Brielle's Ramblings

Found this great little how-to here (and the vista SP1 update here) on how to enable RDP in Windows Vista. 

Found this great little bit of information over here about how to enable concurrent users in XP SP3.

TNE went well, from what I could sense from everyone.  A little hiccup and schedule change here and there, but other then that...  I had fun.  :-)

Lady Arielle's show went well during the intermission of one of the performers.  Got about 30 minutes of video I have to dump at some point from the Handycam to the laptop, to post online.  She tied up 3 individuals - 2 women, 1 man - and then tied them together.  Pretty good crowd present.

The auction went okay as well, a couple we met eariler in the day got the chance to learn some shabari from Lady Arielle, and had a private session.

Aaron's show was great as well, slightly different atmosphere then previous shows, but very much fun regardless.  I'm still waiting to see the video since I don't quite know what I did in front of everyone (I'm told I was quite vocal).  As always, it was a pleasure to be under Aaron's very powerful mental powers.

So, out of sheer boredom, I was reading Kanye West's blog entry here.  Don't ask me why I was reading it...  I'm still cursing the fact the thought crossed my mind.  However, the comments posted are...  Interesting to say the least.

mrsEastandmrWest | June 24, 2008
WOW I SAVED THIS TO MY WORD DOCUMENT...SHOWS HOW SINCERE YOU ARE..

Yeah, so nice to know the kind of idiots we are dealing with...  I'll save my blog to my word document!

It's been 6+ months since I acquired a laptop with Windows Vista.  It's been a rather interesting journey, and anything but an easy one.

Hardware Issues

• Visioneer Onetouch 7100 and 8100 series scanners do not work - at all.  I have one of each, and Visioneer's solution to the problem is give them your old scanner and they'll give you a slight discount on a new one.  I ended up fixing this problem by loading up an old version of Windows in a VMware session and using USB pass-through.  The trick on this forum posting did not work.
• Nokia DKU-5 data cable does not work.  This makes it nearly impossible for me to sync my Nokia 6820 phone to my computer's address book.  Bluetooth is great...  If you have it built into your laptop (which I don't).
• Dell AIO 962 does not work properly when conntacted to a Windows XP box on the LAN and shared to the Vista machine.  I'm still not quite sure why, though I'm guessing it has something to do with the custom printer interface it uses. 
• Laptop can not run XP reliably.  The Nforce 630m / Geforce 7150m chipset is pretty much made for Vista, and throws a shit fit under XP.  Various things don't work right, from the built in ethernet to the display screen scaling.
• USB streaming from older Digital8 Sony Handycam does not work - at all.  Firewire/DV streaming does work however, and fairly well at that.
• USB internet tether on Blackberry Curve 8300 is flakey, and rarely works right.  Hangs at Verifying Username And Password...
• WiFi is a hit or miss sometimes.  There are times where I will go 3-4 weeks with no problems connecting to known good and working APs.  Then there are the days where I have to uninstall the WLAN card and redetect it before I can get connected.

Software Issues

• Games crash.  Constantly.  AirRivals is a perfect example of this.  Around 30% of the time, the game will hang during map loading.  PerfectWorld seems to work though, if not slightly sluggish.  I can't play Myst either, at all.
• On close, many apps crash.  It doesn't happen all the time, but it is kinda common (and annoying).
• Have to turn off UAC or everything that wasn't made strictly for Vista has permission problems.  This was a major problem early on with Cygwin, and it fouled up many builds of ClamAV/SOSDG.
• Quirks with simple and well programmed applications, such as XNews (which exhibits an annoying 'ding' noise on any clicking). 
• Yahoo Messenger somehow keeps turning on window animation even after I explicitly turn it off.
• Local search interface that is nothing short of annoying, with no way to revert it to XP style searching.  Locate32 is a good alternative.
• File copying is insanely slow, esp. over a network.  Terracopy is a great alternative and highly recommended.
• Slow startup and shutdown times.  I can sorta understand slow startup...  But why the hell would shutdown need to take 2-3 minutes?

Oy vey...  Well, found this gem of a quote from Usher, on why women love women...

Okay, Usher, can you please put down the crackpipe and stop thinking you are god's gift to womenkind?

Women love other women because that is who they are attracted to.  It doesn't help that many men these days behave like a bunch of inbreds and don't know how to be a gentleman.

Lately, I've had alot of time to think about death...

In April, one of my close friends, Julie Case, killed herself.  I won't disclose the details of how, or why...  But, needless to say, I've been pretty upset over it still to this day.  This makes friend #2 from my work history that has taken their own lives (after preaching to me about how valueable my own life is, and insisting that I must survive no matter what).

For those of you who didn't know Julie, she was the creator of MageNet (aka Valley Of The Mage Consulting), the predecessor of the SOSDG that we split from back in 2001.

So yes, if I seem a bit... angry and upset lately, it probably has to do with my (now dead) friends being a bunch of hypocrites that are willing to force me to suffer in life, but yet take the easy way out themselves.