Not because we work in high-tech we have to look bad all the time, plus our spouses may enjoy this faaaar more than we can.  I recently became a member of Beyond the Rack, a Canadian online fashion outlet which sells higher-end brands sometimes up to 70% off.  So far I have not bought anything for myself (but was tempted by some Ben Sherman stuff) and we got my wife a Guess handbad at 50% off.

If you like good stuff and like me hate paying top retail prices, check’em out here.

Just came back from voting and when you look at who’s on ballot and what’s been happening with the two main parties (read: corruption scandals), this occurred to me: Youppi for Mayor!  The main reasons:

1. He’s orange (as good as a reason as any)
2. A vast majority of Montrealers love him
3. He has no mouth making it harder to lie, cheat or mutter stupidities

’nuff said on the topic of the clowns.

I got my copy of Win 7 Home Premium for my wife’s laptop and installed it last night and already installed the RC on an old Sempron 3000 w/1Gb RAM & ATI 256Mb Radeon card.

Collection of thoughts on the two installs:

1- The Sempron box: old PC doing not too much but gathering dust at this point, so I wiped the HD clean of XP and installed the release candidate version (RC) about a month ago.  Smooth install, and surprizingly fast operations for a “new” OS on an old clunker.  Have not had the chance to mess with it since then but was impressed nonetheless.  The ATI card made it so the UI with full-blown animations was working smoothly.

2- The HP Latptop: it’s a Core2Duo with 4GB RAM and 800Mhz FSB, decent hardware running Vista 64-bit and was slower than molasses due to Vista.  So did the upgrade thing as I decided to be lazy about it (I usually install an OS from scratch but my wife wanted it back asap so what the heck!).  The upgrade process went without a hitch but be advised it took hours.  Just be patient.  The laptop under Win7 runs smoothly and I have to say significantly faster without changing a damn thing to the apps & hardware.

Overall, Win7 is a really cool OS at first and will post notes as times flies by on how this is going.

Anybody else enjoying 7 and ditching Vista faster than the speed of light?

]]> http://jphebert.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/windows-7-first-thoughts-the-upgrade-process-from-vista/feed/ 0 jphebert http://jphebert.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/iphone-3gs-thoughts/ http://jphebert.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/iphone-3gs-thoughts/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:31:46 +0000 jphebert http://jphebert.wordpress.com/?p=230 ]]>

Am I ever glad I got this device!  I can now check email, surf, play music, watch videos and the usual stuff expected, but what makes this a killer tool is the app store.  Going back to a BlackBerry (since I’m not an email power typer) is not possible but I’d love to check out an Android phone once the OS hits 2.0.  Enough money spent on gadgets like this for the time being!

Check out the specs!  I’m drooling..  Will merge my iPod Nano, my cell and my GPS into one.

For those of you (maybe 2 or 3) who read this bog know that Star Wars fan I am, and big fan of the KOTOR game series.  KOTOR 3 will be a MMORPG (never played one before) and I can’t wai to get my paws on this one, this trailer should explain why:

I just gave a whirl to DoubleTwist, a new sync package which can sync up your media to any device (iPod, PSP, etc.).  While this is an interesting package, I’ll stick to my trust told iTunes until they release a feature lacking in iTune which to me is a holy grail: dynamically downscale files when sync’ing.  All my rips are in MP3 @ 256Kbps, so files are fairly large, and I manually convert to AAC 96Kbps prior to the sync.

I’ll also give it a whirl (DoubleTwist) on my wife’s Blackberry Curve 8900 since its much simpler/ligher than the Roxio one.

The Coyote’s future is at stake, or at least where they’ll play in the future.  We’re now seeing two investors willing to keep the team in Arizona (where the only ice outside the rink is in your glass) and sell this to a public with “prior engagements” (Nascar, NFL, NBA, etc.).  Local culture is around these sports, not hockey.

I think the goal of making a franchise work is a great one, but they’re at the point of cutting losses and moving on, loosing 70+M$ in the last few years should be a clue any investor should look at.    Just move the team where it can be profitable (and that means somewhere people like hockey), I’m not saying go with Jim’s plan but where it snows would be a start..

The NHL needs to be held accountable to selecting cities for new teams.  Arizona?  Someone needs to go back and hit the books..

I’m in the process of making my son’s hockey team post-season DVD and decided to try the software which came pre-loaded on my wife’s new laptop we got last December.  First – egad – I’m using low-feature OEM software!  How many time has this happended?  Almost never.

OK, I’m in and I have a bunch of slideshows to do with pics we took (easy as pie!), clean the source tapes (easy but not as efficient as others) and built the DVD template (not bad not great).  What struck me is that I’ve done this all in minutes very easily without manuals just a few “F1″ moments.

When I upgrade my trusty DV camcorder to HD, I’m getting the full suide for HD/Blue Ray for sure.  Rarely have I been impressed with a combination of simplicity and results.
Reference:http://www.cyberlink.com/products/cyberlink-dvd-suite/overview_en_US.html