+ 4 - 0 | § ¶MS Office does something right!
Today I discovered the ability of Microsoft Outlook 2003 to sort inbox views "by Conversation". Finally a concrete reason why I should upgrade from Office 2000: comparison matrix. Of course, I wouldn't pay for it if my company didn't provide it. If it was up to me, I'd be using openoffice with Mozilla Thunderbird for free :)+ 3 - 1 | § ¶Ubuntu 6.06 on a Thinkpad T30
Yesterday, I installed the new version of Ubuntu (6.06) on my Thinkpad T30. There are alot of reviews of the distro floating around on the net so I won't get into much detail, but I did want to say that Ubuntu is now the easiest Linux distro to install. All I had to do is pop the CD into the drive, boot the computer, wait till the CD loaded me into a fully usable GNOME desktop environment, and click on the install-to-HD icon. After that, I answered a few questions, selected the appropriate partition to install to and off it went. The installer even detected that I had Windows 2000 installed on another partition and setup a dual boot environment for me.... very nice!
After the install, most of the hardware worked out of the box, but I did have to get a package called network-manager to complete the setup. With network-manager running, the laptop automatically manages what network connection it will use (wifi, lan) without much input from the user. We'll see how the distro behaves after a few weeks, but for now I'm happy :)
PS: Make sure to grab the gstreamer10-mp3 playing package to get mp3 playback!
+ 2 - 2 | § ¶The Breakup
Suzanne and I saw The Breakup with a bunch of friends this weekend. Despite what many critics said, I liked the movie. I felt that it portrayed the issues that some couples dealt with very well. Some of the critisms leveled against the movie included the lack of chemistry between the actors, the fact that it didn't follow the standard “romantic comedy” paradigm, and that the plot had too many loose ends. When viewing the movie myself, I could actually see some chemistry between the actors, I felt like they didn't really know each other at first (which is why they broke up) so they didn't really have much “real” chemistry. As the movie went on, however, the chemistry actually appeared. However it was too late for them by that time, and they had to go their separate ways. As for following the standard formula, I really enjoyed the fact that this movie didn't. I'm sick of every romantic comedy following the same plot where the couple meets unexpectedly, gets together, has a big issue that threatens their relationship, overcomes the issue, and is happy forever after...In addition to all of the above, the movie had a few elements that made it especially enjoyable for me:- Vince Vaughn wore Polish shirts on all the time, and there were lots of Polish references in the movie
- The movie was set in Chicago, and celebrated the fact... some movies use the same setting but barely mention it in the plot
- Vince Vaughn and John Favreau are awesome together (Swingers, Made, and now the Brakeup)
- mmm fuzzy nakedness... (sorry Suzy)
