Before & After & Inbetween

IT's extremely quiet here by now.
Of the blogs I follow, there were zero posts in the last quarter of a year.
A few communities still have weekly posts, but sadly none of the interesting ones.
I may have to spend more time looking for new ones...

Editing my private website to reflect the changes in prefered social networks proved to be even more of a slog. The software I use for it has made some changes for "easier use", which now prevents me from using different footers on different parts of the site - but I have black (general content) and white (stories) pages, and having a black footer on a white page (or vice versa) looks ugly! I may end up having to redo the whole thing once I come up with an efficient way to do it.

OS-independent full system backup / disk image solution as a live cd with a graphical interface under the open source GPL license. Really easy to use, straight forward, to the point that I'd recommend it to my mother (if she spoke English, that is). There are a lot of other disk image solutions out there. However, most of them are limited to either one OS and/or are expensive. For creating an emergency backup (for example, when planning to upgrade your OS or trying something you aren't sure will work) this worked great for me with Win 7 and Linux systems.
http://redobackup.org/

I spent the last two days with switching my OS vom Vista (x86) to Win7 (x64) [For the record: yes, it looks shiny and yes, it is faster & more stable on my system.].
What pissed me off was the same as in Vista, quite a bunch of my proggies always trigger the UAC, blubbering about "this file was downloaded from the internets" (about three years ago and it didn't blow up since then, but its unsigned because the guys who write it can't afford to cough up the 200 bucks a year for having it licensed!) "are you really, really sure you want to start it?" (yes, I do want to play BlockOut again, thank you very much!). During the installation frickery, I stumbled upon a very useful detail:

if a file is triggered by the UAC, it helps to put it into a 7z container (native compression format of 7-zip) and unpack it again, then delete the triggery file and copy the previously packed file into its place. Windoof then considers the file as "nice and safe and totally from your computer!" (*SNORT*) without having to reduce your system's security level, frickle with oldfashioned FAT32 partitions (to get rid of the streams holding the incriminating information by copying to and fro) or additional command line tools. But beware: Windows' inbuilt zip packer does not work.

Frankly, after two main OS installations with multiple service packs, one should assume they'd be able to add an option for a user permanently store a clearance with files and programs without performing a breakdance through burning loops.

It's official. After using a highly customized version of Firefox since it was at... version 0.7 I think, I'm now moving house browser. I've about had it with interfering addons, slow surf-times and it's occasional "let's forget the settings for that page" even on a fresh profile whenever I can't give it 50% of my RAM to play with.
After several trials, I'm now officially in the Opera fraction & happy with the fast surfing, the sleek interface (all glass themes... :))) ) and most of the clunky addon stuff being properly integrated into the main program. Including ad-blocking, and site-specific no-scriptiveness. Overall, a thumps-up.
It will still be a learning curve, but one I consider worth the effort. :)

...and now back to writing Seishiro & Subaru getting wet.