Financial & Travel Musings

With the resolution on even quite modestly priced digital cameras going up seemingly by the day it’s now possible to retouch photos pretty much the same way as the professionals do.

Older cameras couldn’t really zoom in close enough with the image to allow the fine changing of individual pixels without it being noticed on prints produced from the cameras but these days 8mp cameras are commonplace and at that level of resolution there’s quite a lot you can do on the original without it being noticeable on any prints produced. Fortunately the price of the technology that you need to make the adjustments to the images has also crashed in price so, if you’re into photography, it’s viable to consider buying one of the digital airbrush devices and start playing around with it.

I’ve got one myself and have barely touched the surface of what’s possible. Whilst you can do some of the retouching via a mouse to really make the most of the software available you really need to look at graphics pads which are quite simply fantastic and that’s even at the beginner level – a few months use of it and you’ll not know how you did without it.

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Whilst you might expect a small software company to skimp on software testing, clearly Microsoft doesn’t fall into the category of “small company” and yet Vista seems to be the most untested software product to have hit the streets in a long time.

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that there was someone in Microsoft who wanted us to use some other company’s products. And, yet… Vista and Office 2007 are so bad that I’m planning on doing exactly that as soon as I can get the move organised.

To begin with, Outlook 2003 isn’t compatible with Vista so you’re immediately forced to upgrade to Office 2007 if you want to access your mail via a version of Outlook. That in turns brings with it new versions of Word and Excel with are neither compatible in terms of the file format that they use nor in terms of the user interface.

That wouldn’t be so bad but even Outlook 2007 doesn’t seem to be entirely compatible with Vista as it hangs up on a regular basis and seems to need to check/repair the database almost constantly. For that matter Explorer isn’t compatible either in that it hangs up after a couple of hours of use.

As it turns out, it looks like it’ll be the Outlook problems that will finally push me  into moving towards Linux. The primary reason for keeping Microsoft software has been that of compatibility. You could always move to the new version of the software quickly and easily. This time you can’t do that and it doesn’t work either.

Consequently, I’m currently investigating how to go about making this machine dual boot Vista and Linux as a first step. If along the way I can find a way of importing the e-mail from Outlook into a Linux based product, I’ll be junking Vista almost immediately. It’s that bad.

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