I must be getting old, I told the clerk at the computer store, because I was paying for software. This one seemed potentially worth it, though: I bought a program today that allows me to run Windows on my Macbook at the same time as Mac OS X. Boot Camp is free and allows you to boot right into Windows, but it requires a 10 gig partition that I really wouldn’t want to have eating up space all the time. This seemed a good alternative, given that all I want to do is play PC-only indie games.

First, the good: This is fun. I like that I can download stuff in Camino and Safari and just drag it into Windows when I need to install it. I like that my Macbook’s home directory appears as a shared folder on my Windows desktop. And I like that I can make Windows applications appear in my dock alongside Mac apps when I open them, making it feel like a more integrated UI experience. This last part is a bit misleading, of course, as the keyboard shortcuts are different (and kind of a pain sometimes) and the XP windows are still rendered in the blue, plasticky style of their native OS. Still, Windows turns out to be super easy to customize with new themes for free, including Mac-style themes (which, I was amused to notice, typically change your start menu to an Apple icon). Plus, Fusion cost $40 at the campus computer store, whereas its main competitor, Parallels, sells for $80. (Fusion seems to be $80 too, with a $20 rebate online dropping its price to $60, so I’m not sure why I got it so cheap.)

And now, the bad: I bought and installed this program for pretty much one reason alone, and that was to allow me to play indie games. I don’t expect high-end games to run well in an emulated environment off a Mac, but I do expect simple stuff to run okay. And so when my long-awaited trial case—Jenova Chen’s Cloud—fails to run properly, I get severely irked. The audio is good, but the video is so choppy that it was a chore just to get the cursor onto the “Start” button. My video card (Intel GMA 950) doesn’t seem to have any particularly recent drivers that need downloading, so I’m not quite sure what I’m missing here.

So, if all I want to do is screw around in Notepad, fiddle with XP themes, and watch stuff in my Movies folder from Windows rather than from the OS I like better, Fusion works great. But I’m going to need some input before I have any idea whether it can be used for the purpose I actually bought it for.

Update: Long story short, Macbooks share VRAM with system RAM, and running a virtual machine is demanding on RAM. Thus, I can’t run Cloud (or other video-semi-intensive applications) through Fusion. It took me a decent chunk of the day to install Boot Camp, and I’m still not done due to complications with activating Windows. Everything (including Cloud) seems to run fine when running through Boot Camp, at least. In short, Fusion seems kind of cool, but it looks like I’ll need to reboot to run pretty much everything I wanted to use it for.

If your life is at all like mine, perhaps you too came to your office one day to find that the word processor you pretty much had the hang of had been replaced by a godforsaken abomination. I’m not saying I was a huge fan of what Microsoft passed off as “user interface” before, but the new UI for Office 2007 seems actively abusive.

First of all, I can’t seem to find a damn thing because commands are just sort of shoved into non-intuitive categories. Word Count, for example, has been moved under the “Review” tab—which isn’t so bad when you stop to think about it, but it runs against how Microsoft has conceptualized the entire category of tools related to reviewing things. It’s like they came up with their own idea of what “Review” had to mean, and I decided, okay, when dealing with Microsoft, remember that they mean it in a specific sort of way. Fine. And now they mean it in another sort of way. Damn.

I’d be okay with this shift if it meant that I had to unlearn years of bad design to deal with a greatly improved approach. It does not mean this. Rather, an unsightly and absurdly visually crowded “Ribbon” stretches across the top of the screen. The thing is impossible to briefly scan through like a simple freaking list in a menu. I generally keep it minimized to avoid seizures.

Tonight, at least, I discovered that you can customize the only “Toolbar” they left in the UI: the Quick Access Toolbar, which sits above the ribbon. One piece at a time, I made it look like the customized toolbar I used to have. Calm feelings are returning to me. I actually kind of like it now. It pushes the title of my documents off to the right unless you specifically tell it to sit below the Ribbon, but I’m nervous about doing that. That makes it look far too normal, too like the old Office. I fear I will be tempted to click on the ribbon someday, expecting a menu, but rewarded with a punch in the face.

Today I’m just ganking some quick links from Design Observer I thought might be of interest to many of you.

First, Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week writes that the MIT Media Lab’s “One Laptop Per Child” project is a failure—and then he says it again (oh snap). Wade into the debate yourself, but the long and the short of it, Bruce says, is this: Rather than trying to figure out how to make a super cheap laptop, designers and engineers should’ve gone to other countries to figure out what technology might be useful to school children if only it were more usable and accessible. India seems more invested in using cell phones to connect to the internet, so is this just an example of disconnected Americans asserting that everything would be better if only the rest of the world did it our way?

And speaking of potentially unwelcome top-down design: Folks (somehow) associated with the University of Kansas are pissed at the integrated branding effort that changed all the fonts—including the ones on sport uniforms—to Trajan. Enter: Trajan Sucks, the best typographic activist movement since Ban Comic Sans. I really don’t care about sports or Kansas, but I am seriously tempted to pick me up a “Trajan Sucks” t-shirt. It looks pretty likely to be mistaken for a Red Sox reference (especially the red-white-navy version), but whatever. Sometimes “branding” is a great idea, and this is not one of those times, if you ask me.

About time. Having finally seen the light at the end of the tunnel, FOX has made the last two episodes of Drive available in streaming form online. It’s not perfect: when I tried to watch it, it jumped at a couple of points, causing me to miss lines of dialog which weren’t crucial, but I’d have liked to hear. Also, you have to watch the same annoying Smirnoff Ice commercial like four or five times, and you can’t watch it in fullscreen mode.

But I digress. I’ve watched the penultimate episode, which wasn’t bad, but felt a little inconsequential. I’m hoping the last episode gets around to answering some more questions about the show, though since several more had been planned beyond that, I’m guessing I’ll be left wondering.

I’d been considering boycotting FOX this coming season, after this atrocious behavior, but it turns out the point is moot: there’s nothing on the network that I’m dying to see. Maybe New Amsterdam or The Sarah Connor Chronicles will turn out to not suck, but I’m not holding my breath.

A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori. J: I think I do not understand you completely. A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about? J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

Sometimes this conversation between two robots reminds me of actual conversations I’ve had with my girlfriend.

If you’re not familiar with Digg, it’s a site that works like this: people submit stories from around the web, and other Digg users vote on them. The more popular the story gets, the more prominent it gets. There are other similar sites, like Reddit, but Digg is among the most popular, able to drive vast amounts of traffic that often seems to overpower many sites. Getting dugg can be both a boon and a curse to a webmaster.

Yesterday, someone leaked the cryptographic code (a 32 digit hexadecimal number) that can be used to decode content on high definition HD-DVD discs, making it possible to essentially rip HD-DVDs, something which has long been possible with conventional DVDs. The story made it to Digg, where it was subsequently removed by the administrators at the behest of the HD-DVD advisory group, who considered the story to be infringing on their intellectual property rights (the HD-DVD people have also threatened legal action on other sites that contain the number).

Unfortunately, while this may have seemed like a logical step for the HD-DVD folks to take, it was also frankly, pretty darn stupid.

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Emily may have outdone herself on this one, coming up with her two best ideas ever in just one blog post:

1. Make a parody site for Facebook that critiques politicians relationships’ and activities, thus educating through ruthless mockery.

2. Plus, the following sound bite alone should be enough to secure her immortality: “Facebook is the social networking equivalent of watching your friends do their taxes—voyeuristic yet utterly uninteresting.”

I find her proposed project interesting because it is sort of bizarre but in a way that actually offers useful information in an amusing way and a sort of youth-culture vernacular. Plus, I am curious which politicians would list each other as poke buddies.

Just as a follow up to my earlier post, Greg Storey of Airbag Industries has deployed the Airbag Blog Advisory system, a clear and perfectly easy-to-understand color-coded chart that tells you how the blog you’re reading stacks up. You can see our rating to the right (or you could if Wordpress and JavaScript weren’t fighting like siblings in the backseat on a family vacation). I like this way better than O’Reilly’s badges.

(via Daring Fireball)

Noted technology author and publisher Tim O’Reilly has drafted his suggestions for a blogger’s code of conduct. The plan stems from the “firestorm” (obligatory terminology) around death threats issued to blogger Kathy Sierra. While maintaining civil discourse on the Internet is a laudable goal, it’s kind of like trying to bring peace to the Middle East armed with a sign reading “Can’t we all just get along?”.

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So, nobody in the British military has ever seen Terminator. But far worse, it now appears the scientists who have created sheep that are up to 15% human do not read our blog.