I just looked at the winning numbers last night, and I saw that I won! Again! My streak is unbroken.
I take a contrarian approach to the lottery – I bet that a particular set of numbers won’t be chosen. If I’m right, I win one dollar, the amount I would have wasted if I’d bought a ticket.
By applying this strategy consistently each week ever since Georgia adopted a lottery, I’m ahead hundreds of dollars. That’s far better than most lottery players.
After less than two weeks, I’m dumping Vista. I’ll migrate back to XP next week, when I’m next in the office and can borrow a second laptop for a few days to make the switch.
Why am I doing this? Well, I spent an average of four hours per day trying to get my PC to do what I needed to do with it, sometimes without success. The last straw was Thursday, when I was supposed to give an internal demo, and Vista problems made it impossible. I can’t afford to spend so much time dealing with Vista, and I can’t afford to have my PC fail at so many essential tasks.
I’d made the change so that I could learn more about Vista. I expected some glitches, but nothing I couldn’t handle. And moving to Vista seemed inevitable. Sooner or later, our customers will move, and we’ll need to stay consistent with them.
I now wonder if moving to Vista really is inevitable. It is so seriously and fundamentally broken that it may actually fail in the marketplace. The core of the operating system is probably fine, but there is so much complexity layered on top of it for a variety of reasons that it is a constant battle to use it. And those extra layers, mostly put on to add security to a foundation that lacks it, are responsible for making lots of existing software that should work fine in Vista fail.
I’ll put up a few more posts about my experiences with Vista, which may help me if I ever again try to use it (which won’t be until Microsoft has issued a major service pack, at the earliest). And I’ll talk about the things I’ll miss when I leave Vista for XP.
Charles Engelke's Blog 