I installed vista on my laptop yesterday.

And the whole install is very hands-off and painless the price you pay is that it takes ages to complete. But it did install and upgrade my windows XP machine.

After booting my new system twice I grabbed the phone and ordered 2GB of extra memory because before vista i was already pushing it so now it’s just a necessity to get it.

Vista works surprisingly well, it’s a shame though that I still can’t debug my asp.net applications when they are hosted on a network share instead of on my pc.  Sure i can remotely debug them but that experience is not as nice as locally. I do put everything on a network share because of backups. If you ever get your laptop stolen with a few weeks worth of work on them without a backup you’ll never let it happen again

My favourite new feature would be the navigation in explorer over the folders. and the way you can quickly backtrack your path etc.

My least favourite new feature would be the never ending security warnings. If I say unblock on a program that wants to access my firewall then I mean it and I don’t need to be asked 3 times. you don’t read them but it kind of sucks that it freezes your screen.

All the animations are really cool but due to my ram limitation for the moment they aren’t as fluent as could be. I hope the Dell people will be quick to send me my new mem.

I don’t really know what to say about office because i rarely use it. I do use Outlook a lot, Word I also use but all the other programs are wasted on me because I just don’t need them. Once or twice a year somebody sends me an access database. This database gets turned into sql very quickly .

But that toolbar thingy in word : VERY cool and accessible

I’m a happy emailer

Last week on thursday and friday, I attended the webstock convention.

The greatest thing about webstock for me personally was that I got to meet all these people that I ordinarily never would meet.

I considered myself very lucky when i got to have dinner with Douglas Bowman. I do feel somewhat ashamed for the stupid questions I asked him.
I also got to have a chat with Kelly Goto, who came to enlighten us about ethnographics and their huge impact on how websites are perceived.

As if that wasn’t enough I also came across Tony Chor who is responsible for the IE blog and Team, he was accompanied by Grandhi another big guy. Both very pleasant gentlemen indeed.

Now back to webstock, what did I personally take from that whole experience.

Accessibility isn’t to be neglected and should be right up there with Usability
All those people came a very long way to make these points very clear and to make us, designers and developers alike, very aware of that the web is more and more turning into an integral part of social life. And has changed social life as we knew it a few years ago completely.  I still remember the days very vividly that I needed to phone my friend on his landline to confirm that he was home or to talk to him.
If he wasn’t home too bad, better luck next time…

Sitting there gave me a few good ideas for websites that i can build in a reasonable amount of time.

Yes I met a whole bunch of people, that I liked as much as the aformentioned people but they didn’t stand up on the stage to fill peoples brains with fresh ideas and views.