Windows 8 is a Mullet

 

Windows 8. No, really.

Some time back I was given a copy of Visual Aid: Stuff You've Forgotten, Things You Never Thought You Knew and Lessons You Didn't Quite Get Around to Learning. It is full of diagrams that tell you stuff, and is as much an object lesson in presenting data as it is a collection of quirky and interesting facts.

It had a page on haircuts, with an example of each. Including the Mullet. For those of you who don’t remember the 80’s, a mullet was a kind of crew cut front with an enormous length of hair behind. It was billed as the haircut that was “Business at the front, Party round the back”.

Just like Windows 8. I’ve been using Windows 8 for a few weeks now, and it really is an operating system of two halves. It is as if Microsoft have looked at the tablet experience and gone “There’s no way we can make a single system that does tablet and desktop at the same time”. So they have made a machine with works as well as Windows 7 for the desktop and has a Metro interface for the tablety stuff.

I reckon it works.  There are some irritations. The determination of Microsoft to hide the Start button has annoyed a few people, but I’ve now got used to pressing the Start key on the keyboard and then typing the first few letters of the program name to run it. I can get Visual Studio working in much shorter time than previously.

For me the biggest irritation is the way that some things are hard wired into the Metro full screen mechanic, whether you like it or not. For example, the good news is that Windows 8 has a built in viewer for PDF files. The bad news is that when you open it you get to view the document full screen or nothing. There is no way you can have small window open on your desktop, which is annoying.

I’m using a Samsung Slate as my primary computer now and it works a treat. I can dock it for proper work and then take it out and about with me. It would be nice if it had USB 3, so that I could access external disks a bit more quickly, but I can live with that.

I mentioned my “mullet theory” to a Microsoft Person on the Windows 8 team as the possible basis of a marketing push. She thought it mildly amusing, but I think it is unlikely we’ll get Nik Kershaw to sport his again I’m afraid.

Thunderbirds are Go

When I was a kid in the sixties (yes I am very old) a must view TV program was Thunderbirds. We first watched it on our old black and white telly which took ages to warm up. It wasn’t until we saw some magazines pictures that we actually found out the colours of the Thunderbird craft. I’ve never really understood why Thunderbird 2 is green, but I digress. The franchise has been round a few times since, with a major revival in the nineties. (At this point I shall gloss over the awful film from 2004).

Anyhoo, one of my birthday presents was a copy of the Hayes Thunderbirds Manual, which gives a detailed breakdown of the International Rescue organisation and their craft. I like this as much now as I would have done nearly fifty years ago. At first I thought it was a reprint of magazine articles of the time, but there is a lot more to it than that. The authors have made use of the wealth of resources gathered by Thunderbirds aficionados over the years and put them together into a very comprehensive and will written exposition of the Thunderbirds universe. There is even an episode guide right at the end of the book. If you have any interest in this fantastic series, then it is well worth a look.

Olympic Tennis at Wimbledon

We were lucky enough to snag some tickets for the tennis at the Olympics. This was held at Wimbledon, somewhere I’ve always fancied going to. So off we went. The trip across London was actually quite boring. After a media filled with dire warnings of travel chaos it was rather nice to just get on a sequence of trains and get there exactly on time.

The first match we saw was a ladies singles first round match and then we moved on to the highlight of the day for me, a second round match with Roger Federer.

Then, after a third match we headed for home.

There has been a lot of nattering about how London will have problems staging the Olympics and how the organisation and the infrastructure will not cope. This is rubbish. All the stops on the Tube were well highlighted and the trains were busy but very tolerable. They had folks lining the route from the station to the venue. The security check just took a few minutes and very person we saw, from the first chap at the traffic lights on the walk to Wimbledon to the cashier taking our money in the well organised souvenir shop, was polite and upbeat, asking if we had a good time and wishing us well. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. With a bit of luck we’ll make it to some Paralympics events in September too.

Nintendo 3DS XL

The Nintendo 3DS is a nice little portable console. The 3D effect doesn’t do a great deal for me (apart from make me slightly queasy after a while) but there are some very good games for it. I rather like Pilot Wings, Street Fighter and Mario Kart 7.

Now Nintendo have released an XL version of the 3DS, like they released a full fat version of the DSi a while back. It works exactly like the 3DS, only with a bigger screen. I really like this. Although the device is a bit bigger to cart around, it is not prohibitively larger and I’ve got much better at games like Ridge Racer as I can now see further into the distance because the dots on the screen are larger.

However, the XL version does have a much less “premium” feel than the original 3DS. That came with a power supply and a docking station. The 3DS XL comes with, well, just a cardboard box. Not even a power supply. This is a bit of a problem if your business model for your upgrade involves selling the old 3DS. Fortunately I have a spare supply lying around from way back.

The original 3DS was made of expensive looking plastic of different colours and levels of shinyness. I don’t think that this added a great deal to the gaming experience, but it did make it feel a bit special. The 3DS XL is not badly made, but the plastics and the finish seem to have been built to meet a price, rather than to make an impression. The large 3D screen is very impressive, but not particularly 3D as far as I’m concerned.  Battery life is no worse than the original device and the transfer from one device to another is painless and fun to watch, as a horde of Pikmin characters carry the information from your old machine to your new one.

If you have a 3DS that you have to squint at, you will appreciate the improvement. I certainly have.

King of Tokyo

Number one son doesn’t like board games with lots of dice. He reckons that they remove the skill, and doesn’t like being beaten by blind chance. I, on the other hand, love lots of dice. I like to be able to point to an unlucky throw as the reason for my failure to win, rather than any lack of skill/intelligence on my part. I reckon that chess would be vastly improved by a bunch of dice and a spinner.

Having said all that, number one son rather likes the “King of Tokyo” game, even though it has lots of dice. I like it too. Each player is a monster trying to take over Tokyo, or be the last one standing. A turn is a bit like the Yahtzee game, where you repeatedly throw a bunch of dice to get a good set, and then decide what to do with it. You have to balance attacking, healing and buying power ups as you go along.

The games are fast and furious and fortunes can wax and wane on the throw of the dice. We got through a couple of games in an hour and they were great fun. Even though I didn’t win.

Pesky Dice.