They also have us lined up here at 11:10p so they might release it early again like they did for ODST.  Too bad I really won’t be able to play it for a few days because of homework, so I’ll express my frustration in a spoiler: everyone on Noble Team except you dies during the campaign.

Now don’t take this as a claim on all drivers in and around Philadelphia: this is just a personal account of what happened to me while I was there. So I leave Northern Virginia around 4:30 to head up to Philadelphia, and of course I hit DC rush hour pockets. 4 hours later, I’m just past Philadelphia and it’s dark outside. I’m nearly to the hotel I’m staying at and there are a few more highway exchanges to take before I get there. On one of the on-ramps to the second to last highway, I come around the loop and someone is in the right lane. I turn on my turn signal to get into the right lane from the exit lane, and a truck speeds up and pulls in front of me to exit instead of slowing down, letting me on and filling in behind me like everyone else in every other state does. I’ll also add that there was no one else around on the highway.

The next day, I think on the same highway, I was driving on the right lane. There was a car coming on the on-ramp and there was in the left lane, so I couldn’t turn over. I was ahead of the guy on the on-ramp and kept my speed. Now all on-ramps are supposed to yield to traffic on the highway: not this guy. He speeds up, pulls next to me, doesn’t slow down, starts to turn into me, so I brake in response. As he speeds past me, he decides to give me a disgusted look and flip the bird. Sounds like some people need to learn the rules of the road before getting a license.

This was all before doing all the tourist stuff. After that, it took us 30 minutes to get on I-676 because of no signs or signs misleading us to the wrong place to get on the freeway. The freeway was literally less than a 5 minute drive from where we were and it took 30 minutes to finally get on and get out of the city. So some of the street signs weren’t that great either.

Maybe I got a bad crop of drivers where I was going, but Philadelphia, you need a new motto. Comments appreciated.

Right now I’m living in Falls Church, Virginia for a summer internship housed up in Skyline Towers. The staff here is really great and the room is very sizable compared to the floor plan I looked at online before putting down the initial payment. My roommate just got in this weekend, and he’s a pretty cool dude from Arizona State. Only weird thing about the apartment is some random switches that go to certain outlets in the walls, but other than that, love it.

So I have already been here for a little more than a week, and I had not defragmented my computer in quite some time, so I started it to run overnight. This was the night before Memorial Day. I went into my bedroom to go to sleep and about 10 minutes later, I hear this beeping noise. At first I thought it might have been the neighbors, cause they had been playing music for the last few nights. No worries I thought, until I realized which direction it was coming from: the opposite direction of my neighbors. I go out to the living room of my apartment, and the lights from my computer aren’t on. By this time the beeping had stopped and I still didn’t know where it came from. Turns out it was my battery backup that was beeping, signaling it was dead. The fact that it died while my computer was defragmenting was an unsettling fact as well. I tried to turn the UPS back on, to no avail since my other power strip was till active: didn’t work, so I plugged my UPS into the socket my power strip was in and it started working. Next was to turn on my computer and assess the damage. Luckily it booted just fine, so I turned it off and went to bed to address it in the morning.

So after my mattress decided to spring a leak in the middle of the night, I booted up my computer and logged in, but I got a lot of program memory access errors. Many of my startup programs failed to load, and I couldn’t get other programs to run, not even Internet Exploder. So at this point, I’m thinking that there must have been some files that got corrupted in the degragmentation that caused these programs not to start. My first thought was to back everything up, reinstall some programs to recover program data, like firefox bookmarks and such, and nuke the system. So I download a couple of installers from my Netbook, since I couldn’t open a web browser to download anything on my desktop, and put them onto a memory stick to transfer. When I went to install the programs, I got an error that basically said it couldn’t load the windows installer. At this point, I’m starting to think that I’m pretty much at a loss and will have to make an image backup of my OS drive. So I try a System Restore while trying to find a solution to the Windows installer problem. Just like everything else, System Restore did not work. Panicking at this point, I find something that I have used before: sfc /scannow. For those who don’t know what that is, “SFC” stands for System File Checker and it checks the integrity of core Windows System files, similar to how Startup Repair from an Installation CD checks startup files required to boot. Luckily, SFC found errors, rebooted and fixed the problem.

Now here’s the kicker of the story. I purposefully talked a little bit about my apartment above for this reason. After I got my computer fixed, I went around to see what other outlets might have died. Turns out that only the top ones of the three closest outlets were dead. So I find another outlet to plug in my power strip to get it working and figured I’d submit a maintenance request later. This was Memorial Day. So yesterday, Tuesday, I was walking around and saw a switch on the wall that my computer desk was set up against. I know it didn’t lead to any lights in the apartment, like the ones in the bedrooms: and then it hit me. I turned the switch on and plugged my phone charger into the top socket of one of the plugs: it started charging. I turned the switch off: it stopped charging. I managed to almost kill my computer by turning off a switch I thought was to the hallway light. I probably turned that one off and turned the actual hall light switch off and didn’t even realize it. So now I have an aptly named “Kill Switch” in my apartment, and I’m never using those outlets for anything essential while I’m here.

Boot Time: So starting with the boot screen, there is actually a nice little animation, but no loading bar.  Some people will like having the animated part, but there are probably those who like the loading bar.  Personally, I like the little animation.  The user logon screen is the same, other than the background reminds me of Twitter.  I will probably end up changing it to something else Halo related.

Desktop: I am liking the new desktop changes a lot, especailly that the gadgets aren’t restricted to the Windows Sidebar.  A lot more gadgets are also supported than in the Win7 Beta.  I got all my gadgets back from my Vista OS and put them in and some actually work better in Windows 7 than they did in Windows Vista.  I like the ability to rotate desktop backgrounds and how they manage themes now.  It’s a lot more understandable and easy to change a specific part of your existing theme and to save it.  I haven’t messed with the new sound themes, but I set mine to the Windows Classic for now.  I was really unsure how I would like taskbar, but I’m getting used to it.  The program name doesn’t show up by default and you have to change a setting, but once you get it set up, it works pretty well.

Explorer: There’s a new feature called libraries that you can associate files and folders to a specific library, like pictures, music and video.  It’s really convenient if you want to have all your stuff in one place, but it’s a pain when File Dialog boxes go to the libraries instead of the actual ‘My Pictures’ or ‘My Documents’ folders.  Instead, you have to navigate to your user profile and then click on the folders.  I only wish there was an option to change that, but oh well.  The sidebar has had a lot of changes made to it as there are about 3 different categories, ranging from Favorite Places to Home Networks.  Another addition that I haven’t researched yet is the new Homegroup.  I have no idea what it does yet.  All I know is that I had to do something with it to set up media sharing for my XBOX 360.  Aside from the occasional explorer crash, I’d say the quality of explorer hasn’t changed that much.

Base OS: Microsoft did a good job at going back and reworking the system requirements.  The fact that there are less requirements for Windows 7 over Windows Vista is a big plus, and I think Microsoft will see a lot more people buying Windows 7 than they did for Vista.  Aero works a lot better and how Windows handles all the program previews is not nearly as processor intensive as Aero was for Vista.  The fact that I’m using about 2/3 memory in Windows 7 than I did in Vista at startup says a lot.  The UAC has been reworked to only notify important things instead of notifying for everything you did (which is why most people turned them off in Vista).  I have kept it on, and haven’t regreted it yet.

Windows 7 is a lot better than Windows Vista and I reccomend anyone who is running Vista to Upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as you can.  You will find it a lot faster and for some, more pretty.  For those running XP, it’s a big change on how things are layed out, but it’s a lot easier to get used to over trying to switch to Vista.