So… back in L.A., I bought my new computer on Friday. A Sony Vaio, again, because, aside from this recent screen failure on my beloved laptop, I’ve had pretty good luck with these machines. My new machine is not, strictly speaking, a clone or replacement of my previous – it’s a bigger machine, with shorter battery life (which is a sacrifice), but with a dual core processor, 160G harddrive, 2G RAM, it’s a much zippier little machine, and has a nice screen and graphics card, too. I opted for it because, since I’m now definitely moving out of the country, I’ll not have a “desktop” anymore, so this will be my sole computer, and I wanted something a little more versatile for my programming and DVD-watching and so on. But the big change – the huge difference – with this new machine is, of course, that it comes installed with Windows Vista. And THAT is almost PURE suckiness.
It’s not that I’m adverse to change for change’s sake. I understand the impulse. But why must Microsoft change, for example, which “hot keys” cause things to happen, each time they upgrade? And then document in such an obscure way what the new hot keys are? There seems to be a belief in Redmond that no one actually uses hot keys, that everyone is slavishly devoted to their mouse and that hot keys are some weird concession to the handicapped and luddite faction and deserve minimal attention at best and downright obfuscation at worst. And this happens not just in the operating system upgrades – it’s even more common in upgrades to, e.g. Microsoft Office. God, what a ghastly new “look” they’ve managed there – do they believe users of word are illiterate, now? As much as such a hypothesis has compelling aspects, it seems a bit contradictory to presume the user of a word-processor program can’t read labels on menus, and needs little Egyptian-looking hieroglyphics to know what gadget does what. And these things are forced down your throat: there’s no “go back to the old look and feel” option – the help file even admits so, explicitly.
So I’ve spent my weekend learning, adapting, porting data and files from my old system over to the new one. A decidedly unpleasant two days, after a great time visiting with my friend Jay and his friend Cuong on Friday afternoon/evening – we went to a Thai place on Wilshire in Santa Monica (Jay lives in Brentwood) and sat and talked politics, Jay’s amazing business plan, life, the universe and everything for at least four hours – I think the waitstaff at the place was getting a bit annoyed with us, even. But it was good to see him. I’m thinking of trying to reconnect with some other former coworkers today and tomorrow, before I begin the looping drive back to Minnesota.