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

[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.