Monthly Archives: January 2006

The Penalty of Stability Part 1

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My big birthday/holidays gift for 2005 was a Creative Zen Vision. First, I would just like to say that this thing is one kick ass video player. Now that I have said that, I must now say that I only know this from watching the default videos on the player. Here’s why.

At first I thought I left the software at my parents house where I opened it first. It took me a day to realize I should check the cardboard cushion that the screen was resting on in the box. Sure enough, hiding underneath was the software, drivers, and manuals. First crisis averted.

I just loaded the drivers cd into my computer, eager to get everything up and running so I could watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on this marvelous video player. To my shock and horror, the autorun software popped up saying that my version of Windows is not compatible with the Zen Vision. Feeling my irrational fury building, I checked the box. Sure enough under Minimum System Requirements it says ‘Microsoft Windows XP’. Yep thats right, no other operating system is listed. I am currently running Windows 2000. I’m running Windows 2000 because its stable. I know. You must be saying to yourself, “But Windows XP is stable and better,” and to this I will agree but only the latest version with the latest service pack. I add to that the amount of time I spend online and the all the crap I download. It can sometimes cause some instability in many systems and has on other boxes. Not this one though. This one has remained stable since its last upgrade, ridding itself of the plague called Windows Me (though ironically the only OS that ever ran my multimedia keyboard correctly). As the saying has always gone, if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Well, it ain’t broke, but I got a new toy I can’t play with, so it needs some fixin’.

I am sitting here migrating 80 GB of data from my harddrive to my server in preparation of a system wipe and reinstall to XP. I am less than excited about the thought of having to reinstall all these applications. On a side note, though, it will be nice to finally get remote desktop on here and I think I’m going to skip the Office re-install and instead opt for the OpenOffice.org suite and give it a run. No time like a reload to test new software.

Flash Game of the Week: DHTML Lemmings

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This week’s game brings us a classic title that was once quite popular on some of the older game systems. Its called Lemmings and the idea is to save as many lemmings as possible while sacrificing some to get the rest home. It should be noted as the title suggests, this doesn’t appear to be a flash game, but rather DHTML instead.

I made it through all 10 levels on the fun difficultly with few problems at all, but it should be noted that there may be a scrollbar below the animated box where all the action takes place because the level is wider than the screen. This took me a while to realize and had to play level 6 several times because of it.

The mayhem levels are hard. I’ll leave it at that. Enjoy!

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Link Dump 2006.1.4

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Been a while for one of these.

Here is your link dump for January 4th, 2006.

Michael Jackson vs. the World of Nintendo…and a giant alien Zangief trying to put Earth in a piledriver.
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Nori: The original nasal passage cleaner.
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Get that “film-look” a.k.a How to make my cheap DV cam footage look like 35mm.
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Blogging Software Feature comparison chart
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Moleskine Art
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Experimenting with Thumbdrive RAID.
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Avoiding Time-wasting websites when you need to focus.
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