Every time I get a new wallet, I spend much more time than I should on attempting to find the perfect wallet for my needs. I must admit I have a small butt, and thick wallets make me uncomfortable when I’m in bureaucrat mode. It turns out that the wallet alone is 60% of the bulk, since I rarely carry more than my cards and papers with me. I rarely carry bills, let alone change, and I don’t need to keep any order for 5 plastic cards.

I then stumbled upon a post about Dynomighty’s Mighty Wallet. Unlike other wallets, this one is made from the same thin plastic used in Tyvek envelopes, making it slim enough to go unnoticed. On top of being incredibly thin, they come in a variety of cool designs. This YouTube video covers everything you need to know about it.

Since the shipping is ridiculously expensive, you might consider ordering them off eBay, where they sell for about 18$, shipping included.

UPDATE: I’ve received my wallet and have used it for a few weeks. It’s barely noticeable in my backpocket and has a very durable construction. While it does not have separate pockets for every card, it makes up for it by being astoundingly compact. Did I mention it looks damn good, too? I have the Elysium model, but there are plenty of wicked designs available. Go and get one!

A few months ago, I’ve decided to stop using Windows Live once and for all. I had never been a fan of the Live services, but I still kept an account for an occasional chat on Messenger. Things were getting worse by the day for the service, as the spam-to-useful message ratio went past 10:1, so I uninstalled Windows Live Messenger, signed off Live Mail and I have not looked back since then. Thinking about it, the real messages I received among the piles of spam were chain letters and virus warnings, since the relevant information was now being conveyed via Facebook.

Fig.1.1: Windows Live Mail, 07/11/10

It turns out most of the spam originates from people I know. Most of them probably fell for a “crack MSN passwords” website and gave away their credentials to spam bots. A simple monthly password change or better access control could rid the servers of that e-waste.

Dear Microsoft. I have purchased a mouse from you a few hours ago and I was thrilled to assign that button on the side to a cool function, whatever it might be, so I rushed to your website to download the latest version of IntelliPoint. I quickly figured that two things were horribly wrong upon installing the software.

1. It’s 15mb. I have plenty of room left on my hard drive, so 15 000 kilobytes won’t hurt my hard drive space. However, what in hell do you cram in those 15 megabytes? Pictures of kittens? Printable McDonalds coupons? Probably not. I’m sure you don’t need 15mb (which is many, many lines of code) to get a mouse button to do tricks.
2. I need to reboot my computer? Really? What kind of sensational magic can come out of this mouse that is wonderful enough to require me to reboot my computer? I have not yet explored the features of this mouse as I am yet emptying my sack of boiling nerd rage on my blog, but it would have to literally shit golden unicorns to justify this. Does your mouse shit unicorns, Microsoft? We’ll figure that out.
3. It wants to send anonymous usage information. You say it is to improve your products. What kind of information about a mouse could help improve your products? I know this information is anonymous, but what exactly is it about? Unless your motto is something reassuring along the lines of “don’t be evil”, you won’t see any of it.

Get this straight Microsoft: this is a mouse. If I don’t install your crap on my hard drive, it has three working buttons. It shouldn’t take 15mb and anonymous usage tracking to make a fourth one do something. Are you hiring people from HP or is it the new trend among driver developers to play inverted code golf? Oh yeah and the middle click is ridiculously loud, too.

Now let’s reboot and see what this IntelliThing is all about, shall we?

UPDATE:
I’ve fiddled with the mouse for two weeks, and I intend to keep it. It works well and the tiny adapter has an impressive range. The battery didn’t let me down yet, which is an improvement over the deceiving Memory Mouse.

Since my cellphone contract was ending soon, I tought I could try to negotiate a better plan instead of switching to Fido’s appealing 25$ plan. I gave Rogers a call and told them I was not going to stay with them once my contract expires. Almost machinally, the customer support girl offered me a better plan that suited my needs and a price I couldn’t get anywhere else.

However, I had to get a 3-year contract in order to benefit from this offer. I am currently on my father’s account and need to go on my own, so this is a big no-no for me. I managed to negotiate this down to 2 years (which was still too much) before saying I’d think about it and call later. This morning, I called back and got rid of this little requirement.

Now I’ve got a great plan, no contract (I will take one when on my own to keep this plan) and a brand new unlocked iPhone I got for 550$ on eBay. The Rogers customer service, I must admit, has greatly improved and the telephonists have been very helpful, which is a breakthrough.

