4 posts tagged “tech”
I have slept for 2-3 hours per night, each night, all week. Because of some persistent server problems, which I couldn’t be reassured that they would not keep happening as they had for the past few weeks, I moved all of my sites and clients to new servers.
All 34 of them.
All of them this week.
I’m tired, brain-mushy, and not just a little irritated that I couldn’t just leave them where they were. I had been with that hosting company for many years, and all they had to do was reassure me that the problem WAS fixed. But since they couldn’t, now I have to keep my fingers crossed that I made a good choice in the replacement company. Only time will tell that.
But, it is now early Friday afternoon, and the last of the sites is now live on the new server. Email seems to be working, I didn’t screw up any of my databases in the process (that was my biggest worry!), and my phone has not rung since 8 am this morning.
For those of you haven’t read any of my previous posts regarding telephones - I HATE PHONES.
So the silence is such a blessing after this week from hell, that I think I’ll go take a nap, then fire up the bike this evening. The Thumpin’ Puppies are playing the Shining Star Motorcycle Rally, and that’s where I plan to be for most of the night.
Thanks for bearing with me while the site was up-and-down for the past 2 weeks. I hope it’ll be steady here on out….
Over the past 3 weeks, I have bought 3 brand new PCs from Dell. A 17″ laptop for my husband, a 15″ laptop for me, and a Dimension desktop for my mother in law. And Windows Vista came on all 3. I don’t like it, the systems are slower than my other computers, and I really just wanted XP. It did what I needed it to do. I have no interest in flashy pretty interfaces. I just want to get my work done! And now, this….
Friday, April 20, 2007
Dell Reinstates Windows XP As New PC Option
Dell, beaten to a pulp by the stick of public demand, is reinstating Windows XP as an option on new PCs, reversing a January decision to shift entirely to Vista.
You can now grab Home or Professional XP from the bullet points on their configurator, which has for the last three months been a giant ad for their competitors, as far as PC owners unwilling to deal with Vista’s quirks are concerned.
Why would Dell take action that Microsoft would rather it not take? The magic line, “Dell is currently the second-largest PC seller in the world” is why: the top spot was recently nabbed by HP, which, as of today, still foists compulsory Vista on us, at least when buying from their online store.
Remember that Microsoft plans to retire XP in only eight months. The brass balls required to kill off your most popular product to force people to buy its sequel speaks to a breathtaking degree of market control, and that they don’t have any fear whatsoever of OSX or Linux. As a crude but, I hope, effective analogy, could you imagine Sony taking the PS2 off the shelves to “force” people to buy PlayStation3?
The BBC has a great quote in its story, wherein a Gartner analyst wonders why people would prefer XP over Vista. Talk about the ivory tower…
FIGURES.
Over on the westXdesign site, I posted an introduction to the social uses of the internet. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining what this ‘newness’ of community on the web is all about. I forget that very few people started where I did, and all of this is new and novel and amazing to them. Networks of friends, interacting through comments, chat, sharing files, pictures, videos, information. But that’s what the internet has ALWAYS been about. The only difference is the way in which it is happening. Today, it’s easier, and more interconnected. People don’t have to know anything about computers or programming to take part, and that wasn’t the case when I started.
Well, when DID you start, you ask….
without dating myself *too* much…
My first online community was a dial-up bulletin board which I interacted with using an Atari 800 and an 835 modem. That’s right. I wasn’t part of the Commodore crowd. And never joined the Apple bandwagon. It was Atari for me, and continued to be Atari all the way through until I bought my first Windows based PC in 199-something. I don’t want to say what year I got that first PC because I continued using my Atari ST longer than I care to admit. By this time, I was dialing into a local network, and accessing the web using a text-based browser. That’s back when the web was small.
My first experience with true real-time internet-based networking and socialization was the MUD (Multi User Dimension/Domain/Dungeon whatever). Specifically: TCZ (The Chatting Zone). Which still operates today. It’s through TCZ that I got hooked on the social aspects of the internet. I had friends from all over the world there, and no matter what time of day I logged in, there they were. I still have fond memories of many conversations and shenanigans involving Predator. I was Pegasus in case any of you reading care to know….
I built on my BASIC programming skills, and just naturally migrated to CGI and HTML. It was all fun and games, I loved the challenge and the friendships. By 1996, I was fully immersed in the online world, and have grown and changed as much as it has. So the social circles we have today with MySpace, Virb, Jaiku, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds…it’s all natural. This is where we’ve been heading all along. It’s where I’VE been heading all along…
This is a great example of *blend. “Rock the SAT”, a study guide that includes a CD of songs that most teens will enjoy, with the added bonus of improving their vocabulary…hopefully leading to higher scores on the verbal section of the test. When I first heard about it, I thought “My kids won’t listen. They want cool music”. But I was wrong. The songs were catchy, and no more corny than what they listen to every day. I also thought the songs would not be able to actually teach them new words, because teens are notorious for not understanding contextual use of words. But the lyrics go beyond just using the words in context, they actually define them without hitting you upside the head. It was impossible for my girls to listen to the songs and NOT know what the new words meant or how to use them.
You can sample two of the songs at the January 6 Weekend Edition on NPR. Listen to track one at the official web site for the Rock the SAT study guide. Or go ahead and buy it: it’s only $10.17 from Amazon
