So I got my brand-spanking new desktop machine today (my old one barely lasted two years before it gave up the ghost), and I thought it would be fun to keep track of everything that I do to get a machine all set up "properly" for my needs. Step 1: reformat. I don't care what machine I get, who I get it from, etc. I always reformat it first thing -- this way, I can be sure the machine is setup the way I want it to be with no happy surprises. Today, I booted my new machine once just to see the state of things. I had 20+ desktop icons, and about 15 tray items. The amount of shovelware that gets put onto new machines is outrageous! Step 2: install the OS.

So I got my brand-spanking new desktop machine today (my old one barely lasted two years before it gave up the ghost), and I thought it would be fun to keep track of everything that I do to get a machine all set up "properly" for my needs.

Step 1: reformat. I don't care what machine I get, who I get it from, etc. I always reformat it first thing -- this way, I can be sure the machine is setup the way I want it to be with no happy surprises. Today, I booted my new machine once just to see the state of things. I had 20+ desktop icons, and about 15 tray items. The amount of shovelware that gets put onto new machines is outrageous!

Phew, thank goodness for Park Plaza's explanatory text on their fire escape route signs! Now I know that the "alarm sounds like" Whoop, Whoop. Because.. you know.. if it went Beep, Beep or Buzzzzzz, I'd simply assume that it wasn't really an alarm, but was in fact something entirely else. Back to SoCal tomorrow morning. Our flight (the first of three, anyway) takes off at 6:30am. BLEH!

Phew, thank goodness for Park Plaza's explanatory text on their fire escape route signs!

Now I know that the "alarm sounds like" Whoop, Whoop. Because.. you know.. if it went Beep, Beep or Buzzzzzz, I'd simply assume that it wasn't really an alarm, but was in fact something entirely else.

Back to SoCal tomorrow morning. Our flight (the first of three, anyway) takes off at 6:30am. BLEH!

Wow, what a whirlwind of wackiness. Sorry, alliteration just isn't working for me today. ;-) What I really meant to say is that I've been super busy as of late, and so things like blog postings tend to be few and far between.

In no particular order:

I've been working several long days (including the entire weekend) on some really awesome new compiler features for the next beta. I'd tell you what they are, but then I'd have to kill you. But those of you who are in the betas program will probably know what I'm talking about when the next release comes out. But after doing 12-16 hour work days for the last four days, I can honestly say that my brain is full.

So I use Facebook as a way to keep in contact with friends from back home, as well as family members. But lately, Facebook has been sucking significantly due to it's "Applications" crap. Now, I like add-ons as much as the next person, so long as I can ignore them (which is something I do vehemently with FB). However, now the applications my *friends* install start showing up on my news feed. That's all well and fine, except I really don't care which friend won what movie trivia challenge, etc. I want my news feed to be nice and clean -- show me things I care about like status updates, new notes, etc.

Everyone on the net seems to think this is impossible to do... however, they're wrong. You can exclude files and folders from Vista's backup and restore by adding them to the FilesNotToBackup registry key, which lives under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore.

For instance, I don't want to back up my virtual machines for Virtual PC (why back up 4+ GB of stuff that's meant to be ephemeral??), so I added this to my registry:

Name=VirtualPC Value="C:\Users\Aaron Ballman\Documents\My Virtual Machines\*"

That will exclude all files and folders within my virtual machine folder.