Monday October 8, 2007

Been crazy last couple of weeks. Rain every other day it seems, and some new problem to tackle. Gas has been at $2.64 here for a week now. The Gladiator's check engine light was fixed when the EGR solenoid was replaced, the coolant leak was fixed by replacing the heater core and the heater return hose. Now have to align Stripez and put new front tires on it.

Got two quotes for a new furnace, have to find out why they are so different. One for $2400 and a 90,000 btu furnace, the other for $1800 and a 70,000 btu furnace.

Built a new front for the shop out of OSB and 2x4's this weekend. Covered it and the shed with some oil-based stain I had. Still need to finish roofing the shed.

Got the windshield replaced on the Gladiator, put a set of TriplEdge wiper blades on it. According to their advertising they are supposed to "provide(s) drivers with years of no squeak, no streak vision". Maybe. I'm almost ready to switch back to the Anco Winter Wiper blades I have always used. The TriplEdge's squeak worse than the Anco's ever did. At least when the glass is very wet the Anco blades don't squeak, no matter how wet the glass is the TriplEdge squeak horribly. As far as streaking, don't know. The TriplEdge don't streak now, and the Anco's don't streak when new, but the silicone TriplEdge are supposed to never need to be replaced because the silicone doesn't deteriorate like rubber does. The TriplEdge cost a buck less than the Anco's at Wally World, so I thought I would give them a try. After two weeks the trial is just about over. I think after next payday I will replace them.

Other than the wiper blades, driving the Gladiator at night is a whole new experience. The old windshield was badly pitted and scratched (what do you expect after 200,000 miles) and I wanted to replace it anyways, but the expense was too much. But after it cracked and the cracks grew and kept on growing by a couple of inches per day I had to do something. Glad I did. Almost $400, but what a difference.

Raining pretty good outside right now, chance of flooding.

Oh yeah, Vista. On my dual-boot PC I'm always using Vista now, have another PC setup next to me running XP. What Vista does, it does well. What it doesn't do makes it a pain in the rear, and makes me run a second PC with XP. The biggest problem is the lack of compatibilty. Had to wait for the new version of Nero 8 to come out before I could do some burning, my Nero 7 isn't compatible. None of our Clinical software is compatible with Vista. Little things, like having to manually install the Telnet Client because it is not included with the default install. Having to copy NTBackup from XP because the Vista backup is not compatible with NTBackup.

I am NOT using IE 7. I tried to, but when I get errors opening up most websites and couldn't do anything I said enough was enough. I've set Firefox to be my default browser for now, which is OK since I prefer it anyways.

Personal opinion: I think Vista MAY be OK for the average home or business user. The Power User or SysAdmin should wait a while or be prepared to run two PC's. If you run special software for your industry then wait until your industry software is Vista compatible.

Office 2007: I'm using it, but under protest. It has features I don't like. It is full of contradictions. It appears to be designed to be friendly for the average user, but it has features that the power user would like to use if they weren't so deeply buried. The lack of customization for the Ribbon is the worst part. I rarely use a lot of the features that are on the Ribbon, but I can't remove them or put the features I want on there, so I need to use the menu all the time. Fortunately it appears that most of the shortcut key strokes still work. I used to customize the heck out of my menu bar so I would have one click access to the features I used the most, but that is not possible with the Ribbon.

There are some features I like. I have a macro that I run in Access every day, when I ran the Macro the first time a dialog box opened asking me if I wanted to run it regularly. It helped me set up a recurring task that runs the macro for me when I open the task. Wonderful! The error messages that I get in Access 2003 about unsafe macros were always a pain, but in Access 2007 the message came up once, I told it what to do, and I haven't seen the message since. Very nice, after three years I've been sick of that message.