The fact that my Homeowner’s Association pays for my $3,800 roof leak repair has made the $260 I pay monthly seem much more reasonable and tolerable.

I was quite startled by Walmart’s architectural choices, seeing this picture in a Walmart page on Wikipedia:

The best part is the first line of the caption got me hopeful that this actually was a picture of a Walmart.

Over two nights and probably 4 or 5 hours:

7 reboots.
4 failed updates.
One update which was progressing quite well at downloading even though the network card was not connected to a network.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate has been upgraded to SP1.

So far I have yet to notice a single difference in speed, performance, or anything else.

Click for Full Size Image

Attempting to Bootcamp XP on my Mac was a mistake. Two hours later I have a semi-working version of XP SP1 that refuses to upgrade to SP2 (hey, it’s only 3 years old. Of course there are still going to be major, blocking issues).

I’ve gone back and forth on just buckling and installing Vista instead, but I don’t want to. I think I might expunge Vista from my life. There’s just absolutely no reason to run it.

From what I understand I can “slipstream” SP2 onto my SP1 disc and then burn it, though I have to do something special to make the disc bootable.

Installing (rather, attempting to install) XP has made me realize what I’m leaving behind and how happy I am with my Mac. Perhaps this is the main reason Apple developed Bootcamp — to keep switchers in line by occasionally reminding them of their alternative.

PS: If you attempt to run Windows Update before activating your copy of XP, it will redirect you to a page. This page will have a small line at the top saying to activate Windows, and the remainder of the 99% of the page tells you your XP is not authentic and you should buy an authentic copy for $149. The one line of text explaining you need to activate has a little zippy you can click on, which expands to add text on how to activate. So, they hid the most relevant text on the page, simply to give more space to something the user probably doesn’t even need. The whole page is horribly confusing and quite possibly has stolen money from innocent people.