If you’re a PC Gamer however, I strongly advise against the upgrade to version 9.0.  In version 9.0 they’ve intentionally inserted scripts that minimize the game your in every 30 minutes and bring you back to the desktop.  I say intentionally because not interrupting game play is listed as a feature in the basic price package.  When I saw this I figured it affected games when it runs a scan on my PC. NOT THE CASE!

AVG 9.0 Game Mode WTF

Every 30 minutes or so, whatever game your playing, will just minimize without warning leaving you player idol which is infuriating.  I understand that they’re trying to nag you into buying the basic version, but the tactic used has actually crossed the line from helpful service to virus like behaviour.  I’m certainly not going to spend $34.99 for a program that behaves like a virus.  I download your program to prevent annoyances like that from appearing on my PC altogether. AVG crossed over to the darkside with version 9.0 and I’ll never use it again.

I’ll be deleting your software as soon as I can find a suitable replacement. You can also bet your ass that I’ll evangelizing your services to less competent computer users who ask me to help them manage their PC’s.  (Most of whom, don’t mind spending the $34.99 by the way.)

If anyone has suggestions for more customer oriented non-virus like ANTI VIRUS programs… please leave me a note in the comments.

Bye AVG, I hate you.

Sincerely,

Tarandon

His goal was originally to break the world record for circumnavigating the globe by bicycle by a whopping 2 weeks. The reason: hope that his frenzied pace would convey the urgency with which this money is needed.  Sadly his donation page currently sits at 3% of his total fund raising goal. In an amazing attempt to further assert his urgency has has increased his daily average distance to an astonishing 150 miles per day over the past few weeks. Every day he comes a little bit closer to doubling his target margin of 2 weeks.  He’s now within range of shaving a month off the world record.  This young man is about to make world history and nobody seems to be aware of it.

The lack of awareness is not for his lack of trying however. To be quite frank he’s made more of an effort than a lot of efforts I’ve seen to get his message out to the world. His portfolio  includes a map of his journey as assembled online by a GPS unit, a dedicated blog, a twitter acount, and a donations page hosted by JustGiving.com. With all these avenues working for him I would have thought that he’d be much closer to his goal than 3%, an so I’ll make a donation.

While it may be small compared to his goal we all know how those dollars can add up.  I’m also writing this post in hopes that some of you out there might feel compelled to follow in my footsteps. Tthrow this guy 10 or 20 dollars toward his goal, after all he’s about to break the world record by almost a month and that kind of raw athleticism deserves a bit of reward if not for him, than for the millions world wide who suffer from Parkinson’s.

You can follow James’ journey online at whereintheworldisjames.com

For more information on James Bowthorpe and the motivation for his record breaking adventure, visit www.globecycle.org and while your at it, make a donation.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Usually I tend to make friends by offering comical insight or odd perspectives on topics of interest. I provide a view of a situation that might warrant some attention. Sometimes this involves rather lengthy debate, but sometimes all it takes is a series of one liners that create interesting juxtaposition.  Interestingly enough Twitter caters to these one liners quite nicely.  The character limit imposed by twitter prevents the lengthy debate style conversations I might prefer to have.  It instead forces me to simply add my two cents worth to a conversation.  But cming up with 40 or 50 one liners a day can be quite difficult.

One liners don’t enter my mind very easily.  It takes some work, and sometimes some knowledge of the people your presenting them to.  You need to understand your audience to pick up on things they’ll find funny or witty.  The problem with twitter is that the view of any one persons life only comes via the same short snippets I’m trying to make an impact with.  And because the birds I follow are usually organised around undustry not character similarity, it’s hard to find one liners that don’t alienate some while appealing to others.  I’ve been taking shots in the dark on a one off basis hoping someone might find me humourous/insightful to moderate success.  I’ve also been toying with a the option of just not caring how many followers I have.  Resigning myself to this option (at least for now) seems a little bit like quitting.  Whatevs!

Cheers,

Tarandon

It’s interesting to try and identify why the internet today seems more apt to meet my needs as a user than it was 5 months ago.  Maybe it’s just the summer time, and the renewed energy that comes with warm weather but I think life in general just seems to be going at a better pace than it has in the past.

