Taking the high ground.

I’ve said before that I think Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads don’t sell Macs. If you own a Mac, they make you laugh. If you don’t, they’re still pretty funny. If you own a PC and you’re angered or embarrassed, you weren’t going to switch to Mac anyway, I suppose.

However, I have to say that Apple certainly seems to be leading the discussion. Their competitors can’t come up with anything genuinely funny themselves, so all they do is respond to Mac. Like the laptop shoppers who decided that Macs were too expensive and bought a PC. Like Verizon, whose new catch phrase is, “There’s a map for that.” Which apes Apple’s iPhone commercials.

There’s a lot to be said for having a position in marketing that is so good and well known that all your competitors can come back with is, “Oh yeah?”

I have to say something about Windows 7 here: Those new ads that say the consumers are designing the software? That explains a lot.

Windows 7 is coming in October, right?

My computer was turned off. I turned on my computer and it said “installing updates.” It tried for 90 minutes to do this. Then it said the updates failed.  Restoring the previous version took another 25 minutes. That’s 1 hour and 55 minutes of downtime before I could even open email.

How much time is wasted with Vista inefficiency around the world? How many people spend minutes or hours while the operating system churns and churns doing nothing? How much is Western civilization prevented from advancing by a lousy Windows operating system?

There’ll be another one soon. It’s hard for me to hope it will be better.

What is it doing?

Please excuse my ignorance. I am new to the PC world and do not know your customs and etiquette. I want to know of there is a program that tells me what my hard drive is doing. Sometimes it just runs and runs and I have no idea why.

People tell me to look at Task Manager. It has a list of 50 things with names I don’t understand. I could start getting rid of them by picking names I don’t like, but that sounds dangerous.

Is is too much to ask to want to know what the frak my computer is doing right now?

Hell freezes over.

I gave up. I’m tired of not being able to play the games made by the company I work for. Boot Camp is a half-assed solution to the problem, and I hate poisoning my Mac with Windows software. Last night, after some considerable frustrations, we bought two HP Pavilion Vista laptops.

Here are my first impressions of the difference between Vista and Leopard. Imagine, if you will, you are an office manager who has just hired an employee to help you with IT issues. I’ll provide two examples of how this might go, with two different employees. The task is this: We just bought a new printer. Get it up and running on our office network.

We’ll call the first one “Bill.” You tell him, “There’s the box. Open that thing up and get it running, please.”

Bill: I’m getting the box knife. Is it okay if I get the box knife? You’re gonna have to tell me if I can get the box knife. I’m going to open the box now. Is it okay if I open the box now?

Bill’s Friend Norton: THERE COULD BE FATAL DAMAGE TO BILL IF HE USES THAT BOX KNIFE. TRY TO FIND A BUTTON TO IGNORE THIS MESSAGE.

Bill: I opened the printer box. Is it okay if I take the printer out of the box? I need to know.

This goes on for about an hour, and eventually Bill tells you he doesn’t know how to install the printer, you’ll have to find that out from somebody else.

In our second example, we have another employee named “Steve.” You assign him the same task and he comes back in about ten minutes.

Steve: Let me show you the network printer settings. Yes, that’s it. Click that button. You’re good to go.

I don’t know about you, but I think if the world had more Steves and fewer Bills that people would get a lot more done with their work day.

Animator vs. Animation

Find out where pop-up blockers come from!

I like to think of the fire-breathing as Firefox kicking IE’s ass.

Last day at Microsoft.

A video filled with guest stars shown at CES detailing the last day at Microsoft for Bill Gates. It’s not often I get to use the Microsoft tag.

Ms. Dewey, tool of Microsoft.

A viral marketing incentive for its new Windows Live search engine, Ms. Dewey is portrayed by Janina Gavankar.

Similar to the Subservient Chicken, she is the granddaughter of Microsoft Bob and other helpful animals living in Office (Rover, this means you).

Try searching for Ms. Gavankar’s real name. Or a film in which she appeared nude, “Cup of My Blood.” Or try terrorism, algebra, literature, or bdsm.

Surf at work and make it look legit.

Enter a URL and workFRIENDLY makes that page look like a Microsoft Word document. Remember those games with the “boss key”? It’s like that.

Windows XP tips.

Sure, you can read the original article here, but I provide a translation into RealWorldSpeak for each of the ten tips below.

Tip 10: Halt background services to improve performance. (Don’t ask XP to do two things at once or all the stuff you don’t need that’s running that you can’t see will crash.)

Tip 9: Increase available disk space by scaling back System Restore. (The system that recovers your data from frequent XP crashes is actually bigger than it needs to be, just like all Windows programs.)

Tip 8: Scrub your hard drive clean. (Get rid of those leftover files from failed uninstalls, because XP can’t even take out the trash.)

Tip 7: Run two displays on the same PC. (The Blue Screen of Death becomes the Blue SCREENS of Death.)

Tip 6: Force unresponsive applications to close at shutdown. (All you need is a “registry hack” that looks like assembly language. Couldn’t be easier.)

Tip 5: Automatically optimize your hard drive. (It works when your PC is idle, like when it has failed an uninstall, or ran out of room for System Restore.)

Tip 4: Set a custom resolution. (Ooh, muck around with dangerous settings, or spend $29.95 on a program from the author’s company.)

Tip 3: Stay on top of registry changes. (You’ll need a special app to keep track of all the spyware, rootkits, and “other malware” that are just part of the fun of XP.)

Tip 2: Recover lost data. (Helpful in case you accidentally delete an unresponsive application that you have become attached to.)

Tip 1: Automatically log when and why shutdowns have occurred. (Make sure you save a lot of hard drive space for this log. It will be extensive. Scale back your System Restore, that should help.)

After all kids, what’s more fun than a registry hack?

Why I don’t like God.

I don’t need so many damned pain receptors in my kneecaps. My knee sticks out there in front where I can see it, and I know when it hits something. When I hit my knee on my desk, white hot pain that makes me unable to walk is NOT FUCKING NECESSARY.

Are we still in beta testing? Like Microsoft: release = beta? Didn’t Adam tell Him, “Oh man, that’s way overkill, tone that down.”? Just shows the value of good development.

/first-class ticket to hell right here