Yay Technology!

Impressive Collection of Robots You Got There

Skynet Is Getting Closer to Achieving Their Goals

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

I would like to be writing this on a computer running the Windows 8 Consumer preview.  

Unfortunately, the upgrade from Windows 7 to 8 is taking roughly forever while connected to WiFi at my favorite corporate coffee shop with a thing for the color green.

Man, I Only Have 14 Hours to Spare

Shortly after taking the above screen capture, the preview installer decided to give up on the idea of estimating the time remaining entirely.  Then, just before I took a second screen capture, the installer decided that it lied before and adjusted its estimate up slightly.

Just Because the Calendar Added a 29th Day to February Does

Not Mean that You Will Have Time to Get Ahead on Any Projects

After asking one of the green apron people if she would mind staying a few minutes after closing time the following minor miracle occurred.

If you have a fast internet connection, you can download the preview of Windows 8 from Microsoft here.

Update 2/29/2012 11:42 p.m.: I did get Windows 8 running this evening.  Here are some of my initial reactions to the new version of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system:

• Don't bother installing the Windows 8 update unless you have a monitor that supports a resolution of at least 1024 x 768.  My netbook doesn't like anything above 1024 x 600 so I'll have to plug into an external monitor to access a lot of the new elements featured in the Metro interface.
• The Metro interface that has drawn so much attention is actually really intuitive.  Having a scroll wheel on the mouse you're using makes it easy to slide back and forth across this interface.  Holding a left click and dragging the brightly colored rectangle and square icons allows you to quickly slide them around to move the ones you will use frequently all the way to the left where they belong.
• Knowing some of the more popular Window shortcut keys will help. 
• The Start button is gone. 
• Clicking in the very bottom left will cause the Metro interface to pop up.
• The top right and bottom right are also hot corners now and they bring up a menu of settings that remind me of the menu in the recent Unbuntu releases.
• Finally, Windows 8 is not ready for people that just want everything to work yet.  The first thing I did was to download Firefox to replace the built-in Internet Explorer browser.  Oddly, Windows 8 didn't know what to do with a file with a .exe extension.  Weird.