Before Microsoft pulled access I downloaded a copy of the Windows 7 beta and got a product key for it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to install until today because, well, I was out of blank DVDs. Since my Intrepid Ibex install on my secondary drive died a sudden death (I rebooted into it after a session in XP and X.org just wouldn't happen anymore... I'm not good enough with Linux to have figured it out without a lot of work, but I'm lazy and a wee bit apathetic so I didn't feel like it), I even had a nice empty drive to install it on for a quick test before making what I assumed would be a quick transition to what all of the glowing reviews make out to be the new hotness.

Boy am I glad that I didn't skip the testing phase and "upgrade" on blind faith. Windows 7 sucks, it sucks hard and it sucks long. Everything was slow as molasses to load, response time on simply opening context menus or switching window focus was atrocious and even basic web browsing was laggy and slow. Unless a dual-core AMD64 with 4gb of RAM is below the recommended resources to open Windows Explorer in 7, it's just a dog. In fact, even if that last thing is true, that's completely ridiculous, and it sucks because of it.

So anyway, back to checking out Linux distros in search of one that won't mysteriously bork.

On March 29th my girlfriend and I went to a small but relatively well-funded convention at Smith College (one of the Seven Sisters schools). One of the panelists in attendance was Randall Munroe of xkcd, and I had the chance to chat (not on IRC) with him for a while.

It came up that I wished there was some way I could truly pwn people who link to xkcd rather than make their own jokes. We started thinking of what it would say, he mentioned that it's about as creative as "in Soviet Russia..." jokes, and at the end of the conversation this photo was taken. Randall is on the left, and I'm on the right (as indicated by my name tag).

As for why it took so long to get this out there... I just haven't seen many xkcd links in the past month (you slackers), just one by an AC way down in a story that was too many hours old for anyone to actually see it, and I simply forgot about the very existence of journals until today. In any case, this seemed like a solid use for my first (and if I use it about as often as my LJ account, probably last) journal entry.