Dear Guy In Front,

No not you, the other guy. The one that decided to stand in front of fifty people waiting patiently for their train’s track number to come up on the TV screen. You who came late to the station and quickly came to the conclusion that you would never be able to read the numbers from within the group. You who decided that getting the track number was so important to you that you had to sacrifice fifty peoples’ views of the monitor. Thank you for not standing still either! Your gentle rocking back and forth both made me sea sick and made me angry as the ten people in front of now had to start counter swaying just to see the monitor. Thank you for giving the people behind me a conversation starter into just what a jackass you are, causing the inevitable laughter between people within earshot. Thank you for also talking on your blackberry VERY LOUDLY so that we may know you are an important business man with a schedule to keep. As if without you the trains wouldn’t exist at all. Thank you for disregarding the unspoken rule of a the 10-15ft arc, the unwritten rule of make sure the person behind you can read.

Here is to you jackass of all he stands before. Here is to you making our days seem just a little crappier.

Age of Empires III
For those installing Age of Empires III remember that the expansion, War Chiefs, requires you to add a folder to the start menu because that is how it checks to make sure you can install it (stupid). Please note that in Windows 7 the directory for doing this is “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\” which is NOT how it is in Vista. I had to create the directory elsewhere (I used my Desktop) and copy/move it in to avoid UAC problems.

Also be sure to update the game before running it. You can search for the patches on GameSpot or other sites. You may also wish to run it in compatibility mode.

Civilization IV
Civ IV wasn’t nearly as hard. It installed without any problems but after an update said it was missing a DLL. Go to the DirectX page and download the web installer. I know it seems backwards but it will do the trick. After installing have fun crushing enemy nations into oblivion! Update: After playing the game for about eight hours today it has suffered no less than three crashes. If you are playing Civ IV on Se7en save early and save often.

Sim City 4
Sim City 4 (I have the Deluxe Edition) installed without a single problem and even ran immediately without any problems. After nuking the region to start with a flat area I started my city and ran into a wall. It seems as though SC4 runs horridly on Windows 7. While it was not the smoothest game on Vista, I could at least run it with the settings maxed in Windowed mode with relatively few hitches. In Windows 7 with the same settings the game just skips all over the place. While turning down the settings fixes the issue, the reason is mind boggling. The major question producing factor was that when I first ran the game with my favorite settings the slowness started affecting other windows. Dragging XChat around became slow, rendering in IE8 was incredibly slow and overall responsiveness dropped like a boulder out of a plane. Hopefully it is just a driver issue and not a deep rooted problem.

As this article states, Call of Duty: World at War has passed GoW2 for number of units sold on the 360. A feat made more impressive because of its multi-platform status. I think what is most interesting is that WaW beat GoW2 after a pretty bad Beta that seemed to most to be “just another WWII game” and not some blockbuster hit.

I think what actually happened was that people who have played Call of Duty 4 slowly migrated onto CoD:WaW realizing that it has very much the same hook. While CoD4 wasn’t revolutionary, it was unbeatable in terms of playability, taking me back to the days when I first picked up an [Original] Xbox controller to play Halo. In essence, the game just works and works well in the hands of any player. On the other side, GoW2 has somewhat of a niche following due to its duck and cover system. While the new gameplay style of GoW is definately a welcomed change in the community, it just isn’t as playable as Call of Duty’s Counter-Strike philosophy.

Back in the day of Counter Strike (pre-1.6 especially) games were trying to come up with new ways to play with the same coin (shooting other people). Games like Oni certainly did wonders for the genre with its fantastic combination of martial arts and gun combat but fell short because it was also somewhat hard(er) to play. Counter Strike, on the other hand, just felt right the second you started playing it. While it wasn’t the perfect game in any category and wasn’t as polished as other games it was simple and addictive. Two components that persist in Call of Duty throughout its lifetime.

So now that I have had the Beta for a couple of days and even got it installed on its own partition I have noticed a few things…

+ The taskbar is amazing. I guess I never realized how little I actually needed the old task bar until now. I am still on the fence about grouping but am trying to force myself to radical change by adopting the “move it to the side” campaign. Essentially this includes running the taskbar in its default 7 state and moving it to either side of the monitor. While I find myself going to click at the bottom of the screen sometimes, my efficiency has not dropped. I can still find applications easily and quickly. However this is not a usual circumstance yet as I have not bloated up the drive with all my software.

+ The explorer got some major improvements since Vista. When I go into work I actually dread using XP. The explorer in XP is horrendous compared to that of Vista and the latter is like a retarded stepchild of Se7en’s beautiful explorer. My favorite part of the new bits? Favorites! Finally Microsoft has removed the useless built-in sidebar and allowed us to add our own important folders. My only hope now is that every application (HINT HINT Adobe!) will use this format! [b]Update:[/b] Bjoern says you can add your favorites in Vista by adding links to the “C:\Users\\Links” folder.

+ Libraries. They may be a basic implementation but boy are they powerful and useful. Imagine all of your stuff (that’s right I said stuff) located in one virtual spot despite being located physically throughout the drive. My first step with libraries was to create a Logs library for quickly viewing logs of my favorite applications. It removes the need to step through hundreds of directories when I need access to them.

