Okay, I made two list of things which filled my world with joy, now I'll list the things which shit me to tears!


* Modern Warfare 2- The follow up to one of the best games ever made... unfortunately the writers of the original game's plot have bee replaced by lobotomised baboons. Russian invades the USA... riiiiiiiiight. I guess Infinity Ward and Activision miss 1950's American cold war paranoia.

* Internet Filtering- So the Australian government decided to go ahead with the mandatory ISP level internet filter despite massive opposition, admitting it is easy to circumvent and that it will spread well beyond just blocking illegal child porn sites... and they won't even tell you what they are actually blocking! I would like to take this opportunity to declare my intentions to move to the South Pole, as it is the last democratic, free place left in the world.

* Plans to privatise BBC Worldwide- The last bastion of intelligent TV left in the English speaking world to be whored to multinationals or whoever has enough cash... cock.

* Commercial Network News- I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT TIGER WOODS!!! JUST GIVE ME SOME FUCKING REAL NEWS ALREADY!!!

* Ubuntu 9.10- A great ad for Microsoft... because if this is as friendly and useful as Linux gets then my Windows 7 install is not going anywhere. (waiting for 10.04)

Okay I need help deciding which one is better for Giselle page 62.

Version 1:



Version 2:

Okay my Second list of things which make my life bearable.

*Les Chevaliers Du Ciel- French movie with Mirage 2000s and dog fights aplenty! Breathtaking aerial shots and action makes up for a somewhat weak plot... but geez, it's so much fun!
Short TV trailer: [link]

*Top Gear (UK)- British TV show about cars. I don't care much about cars but this show, it's so freaking funny! The Hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are without peer. Many attempts have been made to create localised versions of this show in the USA, Russia, Australia, etc, etc and they have all failed miserably because the original is simply untouchable.
Preview: [link]

*BBC Horizon- Documentaries which are not only accurate but also highly entertaining without dumbing it down or compromising quality.
Excerpt from "What Time Is It?": [link]

*Monty Python- "We are the knights who say ni!"
Classic sketch: [link]

*Mythbuster- Shit blows up every week! Always finding ways to blow up shit! Love it!

Okay, I think it's time that I publicly give love to all those things which are giving me so much joy at the moment!

*WINDOWS 7 x64- Stable, fast and a joy to use. From gaming to making comics, an excellent platform. XP mode is just lovely!

*VIETNAMESE FOOD- Food of the gods! Fresh, tasty and spicy. Complex tastes best served in a cheap restaurant with plastic chairs and facial tissue instead of napkins. Nirvana at the tip of your chopsticks.

*BLACK ADDER- Classic BBC comedy from the late 80's. Intelligent and hilarious beyond description. Close to the best thing I've ever seen on TV.

*THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION- Here's a movie that gets shown every year and I've never been able to catch the beginning so I didn't bother watching the rest. Well, this year I did catch the beginning. Easily one of my favourite movies of all times!

*BONZAI PROGRESSIVE TRANCE COLLECTION- Old skool trance from time when people used to go to parties to dance, not to be seen. Aural decadence at it's best.

*BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM- The dark knight kicks everybody's ass! Could well become game of the year (if COD Modern Warfare 2 stuffs up).

*FATHER TED- Pure Irish comedy genius. Only three seasons were made due to Dermot Morgan's untimely death in 1998. He left behind a masterpiece of TV comedy with insane yet lovable characters.

*ANTHONY BOURDAIN- The man knows how to eat! Here's a man who knows that the best food is never found in fancy restaurants!

*HARUHI SUZUMIYA SEASON 2- Despite the much hated "Endless Eight" debacle, Haruhi still managed to put a smile in my face with her crazy antics and total disregard for everyone else.

*TOKYO SKA PARADISE ORCHESTRA- It's ska and it's Japanese. You can't get more awesome than that!

Vista has had a very hard life. From the moment it stepped out into the world it has been the target of taunts and ridicule. It was like Billy, that kid you knew from school. Fat, slow, untalented and not very good looking at all. Poor billy.. I mean Vista. To make things worse, his older brother XP was a good, dependable bloke who gets things done quickly.
Vista even failed to do everything that XP did!

