Published 3 years, 1 month ago
in Life.
“At least it’s a dry heat.” That’s what most say (who don’t live here) about Arizona. Well, the fact of the matter is…it’s scorching. That’s like saying that sitting on the face of the sun is nice, because it’s not humid. Or, it’s like saying, “Hey burn me with that iron, I kinda like it.” I’m sorry, but it’s not natural for a place to stay over 100 degrees fahrenheit for 39+ consecutive days:
Tucson cooled to 98 degrees on Monday, ending the city’s record 39-day string of temperatures reaching 100 degrees or higher. Denver, which reached a record-breaking 105 degrees on July 20, was down to 65 degrees yesterday. Las Vegas, which tied its 117-degree record temperature on July 19, was back to its normal mid-summer range of 100-to-105-degree highs. And 90-degree temperatures in Kansas gave way to the high sixties and low seventies.
- Washington Post - Reprieve From Heat Marches Eastward
See, I’ve lived in Texas, and I’ve lived in Oklahoma. At least it cools down there at night time. At least the wind blows cool air. At least the cement there doesn’t seem noticeably hot from the face level. Maybe I’m not making a whole lot of sense to anyone who hasn’t spent an entire summer in Southern Arizona. But, here…it can be two o’clock AM in the summer, and still be in the low-90’s. Maybe there isn’t humidity all the time, but we do get humid during our monsoons, and we pretty much just get HEAT.
The next version of the popular Microsoft operating system has just reached the Beta 1 milestone. For those of you who don’t know, this new OS recently lost it’s codename (”Longhorn”) and got the name of Windows Vista. I am pretty excited about this new operating system, there are a number of great new features coming out, and I’m anxious to see what they’ve included. Through IBM, I have an MSDN subscription, so I’m in the process of downloading this massive 2.5GB download.
Paul Thurrott, a Microsoft MVP has a site dedicated to Windows Vista. It’s called the Windows Vista Activity Center.
Beta 2 is not anticipated until November-March 2006.
Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1 Announcement
Published 3 years, 1 month ago
in Blog.
I’m not sure if anyone noticed, because not many people read this blog, but I recently moved servers. You should notice a great speed increase, and there may be a few problems since I’m transferring everything manually. One thing I’ve noticed is when I reimported everything from the MySQL backup, quotations are imported as weird characters. I may or may not fix this problem. Be sure to let me know if you see any problems.
Published 3 years, 1 month ago
in Xbox.
Last Monday, Bungie released 5 new multiplayer maps for Halo 2. The newly named maps are Gemini, Relic, Elongation, Terminal, and Backwash. They are all incredible and are well worth the $11.99 to download them online. More information is available here.
Yesterday, Bungie updated their multiplayer playlists to include the previous 4 maps (Warlock, Containment, Sanctuary, and Turf) in their core playlists. The reason for this delay was that they were just made available to everyone for free recently. They also fixed a few other minor things, such as having a Banshee on Ascension Rifles.
All in all, a very important and very great release by Bungie!
For all of you Mac users out there, Apple just released their 10.4.2 update to Tiger. Its key features are:
- file sharing using AFP and SMB/CIFS network file services
- single sign-on authentication and reliable access to Active Directory servers
- autologin for managed user accounts
- AirPort and wireless access
- Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, including updatedATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
- Finder updates including finding on Kind and using Slideshow
- synchronizing your iDisk with .Mac
- installation reliability
- managing Dashboard widgets
- Address Book, Automator, iCal, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Stickies applications
- compatibility with third party applications and devices
The update weighs in at about 44MB. You can get more information Here.
As I tend to do on most days, I was browsing through the various news and blog sites and came across Steve Ballmer’s recent Channel 9 interview. I think he’s a great CEO; he has a lot of energy and is very passionate about his job and Microsoft in general. One thing really bothered me about this interview though. Here is one of his quotes from the interview:
“But, I look out at the world and I say ‘who is doing the innovative stuff over the last few years?’ Did IBM out innovate us? I don’t think so. I don’t think they’ve done much interesting at all.”
How could Steve say such a thing? Don’t think we’ve done much interesting at all? That’s a harsh thing to say for the #1 patent producer. I see a lot of innovation every day at IBM, but it’s not home entertainment or home productivity. We are a business-oriented company, focusing on what seems to me like B2B type stuff, instead of B2C like Microsoft. What do you think?
