Leaf Peeping in the Berkshires

When A2 announced that she had to go on a trip to the Northeast in the fall, my mind immediately shot back to the time when I learned the phrase “leaf peeping”.  It was from an episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet is upset because he has to forego a radio address packed with policy and issues for a more tempered one about “leaf peeping” in the Northeast.

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Neither of us have much northeasterly experience, so it proved to be an exciting new experience for both of us. Here is a recount of our exploits and our impressions of our dear Yankee friends:

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Windows 7, Another Bag of Hurt

Apple’s newest ad poignantly notes that we’ve been told the same thing over and over again by our friends at Microsoft:

With every launched operating system, they’ve promised that it’s better. They’ve promised improvement… and they’ve delivered baby steps forward with every (other) OS. (Vista & ME… sorry…)

Well, they’re going to have to do better than that. They need a leap forward. They need a grand slam out of the park home-run.

Notwithstanding the anecdotal evidence suggesting that Windows 7 appears to be lighter-weight, faster, and a smidgin‘ better than Windows XP, it is only that. Slightly better. Not great. Not near what it could be. It’s just a bit better.

This is a true disappointment, given that XP was launched in 2001, and launching an operating system 8 years later that is only an incremental improvement is hardly impressive.

The truth is that Windows continues to play catchup to Mac OS X. While Apple is focusing on stuff like hyper-threading and optimizing for multi-core processors (aka making your apps run faster, better, and preparing for the future of processor hardware and 64-bit software), Windows is still trying to figure out startup and standby times.

Pathetic.

Spending

You know it’s gonna be a bad month when you log into Mint and see this graph for your monthly spending:

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That is what a small vacation, a huge car repair, new tires, and a couple trips to wal-mart will do to your monthly cash flow… 🙁

I guess it could be worse…

1. I could be FavUnc and see that bar getting longer and more negative with every pre-wedding month…

2. I could be the Federal Government and not have seen that bar anywhere near the 0 mark for the last 75 years.

I suppose I could always raise my wife’s taxes for being married to me… who says I am “tight”?

A General Conference Dream

Author’s Note: For those not familiar with my religion, once every six months our church has its semi-annual general conference.  This conference is broadcast by satellite and internet around the world, and church members forego meeting in their usual congregations in order to tune into five 2-hour sessions of church leaders speaking kindly from behind a pulpit, and singing by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Last night I had a dream about General Conference.  I dreamed that they had decided to make Conference a lot more ‘accessible’ and ‘relevant’ to children.  They did this by making it a lot less of a stable camera pointing at the podium.  In fact, most of it wasn’t filmed at the Conference Center at all.

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