Vista: Bad with Turtles

So, it turns out that the reason for Vista's incessant Explorer crashes was TortoiseSVN -- the very nifty application that extends Explorer to handle Subversion source code repositories. Problem solved with a minor upgrade.

Now Vista is as stable as a... slightly wobbly but well set Jello mold. Today Explorer crashed as soon as Vista started, but it hasn't done it since. I guess that's "better".

I gave Ubuntu Linux a shot as well, after a job interview asked me why I didn't use Linux, since I am a self-proclaimed geek. What I found out (err... remembered) is that while I am a geek, I'm a utilitarian geek, and Linux just doesn't seem to offer me much over Windows. Sure, stability and programmer friendliness is nice, but obnoxious configuration files, holy-war-style communities, and out-of-the-mainstream applications don't help me get shit done fast(tm) which is, after all, the point. At least, it's my point.

I almost signed up for Flickr, but remembered I already had a photo album at Picassa, so that won. I'll probably regret that, but Google either scares me less or does a better job of scaring me into submission than Yahoo.

I also took the time to write this little C# app:


It's pretty rough around the edges right now, but all it really does is display the album art and title for the track I'm listening to iTunes... but it displays the title in BIG TEXT. I don't know why I can never get this functionality right out of the box with a music player -- WinAmp didn't do it either.

I like to be able to read the track title from across the room. Sometimes I'm doing stuff when the music is on -- why should I have to get close to the computer to see what I'm hearing?

Moreover I use my TV as my second monitor in a dual view setup (I know this is weird, but I only have one monitor and sometimes you really need a second screen to debug DirectX / XNA apps) -- and a standard TV has a resolution of crap x shitty, so I can't even read the standard size font in iTunes on my TV.

I should probably sell iTunesBiggieView... but it just doesn't seem like I put enough work into it to ask for money :b

Oh, and Zelda in a browser: totally reasonable. I'm tinkering with the map editor now.