Looking back through the posts on my blog about 18 months ago, the whole Vista saga was interesting to say the least.

I had a nice new quad core desktop machine that ran 64 bit Vista like a dream

I have a nice new (ish) Dell laptop that refused to run Vista no matter what you did to it to the point that I downgraded back to Windows XP and became happy again.

But a few months ago now, Windows 7 came onto the scene and as soon as the final RTM release was available on TechNet, I went ahead and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit onto my desktop PC.

And it was very very quick and it was very very stable and I was more than a little impressed.

Everything just worked!

So after a few weeks, Windows 7 Professional 32bit was introduced to my Samsung NC20 Netbook. And it was quick, and it was stable and it just worked.

So by now I was getting brave with this new 7 thing so decided to give the Dell laptop another go!

So armed with a copy of Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit and a spare HDD (just in case I needed to roll back) I inserted the DVD. In less than an hour I had a fully working Windows 7 machine with every single bit of hardware working except one.

My HP LaserJet 1018 printer!

Now I need to take a moment here to call out HP and their approach to drivers.

So I have known that Windows 7 has been in the pipeline for some time now and pre release and beta versions have been available to me and HP during this period.

Yet if you go to the HP website, they tell me that drivers for most of their printers will be available by mid November. Now remember that Windows 7 was released to Microsoft business customers 3 months ago, this is a bit shoddy.

But when Vista came out it was the same story. HP were well behind the curve and I had to wait months to get drivers for my very new and expensive Color LaserJet.

But it’s not just Windows. When Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, I was left with 100 servers with no drivers. What servers? HP DL380 servers. That’s what.

So anyhow, back to 7.

So I am now a few weeks in and you know what? Everything just works. Nothing has needed rebooting yet. All my applications work. All my non HP hardware works. I am more than a little impressed. This is what Vista should have been!

Yes it’s a nicer place to be but there are plenty of other websites out there reviewing this new OS so I will let you read the reviews at your leisure but for now, the office has most certainly “gone 7” and is really enjoying it.

I watched this 3 times and each time thought WTF!

Nice to know that somebody out there cares

Now be careful out there won’t you.

I have heard a number of horror stories about what people do with hotel kettles in the past but this was not amongst them.

Likewise I suspect I will approach the iron with care in the future as well as I am guessing flour and suit trousers do not mix.

PS

Having actually stayed in this hotel, I am surprised he actually managed to get an iron in the first place

It’s Sunday morning and once again Simon Tofield seems to know my cat so well.

I saw this film made by Robin Sloan and Matt Thomson a few years ago and just happened to come across it again whilst sorting out my bookmarks this morning.

Remember that this was produced a few years ago before Twitter or Facebook became as big as they are.

It’s 8 minutes long so grab a coffee, sit back and try and work out which predictions were on the nail and which were way off.

Enjoy

EPIC

PS

There is also a slight variation on this video if you have the time

EPIC 2015

Over at Lifelounge, they have posted up some incredible (and very rare) photos taken on the Star Wars sets back in the 1970s.

There are far to many to post here so head on over and waste an hour or so

LIFELOUNGE

Please spare a thought for the people who suffer from this tragic infliction

So after a few late nights, my move from traditional hosting for things like email, websites, photos etc to a world of shared services and clouds is complete.

During this move, whilst the technical part of the move has proven to be very straight forward, I have found myself having to rethink how I work and adapt to suit.

A good example of this has been how I organise email.

Now I will be honest here and admit that I never ever delete emails either at home or at work. This means I have email going back to 1999 which is when I decided to stop deleting but this also means I have a lot of email sat in PST files. Historically I have managed this (together with the spam that comes with it) by using multiple mail accounts with various aliases and white lists. I then managed all of this into Outlook with a large number of folders, folders within folders and quite complex rule sets.

So when I first started transferring my mail across to the Google platform I took the same approach especially as I was accessing my mail accounts with Outlook over IMAP. So I ended up with 5 separate mail accounts with many aliases set up within them. I then had folders set up in Outlook which were represented in the Google web interface by labels.

As I then started to explore the web interface I realised that I had to rethink this approach as it is very outdated and is hard work. Lets be honest, the Google mail platform has been developed for the users of today and calls on non mail technologies (such as search) to help organise things. In addition the anti spam technology is very advanced.

So I started again.

I now have a single account. I have just 7 labels within it. I am still using aliases on my emails however with one mail account, you can catch all so I can then filter on the to address and label the email on arrival bypassing the inbox all together. So now all those emails are organised on arrival and show up against the relevant label helping me work out where I need to focus my efforts

This is similar in the way I have worked in the past but not at such a macro level.

On top of this, all those thousands of emails from the years have simply been archived. Yes I can get to them to browse through them if I really want to but of course the Google way is to search and I have found that this works really well.

I guess it’s all right to lump everything together in one place just as long as there is a way to interrogate it. Search is that tool

As I said before, I have to start thinking in different way but with a single account available via a browser, a client or my mobile life should become a lot simper and the plan is to spend a lot less time managing my email which seems to be disproportional to the time spent actually reading it.

But what about the rest?

Well I moved from hosting my own images online a few months ago now and started using SmugMug. To be fair, I have not looked back on that move as it just works and again, I just need to concentrate on taking the photos and not managing the platform used to display them. Sure I know that under the skin, SmugMug uses the Amazon S3 platform but I don’t need to care.

And of course there is WordPress.

Yes I was using WordPress before but I hosted it on my own server. Each new update saw me messing about with FTP clients and PHP files whilst at the same time I had to keep an eye on my bandwidth usage and spam levels.

Before moving to WordPress.com I did look at Blogger and TypePad but WordPress is a very powerful platform that just keeps getting better so here we are.

So at the end of next month, my old hosted server contract comes to an end and after nearly 10 years of working in that way, I will not be renewing this time.

Yes it has taken a long time for me to take this jump (especially when you consider what I do) but I have been waiting for a time when I felt the technology and services had matured enough for me to place my online life on somebody else’s hands. After all, Google have only just taken the beta tag off their platform.

To a point I now feel liberated and freed from the hassle of having to maintain the platform that supports my online life. Sure I am a little apprehensive that at some point the whole cloud will come crashing down but it would actually be very easy to revert back to a self hosted model if I ever had to so maybe I just worry to much.

Of course what is going to be really interested is the whole online Microsoft Office thing that is just around the corner. If that is as good as the early beta reports suggest then I may find even more of my life heading up into the clouds (such as document storage etc) but I will deal with that when it actually arrives and is actually live and stable. After all, it’s one thing outsourcing my online life but my offline life still has strong routes in the filing cabinet.

Flash

Originally uploaded by Jean-Michel Priaux [JimPix]

Just browsing around Flickr tonight and I came across this by Jean-Michel Priaux.

Now the DNS is starting to update I am able to see what links are now broken for things like pictures etc. My next job is to work through the site page by page fixing each one as I find them so please be patient and normal service will be resumed ASAP.