I've always said I don't regret the past. I can't change it so there is no point thinking about how I my life might have been better if I had done things differently. What is done is done. However, although I don't think of how I could have changed my life to improve it, I do like to think how it might have evolved if my major decisions were different. For example, if I had gone to the Naval Academy, I might be in Iraq. Certainly possible.

This past weekend got me thinking again on this vein. This weekend, I helped supervise the Compute This! event at the Washtenaw County Regional Science Olympiad at Washtenaw Community College. Melissa (one of my classmates from Math Methods) and I designed and ran the event. It was really neat! Colleen Hill helped run the Awesome Aquifer event again. She also ran the same event at Wayne Count's Olympiad two weekends ago. I helped her out with that event. Having never been to a Science Olympiad, I must say I was thoroughly impressed. It got me fired up again to become a teacher. The kids were very enthusiastic and it was great to see them excited about math, science, and engineering.

So, why the comments about the past. I was bummed that Fraser Schools did not participate (and still do not) in the Science Olympiad. It is something I think I would have enjoyed if it had been an option when I was younger. Chalk up something else I will want to do when I finally become a teacher.

On a side note, kudos to Dr. Caniglia and all the folks who helped out at the Washtenaw Olympiad and to the Andrews (Toy and Flowerday) and all of the helpers at the Wayne Olympiad. Very impressive work at both events!

I've been testing IE7 for several months now. Originally, I had the Beta 1 version installed on one of my test machines running XP. When I started testing Vista, I tried it on there as well. Since the public beta came out almost two months ago, I've been running that both on my test machine and my primary machine for testing purposes. So far, I haven't run into any major problems.

For anyone who has been using Firefox, Opera, or Netscape, IE7 will seem very familiar. Features such as tabbed browsing, RSS feeds, and a built-in search bar have been added to IE7. Of course, some of this is funny since I heard rumors that MS said they would never add tabs to IE. Oh well, I guess you just have to do what the customers want, eh? One item that IE7 adds is the ability to see a small screenshot of all the currently opened tabs. Opera has something similar, but Opera actually displays them as separate windows that you can maximize, tile, or cascade. In IE7, they are just like overgrown thumbnails you can click on to maximize. Performance isn't anything to sneeze at and the changes to the CSS support seem to mess up how my web site is displayed. Go figure...and it isn't even CSS compliant! :(

Overall, it will bring a lot of the cool features that have been in browsers for a number of years to the mindless sheep of the world. It should be interesting to see if any of the browsers decide to implement something similar to IE7's page of tab previews...MS might just decide to sue them! Gotta love that whole "freedom to innovate" argument...

I could be accused of being a Microserf. Although I think most computer uses could to some degree. Only those of you using Macs, Unix, or Linux exclusively can claim to be *purebloods*. In my defense, I do own and use a Mac and I do have Linux installed on my laptop. I used to have it on my main computer, but I had some major dual boot issues when my hard drive crashed and I installed a new controller card and drive. However, this is all secondary to the main point of my article.

For those of you living in a cave, Microsoft's next operating system is called Vista and is *supposed* to be released sometime later this year. We'll see about that. :) However, I have been fortunate enough to get a beta copy of Vista and been able to play around with it a little bit. So far, I've been impressed with the changes I've seen. If you run it in its native mode with the Aero UI (opposed to the legacy mode without Aero), the experience is as different from Windows XP as Windows 95 was from Windows 3.1. It's pretty amazing! It is a much richer and *modern* looking interface. However, if you have used a Mac, you will think they lifted the interface. :) A lot of what I'm used to when using my Mac is going to be in Vista...go figure!

The bad news is that the beta version runs like a dog! I'm assuming this is because they have not been optimized yet and additional performance enhancements are coming. I was experimenting with a 3.6 GHz dual Xeon,2 GB of RAM, 128 MB video card, and 150 GB of hard drive space and it didn't run like the speed demon it should have. However, I'm sure that will improve as times goes on. Also, this was one of the older beta versions and I don't have access to that machine any more to test with. :( However, the aero interface is pretty snazzy. I'm curious to see what WinFS is like.

The other bad news is that aero is a huge hog on video processing. You are going to need some heavy duty graphics processing to get the full benefit of Vista. From what I'm reading, anything with less than a 128 MB video card may not be capable of running aero and that is one of the best parts. Oh, if you have one of those on board video cards, yeah, you'll be running in legacy mode w/o aero. One of my co-workers and I found that out today while doing more testing on an older machine with the newest beta version.

Oh well, so that's my $0.02 on Vista for the moment. It should be cool, but you will need a powerful computer to fully leverage it. Tomorrow...IE7…

Oh, here are some articles on Vista that are pretty good...
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931913,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=400&a=171997,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843945,00.asp