Vista: A clear view?

So ... are you sick of the 24-hour a day Vista hype yet? I caught ol' Billy G. on the Daily Show the other day priming the pump:



I almost couldn't believe that it really has been 5 years since the last major Windows release.

(and does anyone remember the "Friends" cast hyping Windows 95):



But anyway, I've had some time to play around with the new Vista release, and on the surface, it looks pretty good. The repeated User Account Control (UAC) requests to enable functionality each time I do something new is a pain in the neck, especially as this comes up dozens and dozens of times during the early phases (since you are enabling lots of new stuff at the start). I know you can turn this off, but that rather defeats the purpose, in my mind. As time goes on, I'll see this warning less and less, so I'm not too worried about it.

I was planning on a major home system upgrade in the next year or so (I have a 64-bit AMD CPU sitting around begging me to put together a new system), so I'm not overly concerned about missing out on the Aero Glass UI functionality. But, if I put that new system together and then it still doesn't work, we'll see how pleased I am.

At IBM, we have the latest release of DB2 Express-C running on Vista, which is encouraging. I'm always leery of existing applications running on new operating systems, but the coders have done a good job and it runs pretty smoothly. Be sure to download DB2 Express-C and test it out on your copy of Vista. [Hey, I've got to pay the bills somehow.]

Next step is to somehow get Vista running on my T60 Thinkpad. More on that as events unfold.

Cable this

Best place for AV/Computer cables: monoprice.com. Even to Canada. And they didn't pay me to say that.

My dream

I have a dream system in my head and it starts off with one of these.

That's right -- a 30" monitor. So if you're enjoying this blog, and you have spare cash, feel free to ship one of these my way.

[My wife's response to my wish to sit two feet away from 30" inches of technological glory? "You wouldn't sit that close to our TV, and that's just about the same size!" Ah, the unwashed masses. So innocent.]

Ahem hem hem

Ola!

Welcome to the 3 O'clock blog, where I'll be talking tech. Whatever comes my way, whatever cool stuff I see or sites I come across. It'll be much more tech oriented than the blog on my homepage (Shameless plug), so hopefully you'll give more of a damn than about my favourite movies and how my son is sleeping.

So that's background. Post #1 to follow in about 10 mins.