Once again, rather deal mostly with my decidedly conventional day (study, Arabic, lunch, procrastinate, read, dinner, more procrastination, write a response paper), I’ll focus on one of the ‘exciting’ news items of the day: Windows Vista is officially out.

I gather I should be feeling excited, but in my case it’s more of a sort of listless boredom. None of the features Vista offers promise me anything. The new security architecture could be useful, but to date, I haven’t had my Windows box compromised. And since it’s a VMWare virtual machine, even if it were compromised, it’s pretty easy to restore directly from backup. Vista’s eye candy is surely of no use to me. Rather, I’m irritated that they decided to move or rearrange everything. This leaves people like me having to relearn various normal tasks. I’ll be the first to admit Windows XP has many flaws. However, gratuitously rewriting its GUI hardly strikes me as a productive way of dealing with these. So hello Vista. I hope we won’t have to meet again for a while.