Whatever the reason, I plan on keeping things moving forward.  Just updated the whole backend of this bitch and now I’m ready to take it all on.

Now, off to investigate cheap bicycles in Toronto.

Cheers,

Tarandon

I lack a basic sense of inspiration.

I get frustrated with the obstacles far to easily.

I get really frustrated with the fake it till you make it types, slowing me down because I have to explain everything to them.

I get tired at the uphill battle and the falling rocks and the stolen ideas and misplaced credit that continuously keeps me from realising the greatness I know I’m capable of.

I’m tired of the lying and the backstabbing stupidity of the corporate agenda.  I’m infuriated by the incompetence of the enabled, who enable the incompetent to fail repeatedly; and they do so by using that failure to justify the need for their incompetence.

I realise that as I ramble the pronouns get muddied and my lack of an ability to communicate that which burns me so sharply makes my soul ache all the more.  Inspiration cannot thrive in this environment.

The parade of the uninspired masquerading in and out the revolving door of this disfunctional business unit brings a cold and icy wind that chills my flame and saps the strength of my inner awesome.

A George divided against itself cannot stand.

When the worlds collide, change will follow.

When I first heard of this concept by Anand Agarawala, I was really excited at the potential of this new desktop environment.  He was even invited to TED to display his thesis project to the greatest minds on the planet.  But what I downloaded and what he displayed were two very different interfaces.

In the TED talks the user was able to resize the icons in an analog fashion, they were able to make the icons rigid or free moving, they were able to make shelves out of icons and stack other icons on top of them, but this was not the experience I was able to get from BumpTop Beta.

While the animation of BumpTop icon resizing was smooth, the ability to re size was incremental and lacked the limitless feeling demonstrated at TED.  The icons also did not spin as freely as the ones in the demonstration, they more or less conformed to a grid with provided wiggle room to create the illusion of clutter.  It was possible to post pictures to the wall of the BumpTop environment but was not able to create the ’shelves’ that were included in the demo.  When editing notes or prompted dialogue boxes like an outlook alert, the left edge of my BumpTop overlay became transparent exposing the windows desktop.  This is likely because widescreen support has not been fully implemented.  The list of grievances is long at this stage in the game but I’m still confident the BumpTop team will be able to pull it off.

I had my misgivings about the interface, but keep in mind this is just a Beta.  It really is worth while playing around with if you can get an invite, but in the end its just an overlay for your desktop and really doesn’t help you all that much if your desktop is pristine like mine (no icons to be seen here).  Everything created, copied or deleted only affects your desktop right now, but I hope this could eventually become a replacement for explorer in general.  Every file folder being its own room and its contents interactive icons.

Cheers,

Tarandon

I just noticed this today.  If it is new, I like.  If not, I still like.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Update: Looks like it’s not new, the folks over at Blogoscoped noticed this too!

The new operating system is called Palm WebOS.  Somewhat predictably this operating system is designed to be really easy for web developers to design applications for.  If you happen to know X/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create applications for this new operating system.

What this means for the mobile market, is that right out of the gate there are potentially millions of developers available for this system with all the knowhow required to get an application up an running in as little as 3 days.

What’s even more exiciting is the user experience design for this new operating system.  Palm has created a device that’s really open to developers while at the same time being fairly sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly integrate information from several sources simultaneously without duplications.  This means that your contact list from outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc.  can all be integrated on the same device without any hiccups or format incompatibility issues.  In short, I think they’ve acheived what google was trying to do with Android, except Palm seems to have pulled it off with a whole lot more class than the Big G.

That being said, I still have some concerns over the application interface being web based.  To me this seems like an opportunity for people to develop self installing applications of a malicious nature through link hijacking and the like.  I really hope Palm has thought far enough into the future to prevent these possibilities from coming to reality.

I think Palm deserves a Kudos from the tech community for sticking it out so long and innovating in a market that seemed to have all the angles covered (or at least have people with patents that claim to cover the area Palm has ventured into).  On that note, let the lawsuits begin.  I suspect there will be some litigation in the near future.

Congratulations Palm!

Cheers,

Tarandon

For free software this is really slick.

I’ll do some more playing around when time permits.

Cheers,

Cheers!

Tarandon