+ The small stuff. People are saying this is Vista SP2 and “what Vista should have been” and they are right. For me it is the attention to detail that makes Windows 7 so great. Being able to see the desktop without losing window locations (Aero Peek) or the sliding animation of the thumbnail viewer. The biggest attention to detail I have seen? Standardization. Microsoft is a large company with hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of software and naturally these were not very standardized. It is killing the company very quietly because of what Apple did, and I don’t agree with that either. Windows 7 takes a good step in a good direction with the inclusion of the Ribbon in more places and the semi-standard toolbar theme (found originally in Vista’s explorer). There are thousands of more things for me to discover and cover, so I will just leave them to you to find.

+ The bug fixing. I am going to touch on this not because of 7 directly but rather because of what Vista did. After using Vista for so long having to go back to XP is just flat out an annoying experience. To the point above, the little things matter and the bugs in XP are some of the most annoying bugs. Thankfully they have been addressed in Vista, and expanded upon in Se7en. What bugs am I talking about? Multi-monitor support in XP was pretty horrid; at work when I switch to an application via the taskbar it will randomly pop up a window on the other monitor. Let’s say I have IE open on one and Visual Studio on the other. When I click to goto VS, IE gets covered by another application! Hopefully you can see how annoying this can be. The other major bug that irritates me every day? The natural ability of XP to steal focus away from you just when you start typing. Today I am typing in IE as Visual Studio opens when all of a sudden my typing stops making words. What happened? Well of course XP switched focus to Visual Studio! Thankfully neither of these have been a problem since Vista.

- The instability. Yes, I know, it is a beta. The problem is that it is the ONLY beta we are seeing. After this it is supposedly RC0 and then RTM. Hopefully they can sort out the instability problems in that timeframe. For the record I got a BSOD this morning. “PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA” or something to that effect. In fact I get this sometimes in Vista and think it is due to my system rather than the OS. I ran memory tests and they all passed so I am thoroughly confused. Oh well.

- IE8. The reason I like Chrome is because it is basic, lightweight, fast, simple. How many other adjectives do you want Microsoft? You need to either focus on a lightweight version of IE or fix it. IE8 crashes more times than I hit the A key today. It is likely to crash while writing this. And I know, beta software. The problem is Beta 1 on Vista wasn’t nearly this bad! The worst part is that a single tab crash still brings down every single tab. I thought a major reason for going the modular route was to prevent that Microsoft?

- The backwards compatibility. It is 2009 Microsoft and I suggest that for your next OS you drop 32bit all together. I also suggest you drop the “Program Files” directory for “Programs” or better yet, virtualize them and make them fast. Stop supporting these legacy systems, increase the phase out program. Make Windows leaner, meaner and ready to fight toe to toe with tomorrow’s OS, not an OS designed and developed 11 years ago.

- Integration will be the key to success for any OS in the future. Google and Apple know this and have built their platforms around it. Microsoft is, as usual, late to the game. While Live Services has been picking up the pace in taking on this attitude, the OS is a far ways away from full integration with the Microsoft “platform.” Think of all the hardware you support from Zune to WiMo to the 360. These things should all be tightly wound into your services and more importantly your OS. They should feel and look connected rather than this Games-For-Windows-Live-is-really-Windows-Live-is-really-Xbox-Live-kind-of-I-think-sort-of-complicated-web-bullcrap.

It is no secret that I am a Windows fanboi to the extreme. I have used the OS ever since the early days of DOS and have used every single version including the horrendous Millenium Edition. I have often defended attacks on Vista because they are mostly founded on rumors. However when Windows 7 was announced I knew Microsoft had to hit a home run. It had to do something big in one way or another and they had to deliver on their promises. In essence, they couldn’t drop a single one of the gigantic balls they were carrying.

Now that the Windows 7 Beta went public I finally got my grubby little paws on a “copy” (download) and installed it within VirtualPC. I am only five minutes into using it and I already want to replace my Vista install with it. The big change is bigger than I thought, a problem that Microsoft marketing will have to overcome. What is the big change? The UI just makes sense. I guess it never occurred to me that Vista’s UI was confusing because it wasn’t to me. In my opinion, I always found Vista’s UI to be vastly superior to XP. Finding my documents, code, etc has never been easier until five minutes ago.

But it isn’t just about finding your data. Settings and general functionality of the OS is also much more discoverable. I am finding myself easily flowing through the control panel. The task bar, which I imagined to be a horrible gimmick, is something I will have to get used to but will grow to love. I can see why they made the changes. Finding your windows is easy and finding your favorite applications is easy.

While I am sure there will be problems with W7, I am blown out of the water that Microsoft actually took the time to work on the UI in such fine detail. Hopefully they carry the styling and standardization to their other applications like Office and Visual Studio.

It seems it is getting harder and harder to eat healthy. As humans learn more about what makes up food and as we make more genetically altered food I find that being able to understand how food affects you becomes impossible. There are some people that believe in all organic foods, others in being a vegetarian but there are people that contradict these beliefs. I think the best solution is just to take things in smaller portions, there is no need to eat a gigantic slab of steak in one sitting.