theme.  The Vista, non-classic (think blue and grey), is actually pretty nice.  I can’t stand the default XP theme. 

The gadgets look nice, very similar to widgets on Mac OS X and the widgets you can already get with google desktop. 

At this point, it will be hard to comment on speed and stablity because I won’t be doing any serious computing on Vista.  With that being said, I don’t think I’ll be compelled to spend much money on getting Vista.  Yes, the user interface is nicer, but the bottom line is: XP does everything I need it too.  And I already have a ’slick’ operating system on my laptop (OS X Tiger).

Oh yeah, Solitare has recieved it’s biggest update since Windows 95.  It follows the theme of ‘Looks nicer, but not really any new added features’