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Showing posts from December 16, 2007

End of year anthem.

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By a happy coincidence, I stumbled across the track which is going to round out the year for me in 2007. It was in A State Of Trance episode 328. It's a Daniel Kandi remix of Out There by Dave Masters & Robert Nickson feat. Justine Suissa. The original track came out in 2003. This is a massively updated version and is exactly the sort of upbeat, sunny-sounding end-of-year anthem that will close out the year in Trance Music nicely. Here's a low-res sampling from ASOT. To get a feel for it, skip to 3 mins 30 seconds.

Bloody windows !!!

AAaaaaargh! So I go to use Adobe PDFMaker this morning - an application that has been available on the toolbar in Word ever since I installed Adobe, and it's gone. View->Toolbars doesn't even show it as an option any more. So off I go, googling to find out what's happened. Turns out the update that I bitched about in my blog on monday arbitrarily decided I didn't need PDFMaker any more, and disabled it. I had to rummage around in the Word help->about menu and found something called 'disabled items'. Sure enough, there it was, disabled. I re-enabled it, and of course, it wouldn't work without closing Word and re-opening it - just like everything Microsoft does which is totally incapable of making a change in a running application. Why? Why do this to users? What possible benefit could there be to disabling toolbars in applications without telling the user how, why, or where to re-enable it?

I can't believe I'm going to say this.

Hold on to your hats: I agree with something Bush is doing. He's going to sign part of the energy bill that outlaws incandescent light bulbs. Sadly, it's a phased approach which won't really start to hit until 2012 by which time some other busybody could overturn it. But - it's the closest Bush has come to demonstrating any understanding of an energy policy. I'm stunned. Outlawing incandescent bulbs.

The biggest improvement they could make in Windows.

Apart from removing all the bloat and taking out all the unnecessary "improvements", the biggest thing that could be done to Windows is to give it X-like window focus. ie. to stop other processes from stealing the focus away from the window you're working in. Our corporate overlords demanded a bunch of patches be installed this morning, so I set them going and got the message that I could carry on using the PC because all this guff would be installed in the background. Except that stupid install windows kept popping up dialogue and notification windows, stealing the focus. At one point, apparently mid-typing, one of them not only popped up, but utilised the space bar as the 'cancel' function. So mid-sentence, as I was typing, I hit the space bar as this installer window came up and cancelled whatever it was doing. A minute later, the same thing happened but this time the thing stole focus, intercepted my keystrokes and arbitrarily rebooted my PC, deleting everyth

10,135 vertical feet

Yay! First day's skiing of the season. I did 10,135 vertical feet at Solitude today. The weather was great, the snow was great, and there were no crowds. Sweet.