Monthly Archives: November 2008

Been busy lately, I reformatted my laptop and installed XP on it. It feels a lot less sluggish now! It’s hard to understand why Vista lags so incredibly much doing even simple tasks like opening “My Computer” or using Launchy, which is supposed to be a superfast program launcher. (It is superfast now that I have XP instead of Vista.) But now I have to reinstall and configure all my programs, which is quite a bit of work. I thought I had copied all my program settings, but apparently some of them were lost…

At least it gave me a chance to clean up some stuff, like my address book. Luckily I had a backup of my Thunderbird address book, so I merged it with the contacts that I had already imported into GMail, had to clean out duplicates and make sure the addresses and phone numbers were put in the right fields.

Here’s a screenshot of my current desktop:

I actually installed a Vista theme on it, which is why the taskbar looks like Vista. The wallpaper is supposed to change daily, but the scheduled tasks in XP is actually not as good as in Vista, because it won’t run tasks that were missed because my computer was off. (Note that the only reason I dislike Vista is because it’s slow. I actually kind of liked the functionality and even the graphical changes in Vista…) Also I usually don’t use desktop icons (since I use Launchy anyway), but I kept a few icons to test BumpTop.

BumpTop is kind of interesting, but entirely useless, at least to me. It might be somewhat useful for people who has tons of documents and actual use visual cues to recognize them, but I actually don’t have that many documents, and I usually prefer looking them up using their file names. Keyboard navigation is better for your hands too, I’m pretty sure using the keyboard more is part of the reason I don’t get as much trouble with my arm as other computer users do.

I guess I’ll get back to the computer configuration. I think I’ve installed most of the things I use every day by now at least.

I’m now 26! The age just keep ticking up. I’m not sure if I like that. I still haven’t finished BioShock that I bought last Christmas, and it’s almost Christmas again now… where has all my gaming time gone! Well I’ve played a lot on my Nintendo DS, so it’s not as if I haven’t played anything I guess. I did finish Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxy (that I also bought last Christmas), so it’s not too bad I guess.

By the way, there’s a new DS now, the DSi, with slightly larger screens, camera, SD card support, and support for downloadable content. It got rid of the GBA slot though. It’ll still support DS games, but there will also be DSi-only games later.

It’s out in Japan now, but won’t be in Europe before next year. Since I’m going to Hong Kong, I guess I could get one. But I actually already bought and installed a new touchscreen for my old DS fat! (The old one was scratched up and awfully inaccurate.) The new one is working quite well, and it’s a joy to be able to look at the screen without having to try and look past all the scratches! So I still don’t really need a new DS. (I also skipped buying the DS Lite.)

I had a few friends over for my birthday, it was kind of nice. We ate dinner, talked a bit and played some games: “Ta 6″/”6 Nimmt” and Cash’n Guns. “Ta 6″/”6 Nimmt” is called Category 5 in USA I think, which is why it looks different on the webpage that I linked to.

My friends were kind of skeptical to the games in the beginning, but I think they enjoyed it after we started playing! Both are kind of simple games without too many rules and strategy requirements, so it wasn’t too hard to learn.

Still haven’t quite been able to get into a routine of working out… I need to make it a routine somehow in order to keep doing it. Right now I’m only doing it when I “have time” and “feel like it”, which is to say once a week plus/minus. I’m considering trying to get myself up earlier in the morning to do exercise. But seeing how I can’t even get myself up for eating breakfast, I’m not sure how feasible that is… I want to go to bed earlier too, but I’ve always got too much things to do! Not that having things to do is necessarily a bad thing, although I still wish I had less things to do. Then I might’ve been able to finish BioShock, for one thing. Ah well…

I guess I’ll try going to bed now. Or soon. Writing on my blog hardly counts as essential I guess.

My old website died, and I haven’t even had time to resurrect it. Since they added banners on that site, maybe it’s just as well to leave it dead… And because some of the contents has been mirrored here, I might as well continue using this site! I turned on commenting on this site too. (I had previously disabled commenting here because I wanted people to comment on my other site instead. So much for that.)

I recently installed the Windows Live Messenger 9 beta, and though I didn’t really use it much, it came with Windows Live Writer, which I actually really liked! It’s basically a blog editor which lets you post blog posts in a word processor-like editor. I’m even writing this post using this program right now:

The best thing with this program is that you can just paste photos and images into it (like when using Microsoft Word), and it’ll take care of uploading the photo and making thumbnails for them. And you only need the YouTube URL to embed a YouTube video clip into the blog post! So it’s really nice free program from Microsoft, which makes it a lot easier to write blog posts quickly. Maybe I’ll post more stuff on my blog now. Which nobody reads anyway. Well, I guess I’ll be using this as kind of a diary, so that in the future I can look back and see what kind of silly things I was thinking back in the good old days when we were still using 2D monitors for computing and we had to write using our hands.

Chrono Trigger was released for the DS. Just listening to the opening music is so nostalgic… It’s the first RPG I played, I think. Below is the PSX (and DS) version of the opening movie. (SNES version of the opening for those who wants the 16-bit goodness instead.)

I tried out Ubuntu Ultimate Gamers Edition 2.0 on my laptop. It had lots of free 3D FPS games, I didn’t realize there were that many for Linux, and they actually look quite good! And the desktop GUI came with Compiz, which is basically a large set of (mostly useless) fancy effects, like shaking your windows around and having fire/water/glittering effects when you do various things like minimizing your windows and opening programs. Here’s a random video I found of this OS:

The worst part of it all is that even with all these effects, and running it from a DVD (it wasn’t installed on my PC), it still felt rather a lot more responsive than Windows Vista.

I really need to get rid of Vista and install XP instead.

By the way, if you see any typos, it’s because my wireless keyboard is running out of battery and letters seem to not always show up when I press them.