A few people went to Linux, a few more got Macs and a shitload stayed with XP. Sure, a couple of service packs later and Vista is a much more appealing option and the initial issues are gone but the damage has already been done.
So Microsoft is now doing what any parent would do with it's problem child. Forget about him, make a new one and hope for the best.

Enter Windows 7.

Apple was quick to jump the gun and scream very publicly "It's just a service pack for Vista!". Brave words from a company that has been passing off service packs as new operating systems for nearly a decade. As it is the case when people speak too quickly, they ended up looking quite silly. Windows 7 was far more than just what Vista should have been.

Installation is a lot like Vista except that the number of reboots have been reduced. This took me about 20 minutes or so.
Drivers are the same as Vista so there really shouldn't be a lot that doesn't work (unless you got hardware from 1995).
The interface has been radically changed. The taskbar which has remained virtually unchanged since Windows 95 has finally been upgraded. I guess it could be compared to to the OSX dock in the way that it shows you an icon to represent an open applications. It's kinda like an extended quick launch bar with more options. Works surprisingly well.

Aero peek, a feature introduced in Vista, has had a revamped too. Multiple open windows are kept under one icon and then a preview shown when you hover your mouse over it. leave the mouse cursor over the preview and the other windows will become transparent leaving only the window that you're previewing. Click on it and it activates the window to the front. Amazingly, it is very intuitive and a vast improvement over the current method.

Another nice feature is the way that windows dock and undock when you move them about the screen. hover a resized window near the top of the screen and it will maximise to fill the screen, then you can grab the top again, undock it and the widow will resize again to it's previous size and if your screen is too cluttered with other windows, you can just grub a window, shake it and the other windows will minimise down to the task bar. Do this again and the windows will regain their size again.

Libraries are a new concept introduced for windows where you can tell a folder to display the items of multiple folders so that way you can have a video, music, docs library (you can make your own libraries). this is great if you got files all over you hard drive that you want to access in the one place.
File browsing also had an overhaul with new preview panes and much better placing of context menus which don't suffer the menu-behind-a-menu that Vista had.

The desktop search function of Vista was executed in a horrible, painful way and it has been replaced by on that actually works. Indexing now is a feature, not an annoyance.
They might sound like fluff but I really missed these features when I used Vista again. They really do make for a faster and more enjoyable experience.

Performance, that's something that Vista was sorely lacking. Win 7 feels like someone has put NO2 booster in it. It's so much faster! Memory management has been vastly improved, the virtual memory file, which gets thrashed in Vista, barely gets any action in Win 7. I tried decompressing a 4 gig file in Vista and too nearly 15 minutes. Win 7 only took 4 minute. Programs boot up faster and the interface is a lot snappier.

UAC, the thing that made vista not just a bad OS but also stupidly annoying, has been reworked and now you can set levels depending on how often you want to be notified. Good shit.

Boot up is way faster loading my start up programs so much quicker than XP or Vista and writing/writing files are a heck of a lot quicker than Vista... but then again, you couldn't get any slower.

A few noteworthy enhancements are the inclusion to natively burn .ISO files. Just double click on the ISO and windows will prompt you to burn. Windows Media Player actually doesn't suck massive balls this time around. It's fast and friendly to use. Still, it fails to display subtitles with .MKV files (even with the correct codecs installed) so it still a no go for anime viewers. Luckily, Media Player classic, VLC and other media players have no issues at all with the .MKV files.

A couple of things that did not work were my WG311v3 wireless card, Netgear has not seen it fit to release drivers for it yet (fair enough I guess. It’s not a released OS yet), and CCCP codecs on media player classic does not filter the image by default giving you a pixelated image. You need to manually tell it to filter the image under the options menu. Apart from these, I saw no other issues.

Microsoft fired pretty much everyone who was involved with Vista and I can see why. This is an OS that should have been release 3 years ago but I’m glad it has finally seen the light. Let’s hope that Windows Eight doesn’t suck again.

Now waiting for Linux fanboys to ask me how much I’m being paid by Microsoft and tell me that I’m spreading FUD... and that Gimp rules... and for an Apple fanboy to tell me that Apple rules and that he wants to have Steve Jobs baby... and a MS fanboy to tell me that Vista ruled.... *sigh*