May 2010

This is sort of like the fact that every Star Trek movie utilizes a different transporter effect, but as you probably know, just about every version of Windows uses a different set of sounds, including the startup and shutdown sounds. On the various Windows and Linux computers I use both personally and professionally, I often modify the sound schemes to the one from the Longhorn Beta, which ultimately turned into Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the Longhorn Beta sounds didn’t make it into Windows Vista (or Windows 7, for that matter), which is a shame because quite frankly I find them to be the most soothing of the Windows sounds.

Yes, I am soundly a geek when it comes to sound. (There’s some of that wit!)

Here is a YouTube clip of the Longhorn Beta startup and shutdown sounds. I really like the ethereal sound of these. I have the whole Longhorn sound scheme and someday I’ll post instructions on how to make these beta sounds your default on your computer. I hope I’m not infringing on someone’s copyright by doing that.

Anyways, here’s the sounds I was just talking about.

So Earl left for Las Vegas this morning and Jamie is in Buffalo until Wednesday night. This leaves me alone at the Manor for a few days and it’s been a long while since I have been in bachelor mode for this many days in a row. To keep it interesting, tomorrow night I spend the night near work so I can do some middle of the night testing again. It’ll be a good gig.

To pass the time this afternoon I decided to go to the local Best Buy to see what they have in the way of computers. I have been itching to buy a new computer lately, though I’m not really in the mood to buy another Apple product. I wanted a laptop that could work on either Windows or Linux so I spent a good hour or so looking each over each system on display. I typed a lot on each one of them to see if I liked the way the keyboard felt and I looked under the hood to see if the specs were really as good as the shelf placard stated. Keyboards on laptops are not as good as they are on MacBooks, and I was expecting that, but some of these keyboards were just downright mushy.

I am curious about this recent trend to put a full sized keyboard on a laptop, in that the keyboard has a number pad on the right as if you were sitting at a desktop. This is strange to me. I have a hard time typing if the keyboard is off center from the screen and because of this peculiar layout, this would most definitely be the case.

After looking over each model on display at Best Buy I decided to skip the whole Best Buy experience altogether because nothing there really tickled my fancy. I then went to the adjacent Wal*Mart to see what deals they had but every computer on display there was in a sad state of affairs; smashed screens, broken cases, missing keys off the keyboards. I guess there’s a lot of animals shopping at Wal*Mart. I was there less than five minutes.

All in all I decided to skip the computer purchase experience and stick with the MacBook Pro for the time being. The though trackpad is starting to die on this computer, it works well for what I need it to do and so I’ll just carry a little mouse with it or something.

I did discover during this excursion that I have a low tolerance for ignorance: people not turning right on red because they’re too busy chatting on the phone, people not watching where they are walking, parents letting their kids run on TOP of the shelf in better home furnishings at Wal*Mart (I wish I was making that up). I don’t know if I’m getting older or if the the general populace is getting more and more stupid as time goes on but I feel like I am firmly out of step and marching down a different boulevard from the rest of society these days.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.