Ongoing processing.

As far as I can tell, the television ads for Windows 7 attempt to convey the message "buy this product and you will be a pretty woman sitting in a cafe." I talked about this to the guys in the ITS help lab today, and one of them put forth the theory that the Windows 7 ads are targeting women because men wouldn't need much of a marketing campaign to buy Windows laptops because they'll buy them anyway. And I can see how those ads would be enticing to young women thinking of buying their own computer: "Buy this product and you will be hip and with-it." It bugs me a fair bit that this is how Microsoft is marketing towards my gender, and how part of the campaign is how simple and easy the computer is to use although I understand this is probably an attempt to get its way into a new market share and most computer advertising campaigns focus on ease of use, regardless of the reality.

XP is back on my machine, which is making my life much, much easier. I'm slowly figuring out how to use Windows Media Player 11 to sort my music, which is fairly difficult when I have a large folder of very random MP3s that aren't sorted by album or artist. I enjoy having a program which plays music without my having to go into the file folders and search them for the individual pieces, and I like being able to open up that program and play different albums. The only workaround I've managed to find - and this holds true for iTunes as well - is to make a playlist of the random stuff and toss it all in there, still sorting everything by artist.

I'm getting my frequently-used programs back on, and I'll have to get bookmarks sorted out, and also see about getting some stuff set up so I can start some online projects - mostly job hunting - so it goes smoothly.

Even with all this, it's a fantasic computer I've got right now. More memory than my external hard drive, wonderful sound quality, plenty of RAM, the programs are going smoothly, and it still feels very new and fresh. I've named it Eureka.