Today is an exciting day, of course, because Chase turned one. We had a small party to celebrate. It was attended by Mike, my parents and Emilie's mom. We had some cake and Chase opened a few presents. Although he finally ate some of the cake he doesn't seem to like it, generally speaking. We had a pre-birthday celebration with Emilie's family on Monday night and he wouldn't eat the cake then either. Weird.

This is either a freaked-out-by-the-candles picture or an I-want-to-grab-fire picture:

There were several candles on the cake, which were placed in the shape of the number 1. I just don't want any cake/candle purists complaining about having too many candles, so I figured that I better explain.

Minor annoyances with Windows Vista have made me say on a daily basis that I am going to switch back to XP. One minor annoyance became a major annoyance a few minutes ago, so today is officially the day that Vista dies on my laptop. Please keep in mind that I am not using a release candidate or beta version. This is the official final release of Windows Vista Business.

I use Vista with dual displays. Windows is setup to extend my monitor (primary display) to the laptop screen (secondary display). Both displays are widescreen format. The problem is that when my monitor goes into sleep mode, or when my laptop goes into suspend mode, Vista forgets which display is which. Suddenly, the laptop screen becomes the primary and the monitor becomes secondary. Not only that, but the monitor resolution is changed to standard, which shows a 1.5" black bar on the left and right of the screen.

Interestingly, Windows switches the numbering of the monitors, which is obviously why it has a problem. The monitor, which was originally display 1, becomes display 2 and the laptop becomes display 1. The next time the problem occurs it switches again - laptop becomes 2 and monitor becomes 1.

Additionally, the laptop display usually becomes very dark when this happens. I cannot adjust the brightness. It is a little too dark to actually use.

To correct this problem I have to go to the display properties, switch the position of the two displays and reset the resolution. I've been using the gadget bar, so I also have to go to the gadget bar configuration and switch it from 2 to 1 or 1 to 2. As I mentioned, Windows changes the identifying number of the monitor, so I have to change anything that was tied to the monitor number.

I would say it's just me, but a cow-orker started having the same problem.

Microsoft is lame. Sadly, XP is still the best product they've ever created.

I'm curious about the raids that recently took place at the Swift & Co. meat packing plants. The CEO, Sam Rovit, said that "the company has never knowingly hired illegal workers and does not condone the practice," according to the article. Elsewhere in the article it says that "the company estimated a raid would remove up to 40 percent of its 13,000 workers."

It seems to me that the company thought, by its own estimate, that 40% of the workers were illegal. Doesn't that mean that they were knowingly hiring illegals? Maybe I've got it all wrong, but something just doesn't jive.

I'm sorry to bring such a topic to an otherwise family-friendly place. My deepest apologies. PSYCH!

Okay, I need to add to my Vista complaint list.

I receive faxes via e-mail on a regular basis. The pages are always landscape. When they are faxed to me they show up in my inbox as a TIF file. This has never presented a problem in the past, but suddenly this has become a huge problem.

Vista seems to think that it should rotate and warp the image to fit on the page a certain way. The problem is that no matter what I do it squeezes the image onto the page wrong. I can change between landscape and portrait layout. I can rotate the picture. I can open the image in different programs. No combination of steps allows the fax to print correctly.

This is a showstopper for me, so I've had to keep my XP box up just to print stupid faxes. Stupid.

I installed Vista (Business Edition, for those who care) on my work computer this last week. I also installed Office 2007. Office is, without question, a huge improvement, especially considering that 2000, 2002 (XP) and 2003 were all basically the same. The interface is significantly different, so that will take a while to get used to. Some of the improvements are massive, though, such as the auto-configuration function in Outlook. I would love to know why it took until the 2007 version for this function to be implemented. It should have been available by Office 2000.

Back to Vista...

Vista looks good (the eye candy factor is pretty high). There haven't really been any performance issues. I'm running it on a laptop and it runs just as quick as XP did. I was surprised that almost all of my applications work, including Firefox. The only one that doesn't work so far is DameWare. That pretty much sums up the good stuff.

To me, it feels like a mix between MacOS, XP and AfterStep. The menus are a lot different, but under the menus it feels a lot like 2000/XP. A good example would be joining the computer to a domain. So far, the interface for changing the wireless settings is the worst of all. BUT if I had to pick a single feature that is almost unbearably bad, I would have to say that award goes to IE7. I've been giving IE7 a fair shot for a while now. Unfortunately, the more I use it the less I like it. Fortunately, Firefox continues to get better and better and works fine.

The bottom line: Vista and Office 2007 are good upgrades overall and will probably grow on me once I become more familiar with them: however, the fine print below the bottom line says that Microsoft is the devil and charges way too much for the product they provide.

I must update. Much has happened since we last met, so let me see if I can throw it all together in an entirely incoherent manner. For those who may have missed it, there is a brief post on October 18, 2006 that I just recently published (I had written the entry, but never saved it to the page).

Chase finally figured out how to crawl. It's done wonders for his confidence. He's found a new sense of freedom. The good part is that he doesn't get so frustrated from just sitting around unable to go anywhere on his own. The bad thing is his incredibly mischievous mobility. Still, it's an exciting development. I think Chase is on the cusp of walking. We've been letting him walk a bit lately and he's been standing and walking fairly well for short times and distances. I am predicting that he'll be walking before Christmas. Emilie is not so sure.

Chase was recently diagnosed with bronchiolitis; however, he got over it pretty quickly so we're doubting that that's what he really had. I'm thinking it was probably just a nasty cold or something. We're not sure how he got it, but he's all good now. For several days he was in a low mood and was obviously miserable. That was right at Thanksgiving, so it wasn't much fun. Chase likes to be around lots of people, especially other kids, so it was a sad holiday. Saddest of all, we didn't get to see the Barnets when they were in Reno for the holiday because of the illness.

Work has been a festival of fun, too. I went to Chicago on the 6th and 7th of November. It was a brief overnight trip. I didn't do very much while there; however, I did find one cache (with a travel bug) and I ate some Chicago deep dish pizza. On the 9th I went to our Henderson office for a quick day trip.

This has been a pathetic update, but, hey, it's something...

Well, the entry that I posted just previous to this one was written more than a month ago. I never finished it, so I never posted it. I left the original date that it was authored on the post. You may notice that it isn't really complete, but at least it's there. I'll possibly finish it in another entry and provide an update shortly.