So I decided a few days ago that I have been spending too much time online. Mostly I am addicted to participating in Internet forums. Currently it has been the Spyderco forums and other knife related forums. I have vowed to stop going for at least the next 5 months. We’ll see how this works out.
One of my biggest problems is that I love looking at pictures of knives, or Surefire flashlights, or just any good quality cutlery (not the junk they sell on Home Shopping Network). If I see the pictures I want to buy the items and most times I do. So I’ve also agreed with myself that I will not buy another knife until my birthday (sometime in the next 8 months).
I think lots of people are spending too much time online and not enough time outside and either playing (if you’re a kid) or working around the house or even just throwing a ball back and forth between you and a good friend.
I know it’s winter time (at least here) and it’s harder to go outside and do stuff but we all need to make an effort to quit becoming a bunch of sloths that sit in front of a computer all the time. I mean quite a few of us sit in front of computers at work. Why come home and do it some more?
Go outside, play, do something, run, jog, build stuff, fix things, go hiking, walk around your neighborhood. Change your life. I’m trying…..one step at a time.
January 29, 2008
I just wanted to put up a link to Windows Steady State for those that have not heard about it or used it. It’s a great free product from Microsoft that allows you to customize a PC to be somewhat locked down. This is nice if you are a parent or share a PC with other people. You can set it up so that everytime you reboot the PC it is just as if nothing was changed by the last user. This works great if you have idiot roommates or siblings. You can change a bunch more, but I will not go into that. Just look at the site for Steady State that I have linked on this post.
Check it out. I’ve been testing it at work and it’s pretty cool. It’s not as advanced as using Group Policy Objects in a domain but it’s good for stand alone or home computers. It is basically a fancy interface to edit the local policy on the system that it is installed on.
Take a look here: Windows Steady State
January 29, 2008
Wow, we’ve moved through Christmas, and New Years and now it’s 2008. This blows me away. Time does for sure go by faster as you get older. At least it seems that way.
As for the topic: I’m still running Vista Business and I keep thinking I’m holding out just waiting for the service pack. However I still have to remote into most of the servers that I need to work on, and this sucks. A good deal of the management consoles that I used to use with XP Pro do not work with Vista so I have to remote into the servers. So far I’m still using Remote Desktop to get into our exchange servers and also our Symantec Antivirus servers.
I’ve not had Windows Vista Business lock up or crash as of late. However in the past I have turned around and worked on my other PC for a minute or two and when I come back to use the Vista box it’s just frozen. Not even CTRL + ALT + DEL do anything. The mouse doesn’t move or anything. Nothing to do other than a forceful reboot. In the laptop I run I have 2GB of RAM and it’s a Dell Latitude D830 with a 120GB 7200 RPM SATA drive, and it is a Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz machine. At boot with nothing else running this thing is taking up about 720MB of RAM. Not bad but I have turned a lot of stuff off. This computer is also a member of an Active Directory 2003 domain so there are certain things I cannot turn off. Today with all of the things open that I need to do my job (about 6 applications) it was using 1.29GB of RAM. Still it’s not using all of my RAM so that’s ok with me. Unfortunately if I plan to install and use VMware or VirtualPC I will have to add more RAM.
I like the “prettiness” of Vista so much that it will be hard for me to go back to XP if I ever do. I never thought I would say that. I really never did.
So for now….I guess I’ll still wait and see. It’s not a bad OS, it’s just a lot less than I expected after 5+ years of development.
January 29, 2008
