Trouble is, I installed service pack 3 first, and the installer is just smart enough to go: hey, I require service pack 1 or 2, service pack 3 is neither 1 nor 2, I’m going to throw up an error message and abort.

+1 point for checking system requirements as part of the install, I guess, but minus several thousand points for not considering the possibility that a future service pack might someday be released.

If you’re not familiar with BRIEF – and I don’t blame you, honestly, considering that this was over 15 years ago – it was a text editor, quite possibly the best ever made for DOS.  It allowed you to open files of unlimited size, have multiple buffers open with easy copy and past between them, delete columns of text – a feature I still don’t see replicated in modern editors – and it did all of this with startling speed.

The “R” in “BRIEF” stood for Reconfigurable and it wasn’t a lie or marketing exaggeration; you could configure the program with all sorts of custom hotkeys and commands and so on and so forth.  It also had a C-like programming language built in for writing macros.

This is why, after learning BRIEF – it was a fairly non-user-friendly editor, its only failing, really – and then changing jobs to another company that also used BRIEF, I was completely lost.  See, the developers at the first company had created all sorts of tools using the built-in language, and I had never realized that they were custom tweaks.  In my new job, which used the application with its default settings, I wound up having to re-learn, from scratch, a tool I’d been using daily for years.

This had a somewhat powerful effect on the way I configured my home machines after that.  That is to say, I pretty much avoided “productivity tools” that changed the way I used the base OS, because I took the position that, by doing so, I avoided handicapping myself on occasions when I had to use a machine that wasn’t loaded up with all sorts of tweaks and settings to make things easier.  If I was condemned to using a vanilla OS at work, my reasoning went, I might as well stick to vanilla at home.

It’s only recently that I’ve softened this position a bit.  My current job allows me to configure my desktop however I see fit, and the reaction to seeing a new piece of software installed is “hey, that’s neat, what is it?” and not “that software isn’t part of our standard desktop environment, remove it.”

So I have actually taken to trying OS tweaks and tools out at work and evaluating them there before moving them home.  Ones that actually make me more productive during the day make the cut, ones that don’t die on the vine.

These are the recent survivors:

First, though, a comment on something that’s not a custom tweak at all but a recognition of something really rather nice that I think was added in Vista: Hotkeys for the Quick Launch bar.

I don’t like application icons on my desktop, so I have Windows set to hide them.  Everything I use on a regular basis goes in the Quick Launch bar, stuff I use periodically goes on the Start Menu, stuff I use irregularly stays in the “All Programs” group.

With Vista, I found that I could launch things from the Quick Launch bar with WinKey+#, obviously only for the first ten items in the Quick Launch bar, but a nice timesaver nonetheless.

There’s a bunch of other WinKey+ hotkeys; I’ve been using WinKey+E to open Explorer windows for ages but I hadn’t really explored beyond that.

Anyway, on to the add-ons:

VirtuaWin (and VirtuaPlus plug-in)

We only have one machine here running OSX, and it’s used as a media center only, so I didn’t delve into Spaces until I was visiting a friend (and rabid Mac zealot), and watched him work.  It was something of a – apologies to Kiki Stockhammer – paradigm shift, and something I can’t believe Microsoft hasn’t stolen yet for Windows 7.

To achieve something of the same effect, I use VirtuaWin.

It isn’t as good as Spaces – you can’t assign applications to their own desktops – but it lets me have six desktops open at work, with one for email and our HR portal, one for doing builds, one for our bug tracking system, and the last three for whatever projects I’m working on, one project per desktop.  Since I often have three projects running at once, it probably saves me an hour a day of state switching.

I also use the VirtuaPlus plug-in so I can have individual wallpapers per desktop.

Another application I’ve added to speed things up is RocketDock, though I don’t use it for its intended purpose as an application launcher.  I’m one of those people who have documents and media scattered throughout multiple drives and network volumes, in a way that makes perfect sense to me – though probably not to anyone else – and so I have all the folders I most commonly use on a dock.

One of the problems with RocketDock is that, well, its usefulness goes down pretty fast if you can’t access the dock.  While you can set it to always-on-top, it interprets that very literally and it will bleed-through full screen applications like media players or games.  You can set it to autohide, which prevents that particular problem, but it’s a little twitchy when un-hiding; I used it a few months ago and I was constantly, and accidentally, launching stuff when I tried to click on objects near the top of the screen.

This was solved by the last of my recent additions, a little app called MaxTo.  Simply enough, it lets me change the size of the desktop used by applications when maximizing, but doesn’t limit full screen applications.  I set RocketDock to allow itself to be covered by other programs, use MaxTo to tell Windows that the RocketDock area is off-limits to maximized applications, and get the benefits of quick folder access whenever I want it, while not interfering with games and so forth.

I still have trouble breaking with my vanilla-OS habits, but these three have persuaded me to allow a few sprinkles.

Yeah, I’m going to hell for using that as a closing sentence.

