chriskarcher.net

So when the lady that took my blood on Sunday and it didn’t work out, she said I might have some bruising from blood that leaked out. I didn’t see any immediate bruising and all was well until today. Now there’s a big green spot the size of my palm on the inside of my arm. It looks like somebody punched me really hard. She said SOME blood would leak out, but jeez! It doesn’t hurt though, just looks kind of funky.

Anyways, I’m off to play some shuffleboard downtown (no, not the kind people play at old folk’s homes).

So giving blood today was a bust. Denicia’s iron is too low and they couldn’t get enough blood out of me. I went along with her because she had to donate for one of her classes. I’ve never given blood though, and wasn’t all too excited about it. She went first but they soon dismissed her after testing her iron levels! They went through the whole donation process with me, but after sitting in the chair for like 10 minutes they said they wouldn’t be able to get enough blood out of me. I think the lady just stuck me wrong…

It sucks that both of us went and tried but neither ended up saving any lives with our blood!

Eeeeek! I’m donating blood tomorrow!

Defensive driving is NO fun. Last time I had to take it I took a comedy course with a friend. It was horrible. The only nice thing about it was that it only took up half of a Saturday. My Saturdays are precious now so I opted to take the online course which I could complete at my own pace. I shouldn’t have waited 3 months to get started though . I just finished doing as much as I could handle for tonight.

Had one heck of a busy weekend. Denicia and I left around 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon to head to my sister’s house for my new niece Madison’s baptism. The actual baptism took place the next morning and was a nice little ceremony. Most of my relatives were in attendance. We spent the rest of the day eating some delicious BBQ and hanging out. Lauren was being a ham as always. She’s also taken to calling Denicia “Aunt Nici”. Uh oh, it looks like my future is set, more on that later.

Later that night we headed out to Denicia’s house in Alvin and I prepared mentally to meet her entire extended family the next day. Sunday went smoothly though and no-one gave me a hard time for being a white guy :). Denicia also was nice enough to inform me that we’re going to get married. Now that I’ve met her Grandma, the wheels are in motion and I can’t stop them. Lauren calling her Aunt Nici is just another sign that I’m not in the driver’s seat and am just along for the ride! In all seriousness though, her family is great and I was glad to meet them.

Wow. I just lost an entire post thanks to Windows Vista restarting my computer after installing some updates. I’m really not too impressed with this Beta release. I’ve been using it for a couple days now and Vista has been plain annoying more than anything. Windows Vista pros? A pretty slick interface. Cons? Everything else. There’s something really wrong when it takes 3 separate dialogs just to remove an icon from your desktop. The main culprit here is a new component called User Account Control. Anytime you try to do something that could potentially damage the system, this little guy pops up asking if you’re really sure, sometimes more than once. I could see this being useful if I accidentally dragged my c:Windows folder to the Recycle Bin, but not when I’m trying to do something as trivial as deleting an icon. Thanks, but no thanks.

The entire kernal and almost all of the components of Windows Vista have been rewritten from scratch. This means a lot for the stability and security of the system but doesn’t directly translate into any cool new stuff for the user. Besides the new Aero interface, the only noticeable change is the addition of a widgets sidebar. You can put on it things like a stock ticker and calculator for easy access. It’s kind of neat, but Yahoo! Widgets blows it out of the water. What happened to my relational file system, or my Monad Shell? These were two really cool features hyped up a couple years ago, but have since been removed from the initial Vista release. What reason do I have to upgrade to Vista? Internet Explorer 7? Way to show up to the innovative browser party 3 years late, Microsoft. The only reason I can think of is that DirectX 10 will be Vista only, but I doubt any publisher out there has the balls to release a DirectX 10-only game.

Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because the computer lost an entire post I had written. It’s important to note that this IS a beta release. The final version will hopefully be an improvement. You better get this one right, Microsoft. Your future is depending on it.

Oh yea, here are some screenshots:
Desktop
Flip 3D feature