I am so disappointed in myself. Knowing very well I should have waited till Vista released a new service pack before upgrading to it from XP.

Quite frankly I was so psyched about my new heavy duty HP workstation I thought Vista would run smoothly on it.

At the beginning of this year I went out and purchased the beefiest HP workstation I could find on the market. For the amount of work I do on the Internet I was tired of waiting for applications to load. I was tired of slow processing and rebooting. So I figured the money spent on a fully loaded box will come back to me in more productivity.

The HP I purchased came with XP and I ran it in stock configuration for several months. When I received my Vista Upgrade disk I spent a week planning the upgrade. Doing the preplanning phase I made sure I upgraded every possible item I could to make sure all hardware and applications were compatible and I even spent two days doing a double backup incase of a an installation failure.

I was certain Vista would run smooth on my new workstation and for a few months it has been great. Then as time went on I started to see the tell-tail signs of problems. Booting up took a little longer every week, applications started to load a little slower and adding new fire-drives to the box paused the hour glass longer then normal.

Then this past week I got the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

After rooting my machine for the umpteenth time and doing a system restore to previous dates where I know it worked well, it appeared the workstation was heading for a massive crash.

I transferred close to 3GB of backup data to my Dell Laptop and then reinstalled Vista using the PC Recovery tools. I think that did more damage then good because my uptime was down to clicking on a few applications before I got that freaking BLUE SCREEN.

My HP comes with 1 click factory restore and I finally sucked it up and told it to FORMAT my hard drive and take me back to better place. I now plan stick with XP till Vista comes out with some new service packs and I hear from power users that they are working well with it.

Here are a few things about Vista that SUCK.

1. It is so god dam resource intensive. The graphics are awesome but I just felt my workstation was running slower then it did with XP.
2. Their friendly tool that pops up and offers assistance when an application fails is ridiculous. It asks us if we would like it if they found a solution on the web for why the application failed. I click yes every time and every time nothing happens. It’s like ordering food in a drive thru with no one taking the order.
3. Internet Explorer (which I try to never use) is dog ass slow on Vista. Go figure, considering the browser and Vista were created by the same company.

I am so pissed just thinking about the hours I’ve wasted this week. I am just thankful I had automated backups running every night and I own a kick ass laptop that held me over.

Check this cool trailer out. My wife picked the music for it…

What a pisser of a weekend for my computer. Vista has crapped out with non stop blue screens of death. Microsoft’s support messages are not helpful at all. You click on their message thinking it will find a solution on the internet and its as if nothing happens.  

After removing all I could from my machine I finally sucked it up and tried for a reinstall of Vista. That took several hours but once I had the machine back up and running I kept getting error messages saying that my copy of Vista was not genuine.

Um, that’s news to me!

After messing with that for a while Microsoft finally validated my copy of Vista but then there were Update Error Messages 800FFFF.

Based on reading a few forums it appears one of the live updates that happen automatically is screwed up.

I was so loving Vista till this weekend…

I wrote a couple weeks ago Are PHP Session ID’s A Cause for Duplicate Content with Google?

Following that post I got hit with a few friendly IM’s from some Search Engine Gurus telling me that Google handles Session ID’s well and tends to ignore them.

I just launched a new site the other week and I decided to keep session ID’s on just to see what would happen and today when doing a site:domain.com I see Google has indexed my site with session IDs appended to the URL.

I do not yet see multiple pages of the same URL indexed which makes me think no duplicate content but heck, my nice look SEO URLs look so nasty in the SERPs with PHPSESSID=88a2d1d6db61c1d5532423430b7e3e52 appended to end of each URL.

Update: July 22, 2006

I am seeing one of my homepage URL indexed by Google for multiple Session IDs.

While at the Woodland Hills, CA BestBuy I made a purchase with my credit card. By habit I had my ID ready to show when checking out but the manager on shift told me that BestBuy and stores like them no longer are allowed to ask and check peoples ID’s.

“So I can come in here and make a purchase on someone else’s credit and you have no idea if I stole it?”

The manager said it’s a new policy. “We are not allowed to ask people for ID’s anymore.”

I looked over at Becky, aka WebMoxy who happened to be shopping with me at the time and we were in disbelief. So we asked someone else in the store if that was really true. That person said if anyone in the store has the facts correct it was the manager we originally spoke with.

What is that all about?

With a cup of coffee in hand at six this morning I jump on Google and pecked away at a few of my ranking Keywords for one of my websites.

Doh! I find that the site is no longer ranking.

The site was originally built by another company and barely ranked at all. Upon taking it over I created a new site but had it built in development mode. For shits and giggles I had <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> set just to insure nothing was crawling the development site and that any new blog posts created in test mode would not get picked up.

Once the site was completed we dumped it into production and we created hundreds of 301 redirects pointing all the old pages to the new pages.

I’ve been using Google’s Webmaster Tools to see how Google views my sites and see that I have been alerted to the fact I have quite a few URLs restricted.

Doh! Doh! Doh!

I took a quick break to figure out what’s going on and I see Vanessa Fox blogging “The first rule of indexing: make sure you’re letting the site be indexed”. As an x-Googler and one of the developers of Google’s Webmaster Tools, I tend to listen to what she has to say.

After reading her post, I slap myself on the forehead and correct the issue.

Thanks Vanessa!

When I was told about this via our mother-in-law I thought it was just another gimmicky pet product. Either way my wife wanted it so we went out of our way and picked one up.

It’s that time of year where everything around us has hair all over because our cats can’t stop shedding. Well we have put the Furminator to the test and this deShedding product is amazing. I have never seen so much hair come off our cats.

The Furminator is now a ShandyKing recommend product.

There is an excellent article printed yesterday in SmartMoney.com called “Socialized Medicine Threatens Heath of Dollar”. Writer Jonathan Hoenig point “Yes, U.S. health care is problematic, but not because it’s a for-profit capitalist system. The problem stems from it not being capitalist enough”.

Well the first episode of the show was cool but since then I’ve been struggling to pay attention when it is on.

While on vacation this past weekend I was talking with my wife about the show and comparing it to Deadliest Catch. (Yup, we only talk about the important things while on vacation).

I think perhaps the producers of Ice Road Truckers got only part of the concept right with this show. Just watching truckers drive around and filming them steering their big rigs is not very exciting from the viewer’s perspective.

The only real sense of danger you get from watching the show is perhaps the ice might open up beneath the trucks. That was enough to keep me watching for 1 or 2 shows.

At least with Deadliest Catch there was a sense of excitement and unknown as we watched the crab fisherman fish. There was drama and excitement as we saw some boats hit payday while others worked through the cold night only to catch a few small crab.

I think Ice Road Truckers is an excellent show for Modern Marvels or some 1 hour special. But so far, watching truckers tie down their loads or watching them eat pieces of chicken while they drive their cabs is not so much fun.

Sweetness… Google seems to have added the name ShandyKing to their “Do You Mean” suggestive search feature.