Windows 7

I’m in love... (eyes glaze over) I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta. I was expecting a headache to get it installed. Like 5 hours of install time followed by 6 hours of configuring and screaming for help on windows forums. However, I was ultimately blown away by the ease with which this operating system installs itself. It was more work to partition the drive for the dual boot. From there I was able to start the installation from within windows Vista. Choose my Windows 7 partition and the Setup program handled the rest. The entire operating system was installed and operational inside of 40 min (this is including creating my user account and restarting after I installed my NVIDIA driver)

This operating system is so slick, it makes using Vista feel like an awkward grade-school relationship. Microsoft actually innovated for once! The new “super-bar” is infinitely more useful than the comparatively archaic task bar (seriously… after using the old taskbar again I stripped down naked and started drawing oddly shaped animals on the sides of my cubicle and danced around the fire I just invented). And as for startup, boot screen to desktop in under 30 seconds. (I wondered at this point if I was using a Windows Operating system.) Surely this was the improved version of Mac OSX that was kept from the public lest Apple become more than a self absorbed marketing and advertising agency… but I digress.

In short, Windows 7 has some serious potential to be the best operating system MS has ever delivered (and with only 2 years from Vista they must have failed to use contraceptives prior to this pregnancy… or maybe that was just the result of hate sex after the public disowned MS post-Vista)

Mirrors Edge

I had a rent one get one free coupon for Hollywood Video. I rented Dead Space because I've been craving the opportunity to violently dismember alien zombies into bloody messes. For my second game I rented Mirrors Edge. Now, I was expecting Mirror to entertain me for about 1 hour before I hurled the controller into the TV in frustration (which would have ultimately destroyed my TV and frustrated me more... but it would have looked cool). However, instead of killing many an alien, I killed about 5. And then played Mirrors Edge to excess. I.... love.... this.... game. It's beautiful, it's exciting, it's also horribly frustrating. But I'm horribly stubborn. So, I wouldn't recommend this game to just about... anyone, but I'm enjoying it so much myself I might just buy it (in 6 months, after it's cheap as dirt since no one likes it). 

A word on modern movie graphics... they suck. I'm not talking about movies such as the overhyped and overrated Lord of the Rings. Or the dialog rejecting, digital pimped Star Wars movies (referring to the crappy new trilogy, not the amazing old ones.... ahhh... I sigh with nostalgia). let me back track a moment to the late 90's early 00'. We had amazing graphical achievements such as the Pixar Animations and Final Fantasy movies. Pixar was advancing the cartoon field while Square Enix was advancing realistic looking people and environments. And yet we still have abominations like the crapped out Beowulf? That pathetic excuse for a CGI movie 7 YEARS after final fantasy? Seriously? Can you smell the bullshit? Even Shrek was a more impressive achievement then this movie!!

I sunk my teeth into Gears of War 2. This game is seriously amazing. Graphically impressive, epic story, passible dialog, and immersive gameplay. It's got its tense moments, emotional moments, epic moments. It's all there, it's sci-fi, and it's amazing. Kudos to Epic and Microsoft Gaming Studios. This is me bowing to you..... but now the gripes. Frame rate dips? Are you !&#*@&@# kidding me? This game was released for ONE console with ONE type of GPU and ONE type of CPU. How can it have frame rate dips? In fact, while I'm tearing the gaming industry apart for system delays when the hardware specs are consistent, let me divert, for a moment, some frustration towards the damnable software engineers responsible for the firmware on the Zune and iPod. Seriously! Why do these devices have frame rate dips? It's not as if there are several hardware configurations that should effect this kind of performance. You have ONE spec! One! Get it right! Why do I have to wait a few seconds for menus to load? I just want to see a frick'n song list. Is it too much to ask for these devices to do what they were meant to do, quickly, conveniently, and without hassle? Why do they jam? The DS and the PSP run games... GAMES!... faster than these worthless music players can access a flipp'n song list. Does that even remotely make sense? At all?

Crushed by the higher powers

Why should it take 3 weeks for AT&T to figure out that they can't connect to my apartment? I waited 3 weeks and 4 phone calls to finally get an employee competent enough to tell me that it couldn't be done. They tried connecting twice before "escalating" my request. After my request was "escalated" the employees couldn't even find it in their bloody system. I was told they were "working" on it. That I would be "contacted". I'M STILL WAITING FOR THE BLOODY CALL AT&T. I had to call them. I was kept in suspense for 3 weeks until an employee simply typed my address into her computer and replied that they couldn't connect to my apartment. I waited 3 flipp'n weeks to be told it "couldn't be done" by an employee who was in no way involved with this "escalation" of my order. Why couldn't I have been told this 3 weeks ago so I wouldn't waste my valuable time on this?!?! How can this ridiculously large companies screw up their primary business purposes so brilliantly with uncomfortable frequency. I really don't appreciate it when I realize that I could do the job of the "tech support" person better than he/she could.