Misk (work, Windows 7, white lions)

On Friday at work they announced that I'm being moved to the desk of a colleague who quit, where there's a Windows 7 machine. This is what made me install that OS on my own laptop over the weekend; I'd already installed it twice before on the old one, but didn't work much on it and couldn't really evaluate the system with 512 MB of RAM. The only thing I did appreciate was that the old laptop didn't throw a BSOD when the hard drive contacts would intermittently come loose (Acer Aspire 5100 error 0200 failure fixed disk).

This time I installed it with 2 GB of RAM, though it's still too early to talk about impressions. The device was designed for Vista anyway, XP would glitch from time to time, and after sleep mode the USB ports would stop working and other glitches would crop up. But 7 has its own quirks; yesterday Excel froze dead, and FireFox went down with it, so I had to do a hard reset, and today similar freezes happened again. I've already replaced the standard task manager and I'm busy tuning the system… On the plus side, the maximum size of the integrated video memory jumped all the way to 358 MB; I don't know why so much, mostly up to 100 MB is plenty, you can't really game much on a GMA X3100 anyway, though I'll have to give it a try on the new system.

At work I haven't noticed such problems, there were other ones there, since someone had already worked on the system before me, a lot of stuff had been installed and configured, some of it not the way it should be. But none of that is a problem, the main thing is that two months of suffering are over; after all, it's sometimes hard and unpleasant to do modern website development on a computer with 512 MB of RAM and a 1.8 GHz processor when you've got an IDE, a couple of browsers, a web server, a MySQL server, office programs and other helper apps all running.

When I was customizing the system's interface to my liking, I decided to put a bunch of rotating wallpapers on the desktop, only I didn't feel like cropping the existing ones to a resolution of 1280x800, so I decided to search around, and in the end I found this site; I don't know, maybe there are lots like it, but I'd never come across this many wallpapers with lions, and right away for every possible resolution. In short, I downloaded all the images with lions, not mountain lions. I also cropped some of the best standard 1280x1024 wallpapers after all, plus photos from Flickr with white lions that were on the hard drive. In the end I wound up with 64 images that rotate every 20 minutes on the desktop :) At work, in the second half of the day, I ended up at a normal 19-inch monitor, and without any trouble downloaded a few dozen wallpapers from the big cats gallery.

While I was going through the photos on the drive over the weekend, I found a Flickr photo from way back in 2007 that hadn't finished downloading; by the ID I found its page, but the link to the original was already gone, good thing the preview is stored in the same directory as the original, so by substituting its name I got the full-size photo. I made one more avatar from the photo; I doubt I'll replace my main one with it, which is also lifted from Flickr, but I've put it up in a couple of places for now, sometimes you want something new.

Today I got another newsletter from the Global White Lion Protection Trust, and from it I learned that a desk calendar with white lions is for sale, maybe I'll try to order it, too bad you have to get in touch personally by email to buy it, it'd be easier to buy through an online store. On the plus side, I found a PowerPoint presentation of the calendar (62.6 MB), I think you can pull a few good-quality photos out of it.

It's a shame though that there are so few photos freely available… Most are sold in printed form or used for design. And if you do manage to download something, it often ends up being a copyright violation. I don't know whether I'd buy photos of white lions in digital form, but for me that's easier and more convenient than ordering them in print, you can print a digital image yourself and then use it for userpics and the like.

It says the calendar contains photos by Karen Jane-Dudley, Jason Tumen and Leslie Anne Staller. Maybe by now you can find them somewhere and acquire digital copies, I haven't looked lately.