Things I am interested in…

Me, Dilmah & Rollo

Jen took this rather nice picture of me and our two cats – (little black) Rollo, and (larger ginger) Dilmah. It is on the web album too…

Since Cosmo’s death Dilmah has been a lonely pussy.  Now he has a new playmate – Rollo!  Short for “Roll Over (and fall off Andrew’s leg)”, which is the first thing he did when I met him on my return from Wellington this afternoon.  Jen chose him from the RSPCA yesterday.  He is six weeks old (which makes his nominated birthday Oct 1, 2007).

He also answers to “The Claw Beast” (Andrew), and “Munchkin” (Jen).

Click here to go to the web album…

 I am very sad to report that one of our two brother cats, Cosmo, was hit by a car while crossing the road in front of our house at about 0630 this morning.  The driver did not stop.  Cosmo managed to crawl off the road, but died shortly afterwards.

 A nice gentleman who witnessed the event later came back to contact us and tell us what he saw.

 We brought Cosmo & Dilmah home to live with us in early May (see link here).  We think they were born towards the end of February.  Their birthday was recorded with our vet as Feb 18, the same day as mine.  This means Cosmo was about 8 1/2 months old when he died.

 I am suprised at how emotional I feel over the death of a pet cat.  In some ways Cosmo was the physically more frail of the two brothers. He was always getting sunburnt ears, and we were worried that he would get skin cancer. However, I liked him because he was more adventurous and inquisitive than Dilmah.  He figured out how to climb in our bedroom window first.  He was also less prone to come seeking affection, unlike “love slut” Dilmah.

 He is being cremated, and we will scatter his ashes in our garden, along with his favourite toy, Mousey (if we can find it wherever he left it last).

 At least he had a better life with us and his brother than he would have found if he had been left with his mother (a stray).

 Here is a link to an album of pictures. Cosmo has the white fur on his nose, and wears the red collar. His brother, Dilmah, has the black collar.

 We will remember him…

Just the other day a friend of mine made a comment in an email about how his computer was not running all that well under Windows Vista, to which I replied:

“Windows Vista is the spawn of the devil!”

He responded by asking me what I had “against” Vista.  He had only had a few minor problems with it (italics mine), such as several items of software not working, including video drivers I would imagine.  He is a keen audiophile, and mentioned that for him the most annoying thing was the time when iTunes would not function.

Here is my reply to his question (which I believe he had already answered in part):

I don’t like Vista because it is built on the premise that everyone who uses it is a potential thief (whether they are or not). There are parts of Vista that the person who has bought the computer hardware, and has also bought the computer software (including Vista), has no control over – Microsoft does.

In the future you, and everyone else using Vista, may find yourself locked out of your own computer because Microsoft find something you are doing objectionable (most likely because you haven’t paid them enough to do it, on a repeating basis).  Or another scenario is that the overzealous and oversensitive “protection” system ( e.g., “tilt bits”) produces a false positive and shuts you down even though you are doing something totally legitimate.

For an interesting (and controversial) analysis of this see the article referred to in my April blog post – http://turbott.net/blog/2007/04/22/the-longest-corporate-suicide-note-in-history/ .

Copy protection doesn’t work – it merely makes things harder and more cumbersome for the average honest user.  Pirates have been able to hack past every single copy protection system yet devised, including that for BluRay, HDDVD, and the protection on the iPhone.  The average time that passes between a piece of (DRM protected) music appearing on iTunes, and the same piece of music appearing stripped of copy protection on some peer to peer site is around five minutes.  Once an item has been hacked, anyone with access to the internet and a search engine is able to find a copy (hassle free, that will run on any computer system with ease – except Vista) by entering “{item x} torrent” into the search engine…

I will never deliberately purchase Windows Vista until such time as I have no choice.  This will only be when the majority of games I am interested in playing will not run on anything else.  Even then, I will probably keep a seperate games’ machine, tainted with Vista.  The rest of my network will continue using operating systems that I have legitimately purchased, and therefore can expect to retain control over, instead of Microsoft or any other third party…

Here endeth the rant!

Outrageous Fortune