It's time for a fresh start, and that demands introductions.
My name, obviously, is NOT Xarathos, and if it were I'd feel really sorry for me, because any parent who names their kid something like that is just BEGGING to have him get wedgies in the cafeteria, but it's the one I use most often online where things like that aren't as silly. You can call me Jonathan, if you like; my friends do.
I am a student at a local community college in California, currently staying with my Grandfather for the last part of the summer, and a longtime user of Windows. Which is the subject which I find most interesting for the purposes of this blog, but we'll just have to see where else this goes before the novelty of having my thoughts on the subject published online finally wears off.
I'm obviously not the first person to hope to get the most out of their Windows experience, and in turn to help others to do so as well, but I'd like to hope my perspective has some merit.
I've been using Windows since I was a kid, back when it was Windows 3.11 or so, and it was basically just a fancy overlay for DOS, and given that it was as slow as molasses in winter (or slower than Dial-up, for those of you who've never seen molasses in winter) it was basically easier to just use DOS itself. I even remember something called "DOS Shell", which wasn't quite as fancy as Windows, but had the advantage of being much much faster to use, for what little it did.
To be honest, I never DID quite get the hang of the "command prompt" as a way of using computers. It might be efficient, but it's just terrible from a user standpoint. Great for people who don't mind getting their hands dirty, or who WANT to try and speak computer. But I digress. Maybe that loses me nerdcred or something, but who cares.
My philosophy of computing has slowly developed overtime, and it is simply this: computers should be simultaneously efficient, 'usable' (an oft' abused term that here means simple intuitive for the individual who uses it to do whatever their needs require and thus means different things to different people), and pleasing to the eye. Windows was, until Vista, really NOT that last thing at all.
Vista is gorgeous out of the box, and with a little effort it can be even more so; and with the latest updates, it IS actually very stable. I won't lie, I've had problems. So many, in fact, that I recently wiped my entire OS from the harddrive and reinstalled it, something I swore I'd never do once. Silly thing to swear, isn't it? I mean, when it comes down to it, it's data, and data gets corrupted. It happens, and when it does you need a clean slate.
So I've been working to get the single best user experience I can from Vista while I wait for Windows 7, which is, in my opinion, the greatest thing to happen to computers since SOMEONE (not Steve Jobs, by the way) invented the Dock Bar and made the Windows Taskbar look like a dinosaur.
This blog, assuming that I keep up with it at all, is going to be about that quest. The quest to find a computing experience that works the way I want it to work, rather than the way some guy in Redmond or Macland or, I dunno, Disney World, thinks I should use a computer. Unfortunately I've had trouble settling on just one approach, but hey, I'm an experimenter. It's what I do.
Hopefully, this'll be useful to at least one person besides me. If not, well, maybe I can just get my thoughts out somewhere. Not that I don't keep a journal, because I do, but blogging is a community experience, and I've been too antisocial in my life, and I've been wanting to do this awhile anyway. So here we are.
I'll get to actual content next time. Until then, excelsior, and dftba.
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