It may be a bit early for me to do a 2009 Year in Review, but being that its January 1st, 2010 seems to be as good as any place.

At the beginning of 2009, I was part of the 7.6% of American’s who were on the Unemployment roles. I was almost at the end of my initial unemployment funds was getting ready to have to request an extension. Up to this point, all I had been able to find was one day jobs till even that dried up.

I spent the end of 2008 and start of 2009 visiting someone I went to High School with to see if anything could be there. Her 7 year old son and I hit it off famously, her and I? not so much.

By end of January I had accepted a job with my current employer, I just had to move from the Los Angeles area to Houston, TX.  Unfortunately my Twitter’s on the subject seem to be lost, I can only go back to a point after I had arrived here in Houston so the exact time frame escapes me.

However, I do see that by January 31st, according to my blog entry “I have a Job” I was already planning on moving for this job. And I know my start date was February 9th.

If my deduction reasoning works right now I would surmise then I arrived in Houston on either the 4th or 5th of February 2009.

Looking over the rest of my blog entries for this year, I can’t say things have been remarkable if this year follows weather wise the same as last year, March will be very rainy and the start of the muggy season which will last until fall hits again.

September was a particularly bad month for me, starting with having all of expensive (ie: worth more than $100) electronics stolen, being stolen from and attacked while at home, and then deciding to move in a hurry as I leave the hospital with 7 stitches in my forehead.

This explains the lack of photography, and related blog entries since then. I have looked to see if I could find a camera that is the equivalent to the Fujifilm S2000HD that was stolen. While I may not have known the half of what it could do, I would like something that is in that same line. Who knows perhaps I will pick one up off of E-Bay, or Amazon, I see Amazon still sells them new.

Overall, I’d say 2009 was much better than 2008 (with the glaring exception of September). However, I do still miss my friends from California. I have also found that I miss the singular season of LA, however here at least snow is a rarity.

So, as you may have heard if you follow the technology blogs at all, is that Microsoft has recently released a public beta for Windows 7 Ultimate. This is the upgrade for Windows Vista. Originally they were only going to have a very limited number of people in the public beta, but it was so popular they decided to lift the limit.

My test machine is a Dell Vostro 1000, with 2 GB of RAM.

Previously I was running Windows XP Professional on this system. I must say that Windows 7 is much faster than XP was. This is even true after I have installed most of the software that I had on the XP side.

At least for the Beta, there wasn’t an upgrade option from XP to Windows 7. So what it did was install the new OS after moving my Windows, User and Program Files directories all into a directory called Windows.old. Installing the software was a breeze. Originally I was going to have this run inside a Virtual Machine, but found my computer isn’t fast enough for that.

After I answered some questions, I went to lunch thinking it would take it a while to unpack all of the files off a DVD. By the time I had came back from lunch, it was ready for me to tell it what my login name and password should be. If I had been running Vista previously, it would have been able to do a traditional upgrade.

The interface should be quite familiar to anyone who is used to Apple’s OS X Leopard, however its not quite as elegant, but much better than what we had in Windows XP. Having previously used an iMac almost exclusively for quite a few months, I have found myself wanting to do stuff the same way here, as I did on that Mac, such as hitting the space bar with a document highlighted to get a preview of it.

One issue I was having with XP, was with AVG. AVG would load and want to test for updates, before the wireless had connected. This of course led to it not being able to connect to the internet and therefore complaining. Under Windows 7, it does appear software is either paused, or is notified when Internet is up. Since I have switched to Windows 7 I haven’t had AVG claim it couldn’t connect to the internet to obtain an update.

However not everything is perfect yet in this beta build. I haven’t been able to track down exactly what causes it, however it does appear to have something in regards of switching out of full streaming video from a site like Hulu.com back to the normal version. The problem I occasionally have, is I get a BSOD. I’m unable to see what driver or what not is causing the image, because the screen is displayed very oddly. Next time I get one of these, I will have my camera take a picture of it.

If your like me, and sometimes enjoy playing older graphic games, such as StarCraft, and WarCraft III you probably realize these games are quite old. Microsoft seems has decided to stop fully supporting games that were written with that old of a version of Direct X. I say this because the game will be displayed but either will have off colors or the display will otherwise be really off. If you have a game that Vista doesn’t play very well, don’t expect Windows 7 to do it well either.

I have found, that at least Windows 7 Ultimate will have a built in DVD Decoder (or at least the Beta does). If this feature stays in once its RTM, it will be interesting to see what happens to software like WinDVD.

So far I have found only one part that doesn’t work under Windows 7. This appears to be the screen saver. Originally I thought it was the Google Picasa Screen Saver that may not have been Windows 7 compatible. So I switched to using one that comes with Windows 7. The problem I encounter, with a time limit of 10 minutes before the saver is supposed to come on, is that it doesn’t. I have left the screen for an hour before, and when I come back to it, its still showing the same image as when I left.

Overall, I would say this is a huge improvement over Windows XP, and a lot better than Windows Vista is. Is this an upgrade in your future? At this point the only reason I could say not to, is if your on a really old machine, or if you often play old XP based games still.

Questions or Comments? E-mail me at: chris [at] chrismoody.net!

So yesterday I decided to purchase a Fujifilm FinePix S2000HD 10MP Digital Camera with 15x Optical Dual Image Stabilized Zoom. This will be my first in what will hopefully be an on going set of reviews. I do have a link here to where you can buy it Amazon, however because a local store was offering a package deal on this camera with some other stuff, I did decide to buy it locally.

I’d actually been looking at this camera for a while, and decided it wasn’t going to get any better than it is currently priced (at least not till it becomes outdated by something newer).

First off, this is my first ever “prosumer” camera, its a bridge between the camera’s that look like an old 110 film camera and the DSLR cameras. So while this does have a lot of point and shoot functionality, getting used to where every thing is on the menu does take a little getting used to.

I would recommend that anyone who has bought this camera certainly at least glance at the 148 page PDF that is included on one of the CD-ROMs, it goes into a lot more depth than the dead tree manual that it comes with.

Of course, you want to see examples of what the camera can do right?

This is the camera using natural lighting.

This is a sample of the camera in Text Mode.

As I get more familiar with the camera, I’ll post better pictures.