Hello from the fabulous Victoria-Jungrau Hotel in Interlaken, Switzerland, where Mel and I have just landed after three days in a much dinkier hotel in Rome (and although it was just a block away from the Vatican, I never ran into the pope at any of the local eateries or pubs…). I tried to post from the coin-operated Unix machine in our hotel basement last night, but the browser didn’t like the POST involved in adding new content to my site (or maybe it was the alt-shift-left knee to get the @ sign to appear on the Italian keyboard…).

This hotel room is nicer than our house, as evidenced by the fact that Mel made me take my jacket off the bed so that she could get “pristine” shots (including from an elevated position in the bathroom). They always treat us so well in Switzerland. Highly recommended.

This is my first real connected experience since boarding the plane Sunday morning (I don’t care how cool Outlook Web Access is – it ain’t nearly so cool as the Windows version), although I was able to get my cell phone to download my emails. I can’t image what that bill will be like…

When kids are young, they have no fear of computers or anything else. My eldest, when he was 2.5, knew how to detect what OS he was running (I dual booted Win2K and Win95 at the time), remember which OS his games needed, reboot, choose the non-default OS from the boot menu and start his app like it was the most natural thing in the world. Even though he couldn’t read, he learned all of the functionality of the app by choosing all of the menu items and pressing all of the toolbar icons just to see what they did. He had no fear.

Tonight, my youngest was working in Word, writing a paper that’s due tomorrow (of course). After he was finished digging through the thesaurus on the right-hand side, he wanted to close that part of the window, but accidental pressed the X to close the document he was working on (which, of course, he hadn’t saved). When he was asked if he was sure, he thought he was being asked if he was sure he wanted to close the thesaurus, so he pressed “Yes.”

The moment his document disappeared is when he learned to fear the power of the computer to throw away his work.

What did he do wrong? How do I explain it to him? What did we do wrong as an industry to teach my son to fear a tool meant to help?

This morning, I read about a $159 computer from a review on the PC Magazine site:

I called my local Fry’s, and while they were no longer have the $159 sale (apparently “quantities are limited”), they would be willing to sell me one for $171. While I was there, I got a 1GB memory upgrade and a 256MB ATI graphics card. Here’s the equipment I went home with:

• Fry’s Genuine Quality 3131 PC: $170.99
• 1.67GHz CPU
• 128MB of RAM
• 40GB HD
• 10/100 integrated Ethernet
• 56KB modem card
• 52X CD-ROM
• Stereo speakers
• Keyboard + Mouse (including roller ball)
• ATI Radeon 9550, AGP 8x/4x, 256MB DDR RAM: $94.99
• 1GB RAM SIMM(for a total of 1.1GB of RAM): $99.99

I then added an LCD panel and a DVD drive I had laying around. Total cost $365.97.

When I got the PC, it came pre-installed with Lindows, the Linux distro meant to look and act like Windows. And I gotta say, it wasn’t too bad. Then, because they ship a free CD that runs directly w/o an install, I plugged in Ubuntu, another popular client-side Linux distro which was also surprisingly easy to use. Neither was as familiar as Windows XP, of course, but they were both a lot easier to use then the last time I ran Linux.

At 12:04am, I started the Vista Feb ’06 CTP installation. At 12:44am, I was running Vista, it having recognized all of hardware (except the sound device) from my $366 PC, including enabling those cool “glass” effects and the nifty animations, integrated search and all the neat things you’ve read about in the Vista reviews.

I know I work for “the man,” but even so, I’m seriously impressed. The install was fast and seamless. The performance is way better than I thought it would be. And the little UI tricks are fabulous. I can’t do any media stuff ’cuz my audio device wasn’t recognized, but it was cool when I tried to play video and a DVD, that the Vista Media Center UI came up (my complete home entertainment needs are served with a coupla TVs, a Media Center PC and an XBox).

I know, I know, I got the OS for free, but come on! It’s still beta and it runs great on my cheapo PC! I don’t know what Vista’s going to go for, but I bet the whole she-bang (including LCD panel and DVD drive) could be had for ~$500 when Vista ships. Plus, I’ve only been playing with it for about an hour, but I already don’t want to go back to my XP boxes…

P.S. This post was composed and posted from “visto,” my new Vista PC.

I love this idea!

″Exanimus is an online massively multiplayer game created in a world where the dead live and roam the earth eating the flesh of the living. While most of the world is dead, there are small pockets of survivors that exist in barricaded cities across the globe.”

You guy will kill me before I change, right?

Live.com has a new image search which does progressive showing of images, scaling of the group and individual photos in very cool ways, but the killer feature is when you surf to the page from whence the image comes, the image is shown in full size hovering above the page. Very slick. My only complaint is that there seems to be no way to do an image search w/o first doing a normal search and then pressing the “Images” button. Still, I’ve switched from a9.com and google.com image search.

If you’re having trouble with ClickOnce while using FireFox as your default browser, then this post is for you. Thanks, Saurabh!

Here’s a tip — if you’ve got a deadline, don’t wander over to the Half-Life 2 comic “Concerned.” I’m a *huge* Half-Life and Half-Life 2 fan, so when I heard about it, I went right over and now that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back (but were oh so pleasantly spent) reading all 120 comic strips front to back. Since I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends playing Half-Life 2 again (why oh why aren’t there any more good games?!?), all of the stuff in these comics is fresh in my mind. Plus, I don’t mean “comic inspired by Half-Life 2;” the guy actually posing characters and objects from the game using a Half-Life 2 mod and builds his comics out of the screen shots, adding hilarious prose. It’s like if Rory built his comics from “Stick Figure World 3D” (coming soon to XBox 360). Very highly recommended.