Believe it or not.. the monitor beats all comers - pen marks, nails, hammers and finally a crossbow bolt!

Would have thought you could do a six minute show on the old tablecloth trick!

Read this guy’s review on his experience in upgrading Vista to Windows XP. He reviews both the look and feel, performance and reliability of upgrading to XP and the choice is clear - all Vista users should be moving to XP as soon as possible!

Reliability
All I can say is “wow!” You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you’re a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory.

Mind you - I would recommend that you move to Mac OS if you have Vista but then again that would have been my recommendation when looking at Windows XP as well!

Fluid is a really cool little utility that allows you to create standalone webapps out of your favourite sites. It currently just works on Leopard and is based on webkit and the pioneering work that Prism (formerly WebRunner) started.

It is pretty neat as occasionally I run into websites that crash the browser. If I happened to be working on something (like a blog post) that did not have an autosave functionality (thank you Wordpress!) then I would lose everything. However, now with Fluid, each of these webapps has its own self-contained web browser in which it can run riot. Also, because it is based on webkit, it has the same look and feel of Safari 3.0.

This is pretty damn bad. I didn’t think cheesy acting could plumb new lows but this has to take the cake.

Prasad sends this through from Shanghaiist.com:

Money quotes are:

..introducing Jiangsu Province’s own MC Qiangqiang, whose work we discovered on video-sharing site Youku.com. The above video is his homage to MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This.” (Check out the original MC Hammer video here for comparison.) MC Qiangqiang has other videos which showcase not only his dancing but also his singing skills (he can sing the male AND female parts of duets!). MC Qiangqiang’s renditions of Michael Jackson’s moves aren’t bad, but not quite as convincing as his Hammer moves. For good measure he’s also done a version of Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own,” a great song from the soundtrack of Ghostbusters II. (”Too hot to handle too cold to hold/They’re called the Ghostbusters and they’re in control.”)

All I can say is that this guy has the moves but none of the stage presence!

It was sad to hear last year that Robert Jordan, the author of the Wheel of Time had passed away before completing his epic series. I remember reading the Wheel of Time series back in high school (early 1990’s) and he has been spitting out a book every 18 months with no end in sight until last year. However, according to Slashdot (article here):

“Brandon Sanderson has been chosen by Tor Books to finish the best-selling Wheel of Time fantasy series by the late Robert Jordan. Harriet, Jordan’s widow, chose him after reading his Mistborn series. An interview is also available via Dragonmount.com.”

Awesome news - though the quality of the books had slipped in the last couple of years. I was just reading to complete my time investment in the whole series over the past decade.

A warning out there for people. I had a mail come in from box.net that stated that someone wanted to share a file with me.

Hello,

A Box.net user (dcummins@filetransfer.com) wants to share “hello” with you. You can access this by clicking the following link:

http://www.box.net/shared/8harkq08ey

Box.net is the easiest way to share documents, photos, and files online. Learn more by visiting www.box.net

Thanks,

Box.net Team
support@box.net

Note: you were sent this email because someone has shared a file with you using Box.net.

I have no idea who dcummins@filetransfer.net is and I definitely don’t want to be downloading something called “hello”. Sounds like a new way to transfer viruses through a hole in box.net.

SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by Colloquis. Essentially it is a bot that you interact with online through MSN, ICQ or AIM by chatting. You can ask SmarterChild for information, a library of information, play games, use tools such as reminders, conversions and a notepad or get into an online community of other SmarterChild users.

Getting the tool is pretty easy. All I did was add smarterchild@hotmail.com to my contact list and I was good to go. It will ask some questions about your age and whether or not you go to school but it is very short. It will ask more questions if you use some of the info tools such as the weather and movies (USA only) but it is relatively non-intrusive and will respond only to your commands.

At any time you can get a list of commands by typing “home” and the creators have done a good job of creating contextual menus through the chat medium. I think it would be nice to extend the number of responses that the smarterchild could do to include other localities and services. I could see this being able to do a butler type service on an intranet which makes me wonder what sort of security does this have available. There is an SDK that you can grab from https://buddyscript.colloquis.com/.

Having visited that site I see that it has now been acquired by Microsoft and the developer SDK is no longer available until they have officially released it through the MSDN.

Do I dare tempt myself with this? I have an SLR now, but it is a film variant and I don’t use it that much at the moment. If I had a more powerful camera does that mean I have to start toting it around plus all the other equipment when I go on holiday? Usually I am quite happy with my small point and shoot but on my last trip through Vietnam/Europe and the USA I thought that some of my photos could have done with better equipment, lenses and possibly photographer