The love puppy is amazing. See more of the Valentine’s Day redesign

It is unclear to me what earth-shattering event took place last night however people in the street began screaming and dancing and assembling into crowds and then burning couches. At first I thought some important current world leader may have been assassinated or possibly the world economy had collapsed, but it seems the city has won a trophy. For the sixth time. You think they would be used to it.

• Patrick’s (that’s me) Photos & Videos
• Josh’s Photos
• JW’s Photos
• Mattt’s Photos
• Alex’s Photos
• Paul’s Photos

Seriously, Microsoft? Ok, so you announce a public beta at a giant trade show so that everyone hears about it, with it opening only two days later, not long enough for them to forget. Then you note that you are ARBITRARILY (or at least without giving a reason) capping the download at 2.5 million people. You modify the site to say it will become available in "the afternoon," and then proceed to make it available before 11am Eastern.

However no one can get it, because we all get this message telling us to come back Monday. That sounds like a great idea, yes, for a widely publicized limited download, I will certainly step away from my computer for three days, and check on Monday.

Now guys, you had to know there was going to be an awful lot of load on your servers right? It is a 2.7 GB download (not that I can verify that, but that is what I hear) so you might have wanted to put a few extra servers behind this, or maybe used one of those modern ways to allow many people to download big files … torrenting perhaps (or maybe you all figured there were enough win7 torrents out there and you didn’t need to make any of your own).

But what I do know, is while this has been the first time in a very long time (ever?) that I can remember wanting and be excited about a Microsoft product, so far – nothing but pain.

(Click for variety)

Update

Well. The update now sounds like they launched before 11am EST, which was a bit premature as they weren’t allowing any downloads until 3pm EST, leading to four hours of pure frustration, followed by 30 minutes of furiously busy servers before they pulled the whole thing down.

“Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to Microsoft.com properties before we post the public Beta today,”

That is a spokeswoman from Microsoft, from this ComputerWorld article confirming only that it was clear that they didn’t have any idea what was coming. Currently, no ETA on when this is coming.

Organized by color.

(Yes. It happened like three weeks ago. I know.)

My mother did all my laundry. For that I am thankful.

Annie, Sam, Lucy, Gran, Allison, Great-Gran, Eva, Andrew.

Last weekend I drove to he Akron-Canton Airport, picked up Katie who had flown in from Boston, and then we went to my Aunt Carol’s house to surprise my grandmother for her 89th birthday. While the rest of the family knew, it was at some point decided to make this a surprise for my grandmother.

When we walked in the door, we were thankfully not met with a heartattack, just a series of questions. Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Boston? Why aren’t you in Boston? How did you get here? Why are you both here? Did you drive her here?

After the, what we are told was not surprise, but, shock subsided we had a wonderful weekend, with all five of the grandchildren and all six great-grandchildren. Including fun games such as stick the hat on the turkey and fishing for skittles. Pictures are here.

Fisheye the mural.

So, I am behind. I know. It has been a crazy, busy semester and will continue to be – more on everything that has been going on soon. But I wanted to catch you up with the weekends, before I begin my travel spree which will last for the rest of this month.

The last weekend of September, Katie, Phluff, and Kevin all came to visit. It was great. They got in Friday night, and we all (plus Danny) went out to dinner and talked exclusively about human breast milk as a possible supplement for cow’s milk. (Just as PETA suggested the breast is best)

Then Saturday, a bunch of people came over and we had grilled cheese and tomato soup and played Bananagrams and Settlers of Catan, and most importantly chalk-muraled the wall directly outside the windows of my living room. I have provided a reference diagram to explain what I mean by the wall outside of my windows and how there is a strange little enclosed type patio space which is not really useful.

So the chalk mural, which can be seen up above, was placed on the wall labeled “chalk goes on this wall” to cover up a giant blue rectangle which was seemingly painted there for no purpose. And it was a fun thing to do at a party. Now out of my living room windows I get to see beautiful art everyday. The rain doesn’t seem to wash it away.

Anyway go explore the photos.

• Danny’s Set which are really good.
• Kevin’s Set which has the best full shot of the mural (the one I used above).
• And then I don’t really have a set – but there are a bunch of photos from their visit that were taken on my camera and they are around this part of my photostream

I spent the last (several) days in Houston, and Katy, Texas. First visiting Amy, really down in Webster/Clear Lake by NASA, hanging out at her apartment and the pool; down to Galveston for a day; viewing The Incredible Hulk at a theater where a waitress (actually like three waitresses and a waiter) served us dinner during the movie; shopping for a wedding present, some legos at the newly opened Baybrook Mall Store, a tie, and of course I bought a few books, before we drove up to Katy, TX. It is there that my eldest paternal cousin, Kelli Johnson, married Justin Davis. (The photo above can be clicked to see a bunch of photographs from the wedding, or just click here for the full set. ) It is also there that Amy, Katie, and I saw Wall•E, and I got to see much of my family and other such things.

