Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Well, here is how it started. My boss, lets call him JD, went on vacation for a week. At the same time we’re just recovering from April 1st mentality around the office. During the week, someone who will remain nameless, came up with the idea of sealing up the bosses office. Not only sealing it off but then also painting the newly sealed off door to look like the surrounding doorway to give it a little extra ‘wow’ factor.

As you can see from the picture we got a little lazy in our implementation of sealing the bosses office. We did in fact seal the door, but were too busy actually working to really devote the time + energy to paint. So we just opted to bring up a shipping container quarter filled with packing peanuts, sealed the door, and made it look like we completely filled the room so much so that it was leaking out. I believe you can see the peanut sprinkle down at the bottom, and peanut line at the top margin of the door frame in the top picture.

What was even better was it was requested to send a project summary of what we’ve been doing, and expect to have done in the next few weeks by email yesterday, which was the day before he got back. So all of us on our project lists put ‘filling bosses office with packing peanuts’ on our to-do with expectation to have it done today. I think that was a great team effort to have that done in one day don’t you think?

So today the boss came in from his vacation to find, like many others who’ve passed it in the last week, that his door was completely sealed off and overflowing with packing peanuts. To make matters better for us we got the COO to send an email to him asking why $500.00 worth of shipping materials was allocated to our department with need for explanation from him. Yes indeed we are a crazy bunch in programming, but at least we know how to seal the deal.

Oh, no, we’re not all fired…. yet. And as a precaution i taped an letter of admission on the door care of our friend CK. You can see his figure in the print-out hanging on the door.

Like many I was very excited when Microsoft decided to open the Windows 7 beta to the public. Within the first few hours of availability I downloaded the Windows 7 x64 edition, but excitement doesn’t necessarily mean i had the time to install the OS on a machine.

That changed yesterday when I needed an extra PC with windows in order to play Left4Dead. I didn’t want to use my Windows Vista Ultimate license unless I absolutely had to because I only get one license per year from school. So that’s when I remembered that I had a free chance to both test Windows 7, and have essentially a free licensed install to boot. So i made the switch yesterday opting for a dual booting system loaded with Fedora 9, and Windows 7.

The first thing i noticed when installing Windows 7 was when i clicked on the windows installation help files. In big bold print it said ‘Installing Windows Vista'! HA. I’ve heard through another blogs people found the same installation title in the help documents, but still seeing it myself just furthers my suspicion that Windows 7 is just Vista with a UI update, and some neat add-on core features.

Anyway, after the installation, which went pretty quickly i might add, i got to the new fancy dancy desktop. Nice, new toolbar, dockable desktop edges, and new improved processes to control the desktop themes. All in all it has the same Vista feel when interacting with files and folders, but a new Windows 7 desktop interface. It seems as if the only big change to the UI is the new ribbonesk toolbar instead of the traditional menu style of old.

I like it, don’t love it, but then again I don’t have a multi-touch device that I can really use to blow me away with using Windows 7. It’s almost beyond temptation to wish for a HP TouchSmart PC to take this puppy for a real spin, and have a legit excuse to purchase one since the price really isn’t that unreasonable. I did test a TouchSmart while at Microcenter and I sadly didn’t care for it that much. The reason? Well the machine gets hot on the display, the friction of running my finger on the screen actually caused my fingertip to get red and sore. Not a great intro to the machine, but i digress the Windows 7 system with multi-touch will be a great addition to the tools i add to my skill set.

All in all a pleasant first experience, no major bugs to report, docking desktop isn’t exactly as useful as i first thought it would be, but all in all it looks nice and is essentially the Vista I've become accustomed to.