Here is the plan I had for 37$ a month (taxes included):

• 150 minutes
• Unlimited calls and texts with 5 people
• Unlimited evenings nights and weekends from 9pm
• That’s it!

And now, the much more down-to-earth plan I got for 25.48$:

• 200 minutes
• 500 text messages
• Unlimited evenings and weekends from 6pm
• Call display, which is something you need to pay for nowadays.
• No contract

I hate to admit it, but I’m a satisfied Rogers customer. This time.

Morale of this story: haggle.

UPDATE (03/31/2010):

This was too good to be true. I received the cellphone bill today and they decided they would charge everything above. Looks like I will have to waste more time on the phone getting Rogers to play nice with me.

UPDATE: (04/07/2010):

I called Rogers and two friendly customer support people fixed the problem. They couldn’t credit the call display since I didn’t renew my contract, but at least I end up paying 10$ less at the end of every month. The least I can say is that their customer support people is very nice, a breakthrough in the field.

Am I the only one to still chuckle at ChuckNorrisFacts? Also, this is probably the first and last time “chuck norris” will appear as a tag on my blog.

I can’t help but laugh in silence when I scan 50 dollars worth of losing tickets for a customer. The most played lottery’s odds of winning a prize are of 1 in 32. Heh.

I finally managed to get my greasy hands on a copy of Windows 7, all thanks to my fantastic school program. I installed it tonight after downloading it for hours at a time on my school’s network.

Installation

Installing Windows 7 could not be simpler. After 3 or 4 questions, it started installing itself. The whole thing took under 30 minutes with no incidents. After a quick and absolutely painless install, I was absolutely delighted to see all my hardware seemed to work right. I still tought there was a little too much stuff in the Start menu that should have been buried deeper. I don’t like seeing notepad and rarely used utilities in the same place, but that’s just me. Nonetheless, a flawless “two thumbs up” for the installation. I expected to have to find and download drivers, but it wasn’t the case. Nick is happy.

Update: Windows 7 erased my GRUB bootloader, which is a big no-no, but nothing new from from Microsoft. Some useful tutorials can be found on the internet to get this fixed.

First impressions

I gotta say I’m pleased to see a more responsive interface and the complete revamp of the taskbar is welcome. For once, it really feels like they put a lot of thinking into it. The new features will appeal both to newcomers and power users. It’s also good to see they’ve combined all of the warnings under a single icon in the notifications area. They’ve also changed the Windows selector in a very intelligent way. I love how the window buttons show all kinds of information. The only thing I would have to say is that the bar uses way too much screen space without justification. I don’t see why there is no way to make it thinner. It’s otherwise a very good step in the right direction.

A thing I’ve always hated about Windows is how retarded things are divided in the system. You always have to search for this or this panel. The new control panel, while much easier to read through, still doesn’t seem to fix that problem. There ARE some improvements in the division of tasks, but I’m still looking for something akin to the ridiculously simple Gnome preferences menu.

The new Windows Explorer didn’t improve much, sadly enough, but it’s not that bad. Microsoft’s engineers added a few subtle changes to get things done faster, but there’s no easy-to-use folder up button yet. Still a very useable application, but nothing to rave about.

The system itself feels much snappier, even on a laptop that played fine with Vista. I’m glad to finally see I don’t need a ridiculous amount of RAM and CPU when idle. That alone is a major selling point for me. It might just become the next gaming rig OS, skipping Vista for obvious reasons.

Conclusion

This time, we’ve got a winner! Windows 7 indeed looks like a fixed Windows Vista, and that’s how I like it. Many improvements were made to the interface to make it truly worth it, not to mention the improved performances. Don’t be shy, this time it’s worth it!

Never in the past would I have seen this coming. Back in the time when PS2 ports were all the rage, I could never have expected mice to be headache-inducing bundles of hate. I explain.

With my first laptop, I had bought a simple, wired logitech laser mouse. I had no budget for those awesome wireless mice and thus used my mighty 3-button mouse until I bought another laptop. Then, having mastered the art of saving tons of money with eBay, I got myself a wireless mouse. A MICROSOFT wireless mouse, mind you. It worked rather well, with some connectivity issues here and there, but nothing to go crazy about. I eventually broke it by my own fault and decided to upgrade to the all-too-awesome Microsoft Wireless Memory Mouse 8000. In a line: bluetooth and 2.4gHz wireless, 1GB memory on the dongle, charges on the dongle, 5 buttons. What a mistake.

