I’m a few days late on this, and I wish I could write a wonderful tribute in memorial of Robert B. Parker, creator of Spencer (and Hawk). Unfortunately, I’m simply not a good enough writer, so I will just write that he will be missed.

I upgraded my desktop PC with Windows 7 on Saturday. I played with it some that evening, and continued a little bit on Sunday before we headed to Mountain Stage^[a]. All told, I probably got in 6 hours of Windows 7 time, not counting my brief interactions with a Release Candidate installed on a virtual machine.

Quick Review: I love it. So much so, in fact, that I already find myself missing certain features when I switch to using either my netbook (which I’m likely to upgrade soon, actually) or the PC at the office, both of which are running XP.

Slightly Longer Review:

• I absolutely love the fact that there’s a separate “recent documents” area for each of the applications that I have on the task bar. Even better, I can permanantly pin items that I want to keep right to the top of the list. I have a set of websites that I visit regularly on Chrome and a separate set for which I use Opera. I can right-click the task bar and jump straight to the one I want at any point. No more opening the browser then finding the link. Similarly, we can do the same thing with my wife’s favorite links in Safari.
• I keep hearing a lot of praise for Seven’s stability, but I never had any significant issues with Vista, much less with XP. Six hours isn’t long enough to have evaluated Seven’s stability, but so far so good.
• I know it was possible to do this with separate applications previously, but I really like being able to set the desktop background to a folder and then have the actual background image rotate every X minutes. I’m a desktop wallpaper addict^[b].

1. Completely off topic – we hit a deer on the way there. Fortunately there was very little damage done to the car (a single dent in a fender, about the size of my hand), and the deer himself walked away from the accident with no sign that he’d been seriously hurt. Having tried both now, I’d very wholeheartedly recommend hitting a deer on a back-road where you’re moving slowly enough to (almost) stop when a deer jumps in front of you rather than on an interstate. [↩]
2. One of the aforementioned sites I visit regularly in Chrome is InterfaceLift, and I have a link set up so that it jumps right to the resolution I need. Every file I like, I download and throw into my wallpapers folder, where they can now just jump right into the rotation. [↩]

Inspired by The Daily Audio Bible‘s Daily Audio Proverb, part of my regular bible reading has been to read a chapter of Proverbs a day. Proverbs, conveniently, has 31 chapters, and I’ve been reading the chapter that corresponds with the date. That means, obviously, that chapter 31 gets a little shorted.

I only started this earlier this month, so I haven’t actually hit a 30-day month yet. I haven’t decided if I’ll just not read chapter 31 as often, or if I’ll try to tack it onto the 30th’s reading in the future.

Anyway, as an offshoot of that, I’ve decided, starting tomorrow, to share at least one verse from my Proverbs reading. I can’t guarantee I’ll include my thoughts, but I will try.

Well, I’ve already written this much, so I should go ahead and start today, shouldn’t I?

This may be the scariest thing I’ve ever read…

Eric Scheie asks, “Who Are The Real Criminals?”

The problem with relying on discretion is that it lends itself to completely arbitrary rule, and with everything being illegal, it’s just a question of whether the government feels like prosecuting you.

I know that’s a very short excerpt, but there are so many blockquotes and links in Eric’s post that it’s difficult to figure out exactly what to cut. Go read the whole thing.

On Friday night, my wife and I went to see Mike Birbiglia in Huntington. With the exception of a rather odd choice of opening acts^[a], it was an excellent show.

We were in Huntington’s Veteran’s Memorial Field House^[b], which is a little run-down at this point, but I thought it was okay as a venue^[c].

The opening act, whose name we didn’t catch^[d] was disappointing, but she was followed on stage by Geoff Tate. Tate’s comedy is slightly cruder than that of Mike Birbiglia^[e], but their mannerisms and attitudes are very similar, and he was an excellent warm-up for Mike’s appearance on stage.

For those not familiar with Mike Birbiglia, he tends to be a little awkward (One of his routines involved the coining of a new word to describe himself – deciding that he’s both pudgy and awkward, Mike dubs himself “pawkward”), and has a knack for, as he puts it, “making awkward situations even more awkward.” His comedy generally consists of telling (presumably) true stories about his life, and even stories that could be considered quite serious (especially some of the stories about his sleepwalking, caused by rapid eye movement behavior disorder) are hilarious when Mike tells them.

It was particularly funny to us when we noticed that Tim Irr (who kicked off the event by thanking the alumni association, mentioning the event’s sponsors, and embarrassing his daughter) nor any of the other announcers even attempted to say Mike’s last name, simply calling him “Mike.” I guess they didn’t want to screw up and call him Mike Bahooski.

All in all, it was a great show (with the exception of The Cheerleader, who actually was quite funny – unfortunately for her, she wasn’t trying to be), and we hope to catch another show the next time Mike is in West Virginia.

1. A choice that was made, apparently, by the Marshall alumni association, and which we can only guess was made solely because someone had some extremely embarrassing photos of at least one member of the association. [↩]
2. I know that article shows “Fieldhouse” as one word, but the Greater Huntington Park and Recreation district shows it as two, so I’m trusting them instead. [↩]
3. I do wish they’d invest in some chairs, though. [↩]
4. I probably wouldn’t give it if we had, since I’m not sure that my reaction to her performance was fair, since a former Marshall cheerleader singing self-written songs interspersed with country versions of songs originally by Whitney Houston and Green Day isn’t generally what one would expect when one has come to see a comedian. [↩]
5. The only issue we had with Geoff’s performance wouldn’t have actually been a problem if we hadn’t been sitting beside my wife’s former teacher, which made her a bit uncomfortable when Geoff’s jokes started veering toward sexual topics. He wasn’t really crude, but sitting next to your sixth-grade teacher while a comedian compares being gay to liking Thai food is apparently almost as embarrassing as watching Cold Mountain with your grandfather. [↩]