Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’m pissed off right now. MG Siegler, currently a writer over at well-known Web2.0 news site TechCrunch, has decided to use people who rely on food assistance as ammunition for a poorly researched and certainly misguided attack on Microsoft. And as someone who has had to rely on the services of food banks in the past just to have enough to eat, I am personally insulted by the gall and brazenness of MG’s attack.

Image via Sizzled Core

If Microsoft doesn't, there's sure to be some folk who will. In fact, some people already are working on pulling the next version of Windows Media Player out of the public Windows 7 beta, and getting it to work with Vista.

Well, this will teach me to trust the official Windows Vista help website. After running the Live Installer to bring myself up to the Live Writer and Live Photo Gallery wave 3 betas (and update Live Messenger to the latest, although that was unsuccessful), I had to restart my computer because Windows Update also decided to do its magic today. The machine restarts, I log in, and… “User profile cannot be loaded.”

Uh oh, what?

Image via Wikipedia

Windows Photo Gallery has great metadata support. It supports hierarchical tagging, makes it easy to rename and caption photos, and even allows for adjusting the date and time that a photo was taken. For all this, it rocks, especially if all you have are JPEG images.

Microsoft's Games for Windows LIVE service used to cost money, but as Engadget reported back in July, it is now free.

Yesterday, Microsoft released the latest beta of Internet Explorer 8, and this morning I installed it to see how it has improved since beta 1.

Well, I've not seen much in changes. The toolbar to the left of the tabs is a bit reorganized, and a few things are renamed (such as Activities, now called Accelerators), and there are now new Page and Safety drop-down menus. But again, much of this is simply rearranging.

Via The Register comes news that Microsoft has joined the ASF and contributing to PHP under the LGPL. In the words of Anonymous, "lol wut?"

I was taking a look at the new design of coldacid.net in IE8 beta 1, simply to find that it doesn't look right with the new rendering engine. Putting the browser into IE7 emulation mode, it comes out looking just fine, however, and I already knew that it works with Firefox 2 and 3. It's pretty interesting. Likely things will work just fine by the time IE8 final rolls out, especially given that the site (or at least the front page of it) is nearly perfect HTML and CSS (and the only validation errors wouldn't affect the rendering anyway).

As a big thank-you for attending the Toronto launch of Visual Studio 2008, I got in the mail today a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate as well as a CD containing a bunch of Live products (including a 90-day subscription for OneCare).

Now, I just need to get a new computer, one which can run a version of Windows newer than 2000.