Last weekend on dry land!

This has felt like a busy week, but I guess we haven't done anything too crazy. I actually worked out with my wife on Tuesday, had Volleyfit on Wednesday, and played Volleyball on Thursday. Maybe I feel tired because of this whole "physical activity" thing.

Tonight is a pub dinner, shopping for cruise stuff, then I relax. Saturday and Sunday will both be reasonably busy days, and next week is going to be a crazy week at work. I think I'm definitely going to need this vacation when it comes...

Maple Walnut Fusion Cake

Today's work lunch was absolutely gourmet. For a main course, I picked up a fresh baguette to go with the leftover pot roast. My sandwich was the envy of the lunchroom.

For dessert, I have a piece of Maple Walnut Fusion Cake. It's called that because it is a cake, has maple and walnuts in it, and I have to eat it with chopsticks because someone stole all the forks.

Volleyfit

So, I did my first class of Volleyfit yesterday. The goal is to get more fit for volleyball, and to improve my skills. The workout part of it was pretty rough on me, but the teacher wasn't all that great at explaining things. He had us playing a proper 6 vs. 6 match, but he assumed that everyone was a volleyball pro, and never really explained what we were supposed to do. So now, I've got to check the internet to learn how to play volleyball, when I'm PAYING this guy to teach me. Fun times.

Windows 7 so far

I've got to say, my experience with the Windows 7 Beta has been very pleasant so far! Since I was reconfiguring the hard drives on my computer into a RAID array, I had to install it from scratch, without upgrading Vista. This is how I would have chosen to do it anyways, since I don't really trust "upgrading" an OS. In any case, I dumped anything I wanted to keep onto my Home Server, and rebuilt my desktop.

The thing I like most about the Windows 7 is that they're made an effort to make it cleaner and faster. There's no more Sidebar, like in Vista. Also, the Quick Launch bar is integrated into the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application is highlighted if it is running, and can be pinned there with a right-click if you want to keep it there. The Start button looks like just another icon, so it maintains a very clean look. Here, Chrome and Paint are running, and I've moused-over Chrome to get a preview:

It's nice, because it keeps your takbar nice an organized. If you click on app that is running, it will shift focus to the app. If the app isn't running, the click will start the app instead.

The Notification Area has also been reworked. You can configure it to hide, show only notifications, or always show anything that goes down there. Again, it's quite easy to keep that area clean.

There are a ton more features, but I haven't had a chance to play with them all yet. So far, this feels like a faster, leaner Vista with some nice UI tweaks. And honestly, that's enough to sell me on it so far.

Probably not as bad as this...

I've become more and more of a Windows geek since I started my current job. Our partnership with Microsoft grants us early access to a lot of nice software that other people can't touch yet, which is pretty fun. I've been pretty busy recently and I didn't even notice the Windows 7 Beta until yesterday. It releases today, and I've already got my keys. 

This weekend, I'm going to back everything up to my Windows Home Server, and install Windows 7 on my PC at home. Worst case, it sucks horribly and I just restore my backup. Best case, it's nice and I keep using it. Either way, it won't be as bad as xkcd thinks:

The joy of ordering online

I ran out of things to read, and I decided to order some books online from Chapters. There were a couple more obscure books that I wanted that weren't available in stores, so ordering online was the way to go. I picked out 3 zombie books from authors I hadn't heard of before, I got The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and then an Odd Thomas book from Dean Koontz that I hadn't read. The Dean Koontz book was supposed to be my "safe" book. Even if I turned out to hate all 4 of the books by the new authors, I was sure to enjoy In Odd We Trust. I liked the author, and the main character in this series is excellent. 

However, when I opened the book, it turns out it's a graphic novel. That's a mature term for "comic book". I missed that when I was going through the description online. Ah well. Here's hoping it's a good  comic book, at least.

"Overkill"?

No such thing for these guys:

Hopefully, things won't get to that point at my office. My solution is much more... discreet. I'll post a picture once I find the camera.

This Ain't A Scene

I work for a software company. Everyday, our software gets "built" out of source code so that the QA department can test the software that we wrote the previous day. Sometimes, this build doesn't work. This is usually because one of the developers was careless. In order to discourage this carelessness, we usually make the build-breaker bring in donuts as penance. Apparently this wasn't working, because one of these was left in the kitchen with a threatening note:

I think someone just started an office arms race.