Latest camping pics are up!

----- 07.15.2006 --------
It is SO nice not to have any big plans for this Saturday. If feels like every previous weekend since the summer began and every weekend coming up until the summer ends is booked up with something or another. It was so nice crawling out of bed at 11 this morning, having some coffee & dicking around on my computer without much purpose or direction. Hence this update.... lol. Anyway, There's a couple things I want to mention. The quickest is this: Don't worry, I'll get my camping pics sorted out soon & posted.... today or tomorrow. Secondly, my buddy Luke sent me this link. It's a 12 minute mini movie. It's called The Call Center Movie and it looks at the lighter side of outsourcing to India. Quite funny and worth the 12 minutes out of your day!

So last night Jen & I drove out to our friends Mike & Susanne's place for dinner. They live in a beautiful house in Oshawa. We had some houre d'oevres (sp?), and then some delicious BBQ'd, maple-glazed salmon for dinner. Sat around and had a few drinks, some cigars (after all, these are the friends we made in Cuba!) and a fire in the chiminay. Trixie and their dog, Turner, played the sniffing game with one another and it was an all-around enjoyable evening and it was great to see them again. Mike or Susanne, if you're reading this, thanks again for having us over!

---GEEK ALERT--- Now, onto something a little geekier. Windows Vista. Again. I have found a few bugs and annoyances so far. And here is another. I submitted this to Microsoft using their Beta Reporting Client, but I really don't know if anyone is reading this. And if they are... who can actually escalate it so changes are made? Today was the 3rd time I used it, and I will attach the just of what I sent below about the File Association gui being gone. What a dumb move Microsoft! The other 2 issues I found were a cookie-handling bug in IE7 where you couldn't "trust" a site via the right-click Privacy Report tool, and the other issue is their decisison to change the "Yes" & "No" dialog box to "Save" & "Don't Save". That's fine, but they support the key strokes for Y & N. I am so used to using ALT + F, X, Y to get out of notepad & save... and now I have to change my strokes to use S instead of Y. And then I go to work on my XP machine and it's backwards! Microsoft, if you haven't read my beta report, but you happen to be reading this... PLEASE, add support for the Y & N keys... no need to mark it, just allow the keystrokes in addition to S & D. Thank you! And latest report/discovery is this:

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Not sure if this is the right form, but I have a problem in Vista. I can't find the file associations. I tried help, and all I can do is change the program associated with the extension to "open" it. What I want to do is change the program associated with "edit", or any custom action. Specifically, I want to right-click an HTML file and choose edit and have NOTEPAD open it, not WORD 2007. In XP, and previous builds of Windows, this was easy to get to through Folder Options | File Types. There does not seem to be such a gui tool in Vista. I'm sure I could take care of it from the registry, but why is there no simpler GUI for it? My Suggestion is this: When the user says "Choose a Program", add an ADVANCED button that brings you to the old gui from XP (or build a new one) to associate custom actions (such as edit) and multiple programs for the same file. One strong case for this is HTML files (as I mentioned). Change the default open command to Notepad will have very ill effects on my computer. Right now, I need to right-click | Open With, and then choose notepad (since I've previously used it, I really like the chached/MRU programs list). Why isn't there a very simple way to have NOTEPAD directly on my right-click menu by way of custom action.

Thank you for reading this and I really hope you will make changed prior to final release. As an IT Pro, this is a tool I use quite often.
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Hopefully someone out there is reading this and working to make Vista better.... before it's too late. Cheers!

----- 07.11.2006 --------
Wow, July 11th already! If I'm not careful, I'll blink... and then it'll be August, or even later! Well, I haven't updated in a little while, but with good reason. I was up camping in Algonquin park for the past week & change. And it was great! As tradition persists, Jen & I made our way up to Algonquin to chill my family. This trip seemed a little less eventful then others in some ways, but at the same time, I feel completely fulfilled with the trip. No regrets that I missed anything. In fact, I didn't even set foot in a canoe this trip... but that's cool. As fate would have it, this morning I was asked on a canoeing trip to a part of Algonquin I've never been, in a week & a half from now. Anyway, back to this trip. I guess pictures speak louder then words... especially when they have captions! The best of both worlds! I haven't gotten around to sorting them out & building an album yet, but I will shortly. Maybe as soon as this week... atleast that's the plan. Assuming Vista (Beta!) plays well with the software I use (Web Album Generator), all should be fine. So.... it's something for you to look forward to! It's getting late and this work thing is a little tiring after being off for a week. So, I'll leave it here and get back to posting something with a little more meat in no time! Cheers!

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