Spacehamster’s Blog

After taking art classes for the last 4 months, I’d like to think I have a smidgen of insight into what “art” means to me. It can mean different things to different people. For some, it seems to mean calling attention to themselves with controversial actions, like this one -

PRIZE-winning German artist Gregor Schneider has caused an uproar by launching a search for a volunteer willing to die for art. The enfant terrible of the German cultural scene is looking for someone whose dying hours will be spent in an art gallery with the public admiring the way the light plays on the flesh of a person gasping for the last breath.

What can I say? Weird guy.

To me, art isn’t about extroverts like Schneider. It’s a deeply personal act of self-expression. Whether it’s through painting, drawing, acting or writing. Schneider’s actions aren’t my idea of art - that’s just attention seeking. Whenever I watch a great well written TV show like The West Wing, or admire a beautiful painting, that (to me) is art.

Its been a little over a year since Vista was released. I must admit, the feedback from the new OS hasn’t been totally negative. It seems adequate as an Development platform - .NET developers don’t seem to have too many problems with it. The real complaints seem to come from Tech-savvy users and a smattering of avid PC Gamers. I haven’t dared upgrade to Vista myself yet, purely because I’m not sure what the impact will be. I use my WinXP to watch a lot of DVD’s and play games. Neither which I’m sure Vista can do properly yet.

So this petition doesn’t bode well.

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

No matter how hard Microsoft works to persuade people to embrace Vista, some just can’t be wowed. They complain about Vista’s hefty hardware requirements, its less-than-peppy performance, occasional incompatibility with other programs and devices and frequent, irritating security pop-up windows.

For them, the impending disappearance of XP computers from retailers, and the phased withdrawal of technical support in coming years, is causing a minor panic.

There’s a good and bad side to this. The bad side is that there still opposition to Vista, which worries me a little. The good side is that WinXP must’ve been a lot better developed and designed OS than Mac and Linux supporters believe in order for a petition to be produced in the first place. Go figure.