First, I discovered you have to use IntelliPoint, the software that allows you to use your mouse. That’s right, you need nasty software for your mouse to work. IntelliPoint… doesn’t work that well. Scrolling wasn’t always working (that’s right, scrolling) and the mouse stopped working with the dongle. With only bluetooth left, my only choice was to use it, which wasn’t that much of a big deal. That’s until Windows Vista’s shitty bluetooth support charged in. The mouse would rarely – if ever – be recognized when I turned on my computer so I had to remove the device and repeat the pairing process every – goddamn – time. Charging didn’t work everytime neither, rendering the mouse absolutely worthless.

So, as soon as I lost my now-useless dongle, I tossed the mouse aside and bought myself the first mouse I had, from Logitech, thise time with artsy zebra stripes. The previous one is still serving my mother, 4 years later, and NEVER failed to connect. Mice is another thing I will stop buying from Microsoft, along with mobile devices, keyboards and software.

Early this year, Linux pundits kept dubbing 2009 “the year of Linux”. For the first time, Linux distributions were bundled with consumer laptops and sold in the big stores. Nonetheless, it didn’t work quite as well as we would have wanted it to. Basically, here’s why.

Netbooks are dirt cheap devices marketed as simple net’n'mail laptops. When I try to imagine who will buy these, I can only see the kind of people who run old Windows XP computers with Internet Explorer 6 and an expired version of AVG. Now you are trying to sell these computer-illiterate people something different that won’t play well with their iPod Touch and you expect them to like it?

What happens is that these people cannot chat or play their music the exact same way they did on their previous machine. Even if the bundled software did everything better than Windows (and it often does), they don’t look and work the same way. These people don’t want to learn how the new thing works, they just want it to work like Windows. Don’t expect them to give a crap about the bulletproof stability and the security of Linux if it doesn’t look like XP. After a while, they will get bored with having to figure out how to do what they easily did on Windows and they will return the damn thing.

There is no way to easily market something radically different to people that have used Windows for years. No matter how intuitive Gnome is, people will still ask how they can install applications or change the wallpaper. Until manufacturers start to fully embrace and support Linux and offer it with full computers (and not mere Atom-powered netbooks), then maybe Linux will get the chance it deserves.

Cet automne, je me suis inscrit au CÉGEP en technique de l’informatique. Ce programme a pour prérequis les mathématiques 526, un cours plus poussé que les mathématiques de base de secondaire 5

Or, pour pouvoir prendre les mathématiques 526 en secondaire 5, il faut avoir complété les mathématiques 426 ou 436 en secondaire 4. Il faut donc prendre compte, lorsqu’on s’inscrit pour notre secondaire 4 à quatorze ou quinze ans, des prérequis du programme qui risque de nous intéresser dans trois ans, si ceux-ci ne changent pas.

Dans mon cas, j’avais fait mes maths 416 en secondaire 4, puis mes maths 436 en secondaire 5. On m’a accepté en technique de l’informatique à condition de compléter mes 526 pour le 20 septembre. Croyant pouvoir les faire pendant l’été, je suis tombé de ma chaise quand j’ai appris qu’il fallait attendre le bulletin de secondaire 5 (qui arrive au début d’août) pour s’inscrire au cours. Faute d’alternatives, je me suis tout de même inscrit au CRIF pour finir mes mathématiques et j’ai été informé du coup que les cours ne commençeraient qu’au début septembre, à peine quelques jours avant la date limite! Je devais absorber un an de matière – 210 heures de travail – en moins de 20 jours en plus des 50 heures de charge de travail du CÉGEP!

De plus, le cours de mathématiques 526 est parfaitement inutile en technique informatique, fait qui m’a été confirmé par plusieurs des élèves de l’année dernière. Lorsque j’ai interrogé mon professeur de mathématiques sur l’utilité du cours, il m’a répondu que je n’utiliserai jamais la matière apprise de ma vie, mais qu’elle sert plutôt à developper un esprit de logique. Alors je dois perdre un an de ma vie sans compter les coûts engendrés… pour développer mon esprit de logique?

L’esprit de logique, je l’ai, mais j’ai surtout de l’expérience. J’ai programmé des applications, créé des sites web et remonté des ordinateurs plus souvent qu’il le faut, mais on me refuse en technique informatique parce que je dois développer mon esprit de logique! Celui qui a ses 526 et qui ne sais même pas comment installer un antivirus, lui, se voit acceuilli à bras ouverts dans le programme.

C’est un lamentable échec de la part des bureaucrates bornés qui fixent ces prérequis ridicules. C’est à croire – et je serais peu étonné – que ces idiots n’ont jamais mis les pieds sur le terrain!