Shiny: Swarovski

In the Eatons(less) Centre in Toronto there's this big-ass tree. Whoopie doo I say, except for the fact that walking buy it, it twinkles and is mezmorizing. Every dangling thing on that sucker is a crystal snowflake by Swarovski (a really expensive store). Apparently there's some sort of fundraiser between them, the mall and childrens wish foundation. But seriously, that tree can cause a car accident, good thing there are none in the mall.

Shitty: Dell and USR

This is what you get when you buy a cheap dell monitor. Shitty ripples. LCDs should not ripple, and no this is not an effect driven by my slightly blurred photography. You may notice the pinching of the film (the thin coating that ripples when you poke an LCD...) near the top centre. Yeah, it's ugly. Try using it. The guy who bought it was on the phone with Dell support for the better part of 2 hours. I still don't know if its getting replaced.

(sorry, no picture) More shit is USR's incredibly crappy wireless products. A source of a never ending headache for myself and a few others. As it turns out the new drivers they have with their 'MAX' line of products (which is really no better than their already crap non-max line) fails to load before a windows user tries to login to the network.

What's that mean? It means if you're trying to actually use networking features for logging on, it won't work. Roaming profiles? Kiss them goodbye.

Another shit factor: Their driver installer requires IE 5.5, which isn't too far fetched but on a new installation where IE 5.0 is installed, trying to install the networking to actually upgrade the rest of the system... it's futile. Catch 22 anyone? And no, they don't distributed IE 5.5, or 6 on their CDs.

Silly: Ubuntu and the TTC

I jumped ship and headed towards the 'testing' version of Ubuntu, which is formally named Dapper (there's a fight whether it should be a Drake or a Dragon... don't ask) Anyways, I rebooted for the first time in a little while, and, this is my splash screen. It's funny, and silly, because they need to differentiate between versions so someone took their mouse and used some lame-ass graphics program to scrawl Ubuntu Dapper.

The other day when it snowed lots, myself and a few geek co-workers were amused by this subway car and it's waffle-like snow formation. It was pretty silly, and that's why it's here. Then my boss broke up the analytic meeting and told us it was because the framework of the car transfered heat faster. We were hoping for aliens. Dissapointed.

And that's that.