gonkulair


this is gonna hurt

Posted in news by joshie on the January 30th, 2007

Windows Vista launches today. thankfully so does Office 2007. Why? Am I excited? No, with Office 2007 launching at the same time as Vista, at least people will be dazzled by all the new effects, new menus, the glossy almost iridescent buttons. The new ways to do things, the “holy crap where’s my stuff now”, the look at all these control panels. There are also bound to be a few hours spent hitting windows key + tab and flick the mouse wheel to play a little “program roulette”. This is good, people like to drive new cars, they should like to drive new operating systems too. That snappiness that a fresh install and an Operating System with high-powered requirements can give you. After all, hardware is still ahead of software in terms of speed. In fact, Vista’s quite fast… in fact so fast it beat a lot of 3rd party developers out of the gates. There is a scramble on for security software, next generation games, next-generation video cards and of course next-generation…WAIT! My scanner isn’t working, and what are all these other computers showing up on my network? Wait, I’m not on my network, I wonder what this linksky network is, man my neighbors are weird. Thank God for Microsoft, as much as everyone wants to hate them, this is the mess we’ve made ourselves. We want all this crap to work together, we want it to be the same everywhere. We want it in our native language, we want it to work easily yet be powerful. Could you imagine if nuclear bombs were simple? Anti-Virus software and Starbuck’s locations would be the least of our concerns. Since I work in the service industry, primarily the IT services industry a lot of my Microsoft hate goes to a very realistic understanding of the core issues. Stopping trying to get a good deal on something you want to be reliable, fast and last for a significant amount of time. Spend a little more, get the service plan and don’t by the “off-brand” software packages that is a tenth of the price of what you really need. It’s going to cost you the rest in my labor charges. So, let’s all be nice to Microsoft, listen to concerns and keep notes on the problems we have. And probably the most important thing I can say, lets hold off on purchasing and installing Vista for a bit. I’m going to need my computer up and running to help you fix yours. :) (Of course I’m running Vista already, but it’s Release Candidate 2 in a Virtual Machine, I know it’s not pretty but Best Buy doesn’t support Vista on our Enterprise PCs yet.)
And yes, I spelled LinkSys wrong on purpose.

Fishing the Lake of The Woods - A picture story. (Narrated by Hal 9000)

Posted in news by joshie on the January 21st, 2007

Lake of the Woods - Frozen

We went ice fishing on Lake of the Woods in Northern Minnesota / Southern Canada.

Beerfor fish too

There was beer.

a little fishBrad's Homemade Rod -n- Reel

A little Fish.

Big Fish (Mine)

A big Fish.
fish made out

These fish made out.

fish go hardcore

Then they went hardcore.

Watchin Dave's Hole

RJ kept an eye on Dave’s hole.

Sunset on Lake of the Woods

All before the sun went down.

an early day

Posted in news by joshie on the January 12th, 2007

So today was an early day. I had to be to work by 8am! (OK that’s not really that early) My team, Services Platform, which is basically the IS project team for services had an early Mandatory Meeting today. Apparently our VP Rich, won the Enterprise Innovation award, which is a pretty big deal. Well, Rich immediately stated that the award was largely in part due to his team and all the innovative work we’ve done for the services team. Well, that get’s us to this:

Josh Kapellen - Services Platform Innovation Award

My award comes largely in part to my work on the Data Recovery project/training/rollout/optimization. Also work in rapid prototyping and development and of course our I like to think for my part in the Services Platform Nursery project. Congratulations to Rich, Services Platform team and of course myself. It’s my first real desk trophy, so I had to post about it.