short takes

[cellio]

On Christmas, it is customary for Jews to go out for Chinese food and a movie. I'll have you know that Dani and I are not so stereotypical: this year we are going out for Japanese food and a movie. So there. :-) (Tomorrow should be a glorious day for getting work done. There were only about six people in the office today.)

This discussion of teaching INTJs resonates in many ways. Speaking of siderea, check out her surrealistic junk mail. (I have had similar "WTF?" reactions to some of the junk mail I get, but she articulates it better.)

With spammers lately trying the "random sequence of 4-8 letters in the subject line" gambit, it was only a matter of time before a Viagra ad was cloakced in coherence. The one that got me had a subject line of "junit" and was sent to my work address.

This eBay auction (link from _subdivisions_) takes an old prank to a new level:

I will be spending the Christmas holiday in Poland in a tiny village that has one church with no bell because angry Germans stole it. Aside from vodka, there is not a lot for me to do. During the course of my holiday I will send three postcards to one person of your choosing. These postcards will be rant-ravingly insane, yet they will be peppered with unmistakable personal details about the addressee. Details you will provide me.

I am not especially surprised that he was able to find a market for this. I am surprised by the winning bid!

A coworker passed along this XP review. Fun stuff:

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop. [...] All I can say is "wow!" You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

It's snarky and over the top, but I got some giggles from it. (I have never used Vista.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

*grin* I stumbled across that XP review a few days ago, and it is indeed fun. I only used Vista briefly, but completely agree: it seems to be a hog. Then again, every Windows OS does until SP2 comes out. I paid extra for XP Pro over Vista, upgraded the UI from XP-like to 2000-like, and further upgraded it to look as close to 95 as possible. But that's just me.

The idea of going out for Japanese on Christmas is a good one. All my local Chinese places (the ones serving edible food) are owned by Christian Chinese, so are closed.

And thanks for the INTJ pointer. I never joined that group, but siderea's description sounds quite familiar to me (but phrased better).

[cellio]

I also have my XP machine set up with the Win2k look and feel. The XP theme is kind of cutesy and garish.

(I'd say the odds are currently better than 50-50 that my next machine will be a Mac. It's not so much that I love Macs (they're decent-enough machines), but that I'm getting awfully sick of the annoyances of owning a Windoes machine. If it's going to become impossible for me to keep XP, which is at least tolerable, then I'm going to have to do some real thinking about why I'm sticking with Windows at all. Parallels makes the previously-impossible possible, from what I can tell.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I'm with you, both on XP looking garish and on moving onto Macs. Most of the reason I got an XP laptop was the threat that Microsoft would stop letting people sell it at the end of this year. I'm sitll getting used to the Mac, but can say that it is nice not to worry about antivirus software or ActiveX or constant security updates.

[cellio]

What got me to move to XP -- though buying a machine with Win2k was getting close to impossible anyway -- was Microsoft deciding they weren't going to support it any more with security updates. The security updates are a PITA, but having a machine on the network that's not getting them seems even worse. So when I bought my current machine, um, two years ago I think, it came with XP.

I don't know when they're going to kill XP to force people to Vista, but I imagine it'll be in the next year or so.

Not worrying about viruses is temporary, I suspect -- when there are enough Mac users for it to be profitable, people will start writing viruses to target Macs.

I have a Mac laptop (iBook), and while I haven't spent huge amounts of time plumbing its depths, I'm comfortable on it. The things that get in my way are more about its laptop-ness than its Mac-ness, and my next "main" machine will be a desktop and thus won't have those issues. As another commenter said, there's a nice familiar Unix under there, so it can't be all bad. :-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

The security updates may be less of an issue once Microsoft "forces" people off of old OSes. My Win95 box is impervious to just about everything, because (like Macs) the target is so small that it is not worth the effort.

There is a nice familiar *nix under it, but the GUI doesn't always match what is under the hood. Things might be visible/alterable from the prompt but not from the GUI. Which is perfectly okay, just disconcerting for an experienced newbie.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

My immediate reaction to the default XP UI theme was that it would be great for elementary school kids.

I am not an Apple evangelist per se but I have to say I've been quite pleased with my Macbook Pro. If you don't like the UI there's always the Unix guts, all my favorite open-source apps work okay, and the screen is really nice.

[cellio]

Not an evangelist (nor an expert user) here either, but it seems fine for most things and that Unix shell makes up for a world of unfamiliarity. If I can't figure out how to do something in the GUI, odds are good I can do it the old-fashioned way. :-)

I don't need another laptop, so when the time comes to buy I'll be looking for a desktop machine, which probably means the Mac Mini if I go the Mac route. (There aren't a lot of desktop options; that one seems like the right fit.) It's rather pricier than the corresponding PC, especially once I add in Parallels (essential), so this isn't certain, but I'm really getting sick of the Windows environment.