Windows 7 Upgrade Report

This weekend I upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows 7. The process was very easy, smooth and devoid of hangups. But given all the preparation that's recommended (backing up your system, verifying compatibility, etc) the whole thing took more than three hours.

But it was worth it. The Windows 7 interface is quite cool, the performance is snappy and there's support for every single application I was already running. Looks like Microsoft got this one right.

Windows 7 Arrives

Well, my Windows 7 upgrade disc finally arrived today. I plan on installing it this weekend; I hope all goes smoothly. Better make a system backup disc first, just in case. I'll report how it goes.

For Fun...My Coworker

This dude sits one cube over from me.

Besides working with me, he designs and sells very cool t-shirts. Check them out!

Your Own Font - For Free

I remember sitting in a plane, leafing through an in-flight magazine maybe 10 years ago, and I came across an ad for creating your own custom font. Basically you wrote a bunch of characters in a series of squares, then mailed in the form along with around $200, and they mailed back to you a disk with your own font. I thought it was pretty groovy, but no way was I going to spend money on something I could reproduce by hand.

A decade later I find fontcapture.com, where you can do it all instantly, for free. Pretty cool--give it a try!

Public Opinion of Healthcare Plan: 41%

Take a clue, congress.

When 56% of your constituents oppose something, while only 41% support it, you'd better give that something the ax, or your jobs are toast. Just sayin'.

Picasa 3.5 - A Fantastic Photo Program Just Got Tons Better

I've long been an avid fan of Picasa, Google's free photo organizer and simple editor. No other application comes close to ease of tagging, simple editing and exporting of images. Now they've added two long-awaited and very desirable features: facial recognition and geotagging.

Picasa's online companion, picasaweb.com, has featured facial recognition for many months now. I find the service rather limiting, however, and it lacks much of the social aspect of my preferred online photo site, flickr.com. Now that Google has ported that technology into the Picasa desktop client, I can enjoy the feature with abandon. Because I have a lot of faces in my collection to be recognized. Nearly 20,000 photos worth.

The other new feature, geotagging, isn't really new with Picasa 3.5, but it is a vast improvement from previous versions. It offers a nice big Google Map right in the window upon which to drop whatever photo you please. Very slick.

What makes everything nearly perfect is the Picasa2Flickr add-on that I use. By simply selecting the photos I wish to move online, then clicking the Send to Flickr button, the photos are automatically placed in the separate Flickr Uploadr application, ready for upload.

The nice thing about the Flickr/Google combination is that they share the basic tagging/geotagging functions. So whatever data I give a picture offline in Picasa is automatically recognized by Flickr. The one drawback is that Flickr doesn't recognize the facial data tags it gives when recognizing faces.

In short, thank you Google for finally adding these features to Picasa. You definitely beat Flickr to the punch on this one--and you have retained at least one solid fan.

Compassion by Compulsion

Allow me to interject some religious philosophy for a moment.

All you hear about in the news these last few weeks is the hubbub over the Democratic plan to socialize health care. The arguments against it are many and valid: debilitating cost to the taxpayer, loss of control of one's own health decisions, degraded quality of rationed medical care, the overall negative economic impact. The list goes on and on.

But there's an underlying violation dealt by socialized health care (and all types of government handouts, for that matter) that offends the very essence of what it means to be human: Agency.

Agency is the one thing that makes mankind unique in the universe. Self-directed thought, combined with the ability to act on that thought to a degree, is why we can rightly consider ourselves special.

Agency was a key concept in the movie The Matrix, illustrated when the computer program/virus Mr. Smith cannot comprehend the human hero's motivation to keep fighting regardless of his inevitable demise.

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? ...You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Neo: Because I choose to.

Back to health care.

The proposed health care legislation is yet another giant step in the ongoing slide into what is portrayed as a "compassionate" society. Every government program that gives out something for nothing is created in the name of compassion. But is it really compassion? Compassion by whom? The lawmakers?

What good is compassion when it's mandated by another person? It even defies its own definition. Compassion comes about only through a personal choice to sacrifice for someone else. Compassion is the result of acting on one's own agency to help another.

Social programs, like the proposed health care legislation, invalidate any human choice in the matter. It takes away one's freedom to choose compassion. If I have $10 to give to a cause, the government would prefer to distribute it rather allow me the opportunity to give it of my own accord--thereby diminishing my agency and the core of my very humanity.

Giant social handouts are not programs of compassion. They're programs of compulsion. And when we become a society of compulsion, we have truly lost our freedom.