I quite enjoyed Half Life 2, regardless of the lack of ending, and while I’m putting off playing the “episodes” until they’ve released the last of them, I figured I should track down this thing, called “Lost Coast”, and give it a try.

For the record, in the space of playing a 15-20 minute long level – which was pretty neat, by the way – I managed to get stuck hard enough that I needed to look up a hint on the net.

In my defense, I only got that stuck because I ran in to a bug; there’s a point where you blow something up and it’s supposed to damage some of the environment in a way that lets you get through, but when I blew it up, it didn’t actually complete its script so I COULDN’T progress.

Still, it was pretty embarassing.

Oh, I had to install Steam for this thing.

I have in the past looked at Steam rather critically.

Honestly, I still think it is astonishing that Valve has pulled it off; they’ve managed to convince legions of gamers that they are to be trusted, and even though they’ve shown in the past that they can cut off your access to content you’ve paid for, leaving you with no recourse, they remain in the good graces of what seems like the majority.  There comes a point where you have to take a leap of faith, that they wouldn’t have gotten this level of trust without earning it in some way.

So, I may even make the odd purchase on it in future, with the following caveat:

I don’t, as a rule, pirate games and haven’t felt the need to since I was, oh, roughly 17 or so, so over half my life ago.  That marked the point where the amount of money I could spend on games meant that I had enough games TO play that they could occupy all the free time I could devote to games, so if I went and pirated stuff it would just be adding stuff I didn’t have time to play to the piles of games I’d actually spent money on and didn’t have time to play.

If I buy stuff via Steam, and then Valve decides to muck around with me, I’m not going to feel shame in going to any lengths necessary to get my digital “stuff” back.

At the moment, Steam is in my good graces.  They gave me the bonus level I mentioned, and a Portal demo and a couple of other freebies, and when I put in the serial number from my thrift-store-purchased retail copy of Half Life, they gave me the two expansions – Blue Shift and Opposing Force – free of charge, threw in Counterstrike, and added in a couple other online deathmatch style games.  It’s not hard to be in my good graces when you seem to be falling over backwards to give me Free Stuff.

We’ll see how it progresses.

It just didn’t pull off the “horror” thing all that well.

You are almost always in control of your environment, and being scared is all about not having control.

The best scare in the game involves a ladder, and it pulls off the scare because, well, when you’re on a ladder, you have almost no control – your weapon is holstered, you can’t jump off the ladder, all you can do is go up to the top or down to the bottom, and getting on and off a ladder is something the game does for you.  You are actually helpless during that brief period, and this is a pretty rare thing in Fear.

There are also a couple of “let’s flash something right in the middle of the screen” early in the game – again, the player is out of control – and those are plenty jump-inducing, but you don’t see them after the first couple of levels.  The game seems to stop trying to scare you after level 3 or so, and doesn’t pick up again until the next-to-last level.

It doesn’t help that the player is a genuine badass.  Special forces, superhuman reflexes, carrying a small arsenal of guns, in an environment dripping with spare ammunition and where you can save at any time… the proper response to any conflict is to shoot the hell out of it and count bodies later, never “run screaming like a little girl.”

In fact, running – screaming like a little girl or not – usually isn’t an option if you want to progress in the story, and neither is stealth.  The game has a pretty neat melee combat system, but getting close enough to someone to bust out your kung fu is a pain in the arse.

You’re going to have to shoot mans, lots of mans, which leads to the next thing I’m going to bitch about.

80% of the enemies in Fear are, if you follow the story, enhanced-human clone soldiers, all connected via a telepathic link to a single uberpsychic general.

This sounds pretty creepy, and it might be, if only they weren’t so damn chatty.

If you’re walking down a dark hallway with your flashlight on, for instance, and it’s seen by one of the clones, he will loudly shout “flashlight!” to the rest of his squad, which alerts you to their presence.  They’ll also helpfully shout “grenade out!” or “fire in the hole” when they’re throwing a grenade at you, shout for reinforcements when they’re down to low numbers, and so on and so forth.

They’re all supposed to be in telepathic linkup, right?  About the only sounds they should be making are footsteps, and maybe involuntary screams.

Now, I get that it would be really unfair if they silently split into two groups, with one group taking a side hallway to get behind you while the first group set up an ambush for you to walk into, but it would also be super creepy, especially if they were smart enough to use air ducts, etc, and you were trying to figure out from footsteps just where an attack would be coming from.

You do occasionally fight a variant of the clones that IS silent and has Predator-style optical camoflauge, and those ARE creepy as all get out, but the rank and file?  Not so much.

I’d been told that the creepy level ramped way up near the end, and this is true, but it’s only really notable because the majority of the game, after an intro that does a pretty decent job of jolting the player, settles down to a straight-up shooty game and stays that way for a surprisingly long time.

It was still a good game, but it left me wanting.  Fortunately, I have Dead Space to try out next, and that looks like it should make me jump a bit.

It’s hard to do that when you’re being fed, though, and this is how I wound up, this Thanksgiving, trying to figure out why Vista kept claiming that my father had installed a new video card.

