Brent’s Thoughts

No before you start saying that it is bad for me to steal Vista, I haven’t. We have access to it at work, because the state is a partner with Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, we still pay for it, but it is a reduced rate per license.

As I have been playing around with it, it is a decent OS, but there are some things that are just too obvious in it as just complete rip offs. They have stolen gadgets from Apple’s Widgets and Google’s gadgets. They even put it in a sidebar like Google did. They stole the search function from OS X and most of the visual effects from it too. The new MS Photo Gallery is just Picasa without the Picasa branding and an AutoFix instead of “I’m feeling lucky”. The new transfer dialog moves away from the “Microsoft Minutes” timer and puts the OS X style transfer up there. To me it just feels like they went for OS X with some Google and Linux thrown in. To me it feels thicker when I am using it too. Like there is a lot of stuff running on my machine and I don’t really know what much of it is, or why it takes up so much memory doing it. 512 megs just doesn’t seem like enough anymore.

I am also working with Office 2007 some and in here it really does feel like they have moved down their own path some. The “Ribbon” style of menus does seem like it will be helpful in finding features in Office. The new blog post feature in Word might actually help me make my posts legible and keep Mom from telling me that I should really proofread what I write. J They might even have trimmed the memory footprint down some, as right now it Word is only taking up 16 megs of memory. I don’t really work with Office too much though, so I am probably not a good judge of its features in terms of usability.

Well let’s see how this post looks when it sends to my journal.

I haven’t posted too much on it, because my uncle has been working on having a new house built, but lately he has really been working his butt off on the car.

When I was up there last I spent a day and sanded on it the old paint in order to rough it up so that new primer and paint would stick to it. He had been doing a great job on patching up any holes in the body and rebuilding a few trouble spots on it. I covered most of the area on the car while I was there.

After I left he went to work on getting the body work finished on it. After that he started with the primer.

Now he has started on putting the yellow on it. The front half of the car will be yellow and the top and rear of it will be white with maybe a little pearl in it. the split will be along the trim lines. You can sort of tell where those are at on the primed car because of the holes for the trim clips.

The dash is also going to be yellow as well as the trim pieces inside the car. I don’t know for sure what color the interior is going to be yet though.

He is doing a great job and I can’t wait to see it in person when I go up there for New Years.

We went back today to have some more tests ran and to see if they could find a heartbeat for the baby. The visit started out with them telling us that they had gotten Pauline’s blood work back and that she was blood type A Positive. They also told us that the extra test for mecury that she had ask them to do came back 0%. Meaning that she didn’t have any in her blood stream.

The doctor then tried to find a heart beat, but wasn’t able to with the “crude” tool he was using. I was completely unimpressed with it. It was little more than a microphone with a amplifier on it, that he kind of just moved around on P’s stomach. We heard her heart beat a few times (which is cool too), but never the kids.

So the decided to do an ultrasound. They had P drink a bunch of water and then like ten minutes later we were in another room and she was getting an ultrasound. This was the kinda machine I was impressed with. 30 seconds into it, we were listening to a heart beat and 35 seconds into it we could see the baby. He moved around on it a little and there were a couple times were we could really see it clearly. Unfortunately, the two pictures we got apparently aren’t those times. You have to look at them with a little bit of an imagination to see it, but there they are:

I started a new album for it and clicking either of these picture will take you there. I also uploaded two with the baby outllined for those that can’t “see” it.

They measured the baby at 44mm, which for those that are metrically challenged is around 1.73 inches. Still pretty tiny. Next appointment is Jan 3 and they opened up the due date a little. Now it is somewhere inbetween June 22 and June 27.