Glog

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this post in early September:

A friend asked me last week if I was following the circus of the election in the States (paraphrasing). Having formulated that question right after a week of vacation, blissfully disconnected from anything not related to the task at hand, i.e., enjoy sun and roller-coasters with my better half, the only event of significance I could come up with was about Mr. McCain’s choice of Mrs. Palin as a running mate, and mostly because it was all over the news: impossible to ignore.

Ever since Loudcloud days, I’ve been interested in the science (and art) of management. Without going into the details of Mrs. Palin’s background, I found one rather interesting point of comparison between the choices of candidates for VP. One of the more resonant criticisms of Mr. Obama has been his so-called lack of experience, and, in particular, his lack of exposure to foreign relations. This stroke me as odd given his background, but let’s for a minute say he is unable to drive decent foreign policy (decent as in effective and human). He demonstrated that he can build (and quite possibly manage) team of people that can run stuff. If he was lacking foreign politics exposure, he went and found himself a running mate with said experience (as Mr. Biden’s tenure in the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations would attest). Thus, Mr. Obama seems to have approached his choice of VP as a management choice of creating a team to run the country than for political motivations.

It’s mid October, and I am yet to figure out what Mr. McCain’s choice in Mrs. Palin brings to the table in terms of building a team.

The word vista, which was probably imported into English from Spanish, means a pleasing view, esp. one seen through a long, narrow opening. This is most ironic in the context of the latest offering from Redmond, which I had seen here and there but never actually used.

I recently picked up a no-name (well, it does have a brand, and a popular one at that, but the hardware manufacturer has nothing to do with this particular gripe, and I will appreciate being spared the install Linux diatribe) for a friend. This friend, who is not a computer whiz, speaks Spanish, so I wanted to switch the language in the OS to Spanish. Sounds sensible, right?

Asides from the horribly busy interface (discerning input boxes and even windows on the screen was a challenge, and giving up something like 35% of the browser’s useful real state, i.e., actual content, in the name of title bars, menus, plugin messages, search bars, tabs and frames annoyed me in extremis), I was unable to configure the thing to display menus and such in Spanish. In the process, I learned about LIPs and MUIs, I read a few [useless] threads on how to activate the Spanish translation (I apparently needed to install an undownloadable LIP, but only if I’m using something or other edition), and ended up nowhere. Ironic as well the whole Genuine Advantage gig. I gave up. Time’s valuable.

Compare this to the PowerBook I gave my Mom a while back: System Settings -> International -> Language -> Spanish. Log out. Log back in. Heck, I’ll trow in a reboot just to try and even things out a bit. Done. Move on with life.

I’m glad a lot of people find Vista useful (and pretty, I suppose) enough to endure it. I’ll spare you the expletives. Perhaps I’m getting too old to tinker like in the good old days, tho language installation (really, it should simply be activation) doesn’t qualify as tinkering in my book. When I tell people I last used Windows in the mid 90′s (I did use NT for about 4 months at Systemhouse), they sometimes look at me funny. But then again: I don’t have to endure my operating system. I use it and be done with it.