That turned out to be the least of his problems.

He has an Acer desktop, about a year old, and somewhere along the line it got in a bad way.  It’s not like it was full of viruses or spyware or anything – I think that any self-respecting piece of malware would have looked at this machine, said “look, man, you’ve got enough problems” and refused to install itself out of pure decency – but it proved that it doesn’t take a virus to really mess you up.

The nice thing about Acers, normally – we have two Acer laptops, by the way – is that they’re very much no-frills machines.  They don’t tend to come with a ton of bundled software.  I suspect, therefore, that the multiple conflicting security suites installed were the result of him falling for the “PC tune-up” service sales pitch at Best Buy.

It had two different anti-spyware programs, two different firewalls, and one of those “free for 90 days!” antivirus programs.

I’m leaving brand names out here deliberately because I used to work on antivirus software and I wouldn’t want to be seen as partisan.

Internet Explorer, when I launched it, had three seperate third-party toolbars installed, all of which opened their respective home pages in different tabs.

Watching this thing boot was an education – one company’s firewall complained because the other company’s anti-spyware was trying to update itself automatically, the antivirus program loaded, complained that his subscription had expired, that his virus definitions were nine months out of date, and then started a full-system virus scan anyway, at the same time as yet another package started trying to optimize the hard drive and what seemed like every application on the system started trying to do self-updates.

Should I mention at this point that my parents have a 256kbps – that’s not a typo – DSL line?

It was the single most effectively gridlocked PC that I’ve ever seen.

It took well over an hour to get enough stuff uninstalled to find out another little drain on its performance.

Running Vista with 1GB of memory isn’t recommended, but it can be made to work.

Running Vista with 1GB of memory on a system with integrated graphics that are set to reserve 256MB of that 1GB for their own use is REALLY not recommended.  While I won’t blame Acer for the software issues, this I WILL lay at their feet with a “guys, what were you thinking?”

Fortunately, there was a BIOS setting that allowed me to set the onboard video to only reserve 64MB.  With that extra bit of RAM freed up and all the shovelware scourged off his machine, he has something resembling a useful computer again.

Still, I think I’ll be getting him some more RAM for Christmas.

I don’t much care for science courses.  In high school, I took a combined total of six years of various science courses, so I really think I’ve done my part for test tube suppliers worldwide and can be excused from any more.

Nonetheless.

This geology course has, in addition to an essay-format final exam worth 18% of the grade, a term paper worth another 18% of the grade.  It has to be on a topic that the teacher approves, and it has to be five pages long with a bibliography.

This isn’t anything TOO extreme, I guess, for a college class, but it’s a bit daunting considering that we also have weekly labs and weekly written assignments.  This class has a hell of a lot of homework.

Anyway, I’ve been sniping away at the assignment for the last three or four weeks, gathering sources and taking notes, and I finally polished it off in a marathon session this weekend.  It took fourteen hours of my Sunday to get it up to a full five pages, and I am a little ashamed to admit that I had to toss in a bit of padding, but I’m done and even submitted it a week before its due date.

So go me, right?

Before I submit it, I check the syllabus one last time to see if there’s any special submission instructions other than “email it in”.

And I read the description of the term paper one last time.

And I see, for the first time, the bit where it says:

“At least five pages (double spaced)”

And I said some rude things.

And then I opened up my paper in Word, selected everything but the bibliography, set “line spacing” from “1.0″ to “2.0″ and submitted my newly-ten-page monstrosity of a paper.

So, yeah, that was my fault.  I even went back and checked my printed copy of the syllabus from the first week and it says “double spaced” there, too, so it’s not like he snuck it into the syllabus halfway through the term.

But the guy had better appreciate it, damnit.

Anyway, I booted up the 360 this morning to see what the “New Xbox Experience” was all about, and managed to be the first person on my friends list* to whip up an avatar, which I will share with you because

a) I’m narcissistic.**

b) It reminds me of the good old days, when I had more hair.

* Only 13 people long, so this really isn’t much of an achievement.

** While “Avatarized” isn’t a real word, this one is.  I had to look up how to spell it, mind you.

But, it is awfully convenient, even when it’s saying things I’d rather not hear.

As an example, I’m 6’1″.  If I’m 189 pounds or over, I’m overweight.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing numbers in the 191-192 range in the morning.  It’s been a little too consistent to blame it on a temporary fluctuation, and I haven’t been able to get back to normal just by being careful about what I’m eating.

From previous experience, I need to kick my metabolism back into gear, and once it’s going again I’ll be able to manage my weight just by moderating food intake.  Unfortunately, that’s the part that means I need to actually do some work. 

So, last night, I queued up a half hour of Caramelldansen remixes on my mp3 player and got on the sole exercise bike in our apartment complex’s exercise room, fully expecting to wake up in agony this morning.

And, yes, there is some agony.

The thing I can’t quite explain is why it’s my arms that are killing me, while my legs are just fine.