However, I am glad to be back in Pittsburgh, catching up on e-mails and meetings and work related things, as well as friends here. Now I just need to get some sort of functioning version of Reading to the Rain up so that I can post the seven books I read on the trip.

There was a time when I told everyone I knew (who used Windows) that they needed to switch to Firefox. Needed. Those days have been over for a while, though I still tend to include it when helping people set up their windows boxes, it is just no longer such a necessity. Internet Explorer though I may be reluctant to admit it has become a much stronger browser. There were the days, back when Fire*bird* & Mozilla existed as two distinct products, when I would use both and thought the dinosaur was silly, when some days I would switch to Opera just to check it out play with the zooming and switch back, and when IE was simply intolerable.

Then Safari happened. And I was really excited and life was great except Safari wasn’t. I mean, it was alright, tolerable, it had tabs – right? But it needed some time. Safari 2 was better. Safari 3 is pretty amazing. I have used it consistently since the first beta I could get, and haven’t even thought about switching. Which is what I did back in the Safari 1 & 2 days, every few months, Safari, Camino, Opera, Firefox, it was a carousel of browsers that changed like the seasons, except faster.

Well the carousel is still spinning and Firefox 3 came out at 1pm Tuesday. And for the next 24 hours they promoted Download Day — and as part of the new hype published this chart (which can be viewed at firefox.com with safari):

And so this made me mad. Real mad actually so this is where the hate comes on. The thing is though, it made other people mad too, and some of them say it better than I can. The short version here, is that this chart is … well a lie, or huge slant at best. I know that this was probably put together by some marketing people to make the browser look amazing (infact they really only made one chart – the only difference between the v. safari chart with the v. internet explorer chart is “Battle-tested …” is changed to simply “Superior speed and performance”) but could they not have filled the obviously one-sided chart with things that Firefox is actually better at … like sean here did.

And the features I actually care about, such as maybe say web standards, maybe CSS3 functionality. How are they doing with that? Not well. (again said better – and this is really worth the read) (for those of you who aren’t going to read that whole link Safari & Opera both passed the Acid3 test – web standards – almost immediately, racing to finish, while Mozilla complained they were too busy with their product cycle(!) to deal with … web standards).

Well, when I start choosing my browser based on the number of downloads it gets (which PS is not a measure of usage, if I was a cult follower I would dl it fifty times too) and certainly not by if it has an entry in the guinness book of world records (doesn’t that pair it with some sort of deformed child and some extremely obese man) but possibly by the features and support it has. Firefox, I had thought was at one point about making the best web browser (or at least taking on the monopoly … Safari with its no more than five percent marketshare really a glowing target now?) and it just seems like they have left that behind and are now all about the publicity. Then again, maybe if they make the back button a little bigger, I will be won over.

Getting their act together, they pulled together a second half which is respectable and sends some people back off in the right directions. Sure there is more awkward bickering between Starbuck & Adama, Adama & Roslin, Roslin & Starbuck (and seriously did anyone actually think that either of them were going to shoot the other?), really Starbuck & everyone, and then of course between the cylons, the real ones. Then we also have our human-variant cylons who are still hanging out and having meetings (anyone notice that cylons absolutely love meetings).

But the coolest parts of this episode (as is seemingly more and more often the case) take place away from humanity. The internal cylon struggles are just more interesting, debates on cruelty to lesser species, removing and adding sentience, and some sort of crazy voting structure that … I haven’t yet figured out. So the future here looks bright, and maybe just maybe I can start hoping they will un-box Xena.

I have always liked Newegg.com, but they have recently provided me with more specific reasons for a sort of logical admiration.

As mentioned earlier in technical diagrams I decided to purchase the components of a new computer (more on that tomorrow once it gets built for reals). I ordered most of these parts from Newegg – though not all, they didn’t have the video card I wanted, and the case was cheaper at ZipZoomFly – and they shipped and all was happy. But then Amy pointed out to me that the Intel E8400 (45nm – Penryn) was much better than the E6850 that I had ordered, and had shipped! And it was also sixty dollars cheaper.

So, I ordered the new-better-cheaper processor as well, and figured when the E6850 got here, I would send it back to Newegg using this magical RMA process that I have never quite understood, but could try out. So last week I sit down to fill out said magical RMA form and Newegg’s website informs me that I cannot because it has been seven days from date of purchase! Oh no. (Seriously guys, if I have one complaint, seven days from date of purchase, that is faster than I eat dinner most days.)

So … I decide I will call Newegg and complain and attempt to explain it just got to my house and I was only twelve hours over (true that) and I ordered another processor from them and I love them — when I realized that they had a live chat with a representative option. I figured I would give it a try even though it was likely one in the morning, and sure enough there was a representative. Ruby.

And within twenty-one lines of chat (most of which were cute littler verbose me — 12/21) and fifteen minutes, she had issued my RMA, had an e-mail with the printing label in my inbox, and waived the restocking fee. Fifteen minutes, no phones, no waiting, and my ideal solution, delivered to my inbox.

Thus, my love.