What is up with Windows Vista?

I bought a Gateway referbished laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium.  I have heard horror stories about Vista, and one of the reasons I chose this particular laptop is it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7.  I am waiting for it to be shipped to me, as the Gateway web site says of my shipment: "Fulfillment in process."

In the meantime I figured I would give it a real try before succumbing to the bandwagon of Vista haters.  In the past week, Vista has not been totally horrible.  It looks a little slick, and feels a little like a Mac or Linux in it's differentness.  But there are three things that bother me:

1. Vista misreports my hard drive size.  My hard drive is 320 GB.  Vista reports it at 289 GB.  And, yes, I do have it set to show hidden folders and have unhidden system files.  There is no other partition, and I have reset the shadow file size to 10 GB.  That is a missing 20 GB.  I understand they round up when hard drives are marketed, but not 60 GB of rounding.  Well, it is a referb after all - maybe they messed up the hard drive formatting and it isn't a Vista problem?

2. Vista has new updates every day, and they usually require a restart.

3. Every time I start certain programs there is a nag screen that says Windows needs my permission to start this unidentified program.  It happens with DreamweaverMX 2004, for example.  I thought that once you told Vista it was a safe program, the nag would go away.  But it hasn't.  And I can't find a way to tell Vista that I don't want that warning to display.

So far, I have one piece of hardware that is incompatible; a web cam.  I have not tried my printer or scanner with Vista yet, but that point is moot because this laptop doesn't even have a parallel port.  I will be using those peripherals from my older desktop.

First Snow On Saturday, 51 Miles Road Cycling On Sunday

We got a wet half inch or so on Saturday.  On Sunday, by 10:30 AM the sun was shining, though it was cold.  The roads seemed dry outside my house.  So I bundled up for a road ride on my vintage 1986 Cannondale road bike.  I purposely inflated the tires 5 PSI low for better traction and headed for the hills.

Watchung Reservation had a lot of snow in the woods and it was really pretty up there.  The road surfaces were a wet in the hills for the first hour, so I was hesitant about descending fast, thinking that I might eat pavement by hitting some black ice or snow.  There were ice chunks falling from the trees that kinda stung when then hit me.

The roads were mostly dry after that first hour, and I felt good, so I decided to go longer than I had planned.  After a pit stop at a Lukeoil station for the bathroom and eating the Cliff Bar in my pocket, I felt even better.  I saw only about 5 other guys out there for cycling workouts, even though it was a very enjoyable day.

There is still a lot of salt on my bike in the garage.  Gotta get out there and wipe her down today.  Here was my route:

2010 Training Plans Sheet Issue/Error

There is a problem with the sheet in the Thinnmann Excel Training Log on the sheet tabbed as "TRAINING PLANS".

When you attempt to update it to 2010, this sheet does not update.

It can be manually fixed right now by copy and pasting from an older version of the file before it became interactive.

If you would like me to fix it for you, send me your copy via email and I will take care of it.

In the meantime, I will work on a fix and post it when it becomes available.