Update.

The other day in Horutoto Ruins, Julianne says "Tom, you should update your blog." This is a pretty pathetic attepmt in doing just that.

Because nobody knows what Horutoto Ruins are, I guess I can breifly explain that... The Horutoto Ruins are a low(ish)-level area in Final Fantasy XI. As you may have already ascertained, by blog is updated so infrequently because of the time-sink known as Final Fantasy XI. It's funny how something with no apparent goal can eat up so much time...

Real life hasn't been too much more interesting. I'm still not getting laid and I still don't have a car, (both of which may be changing this weekend, lolcauseandeffect) so FFXI is seriously my only real activity. I started my new job at The Home Depot this week. For the past 2 days I've spent entire shifts on a store computer doing e-learnings. I don't doubt that the whole ordeal would be slightly more tolerable if only they didn't take hours at a time to complete, or if you actually learned anything from them.

Today my new processor for my computer came in. It's an Athalon 64 x2 3800+. I thought I ordered thr 4200+, but it seems to be working really well so far, dual core processors aren'y completely fool-proof, but it seems to be handling the workload I throw at it really well.

In other computing news. I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate over the past few weeks. (This is where I tell you about where I didn't actually pay money for this "disappointment" of an OS, and there's a working OEM version on quite a few torrent sites, but I'm an honest American against software piracy so I paid in full for this wonderous new product :P) All silliness aside, my opinion of Windows Vista is such; If you haven't used Windows Vista for your own personal computing, you have no valid opinion. Word of mouth really can't speak for this Operating System, its value is really in what it can do for you, not what it can or can't do for your friend or a software critic. With that being said, I feel that Microsoft put a lot of time and effort into their new operating system, and the results weren't fantastic, but really very moderate. A few things that could have been better:

• Speed - If you're upgrading from Windows XP to Vista, (like I did...) You're probably going to notice that your PC is running pretty damn slow. But there's good reason for all of this, Most people who run XP have fairly modern PCs, which can zip around XP without much difficulty (Christ, it's been out almost 6 years.) With vista being so new, most people only meet the minimum requirements for any version. Case in point, you use minimum hardware, you get minimum performance. While this sounds like a nightmare, think of the first wave of XP machines, 1Ghz or less single-core processors, 128MB of RAM, 30GB HDD. That's no impressive by any means, and yes, XP lagged to shit like that. How do I know? I had that PC...
• Other Bugs - Some of the other bugs that people complain about are hardware errors, and networking. Hardware errors are common with new Operating Systems for obvious reasons, primarily due to the fact that they're new. Most common soultion? Go to the god damn manufacturer's website and get the updated drivers. I know it sounds complicated... maybe for a 3 year old, but problem solved. Networking iussues with Vista are a full-fledged nightmare, and I can assure you, I have no argument otherwise. In order to network a small LAN with mixed Vista and XP computers a complex series of steps is required that I can't even explain. And after taking all the effort for your system to even recognize the other PCs, you still have the issue of setting up file and printer sharing- which I still have no idea how to get working... yet.

Well, so much for my update turned Vista rant. I hope everything is well on anyone who decides to read this' side. I'll be sure to update again soon with either FFXI info or some more stuff I hate. Peace.