Microsoft has officially made today, June 30th, the end of the line for further Windows XP sales and has declared the operating system to be dead. Unless you’re a OEM disc-purchaser, in which case you can still get ahold of it. And of course, what with the millions of users around the world that use it (and will be still using it, if the popular viewpoint on Vista doesn’t change), Microsoft made sure to make it clear that support and updates will continue for the venerable operating system until 2014, which in my opinion is an amazingly long time to continue to update an operating system you’ve just declared dead. Seems to me like an “official talking point” that will make people irritated, but very few people (proportionately speaking) will actually seek out the alternative methods to continue to acquire XP.

I think people’s reactions to XP’s death, and Microsoft’s subtle hemming and hawing as it suggestively pushes Vista to them, are quite interesting. I’ve frequented a few forums and blogs today to see what the talk on the internet is about it, and many forums are filled with frothing, caps-lock filled posts about how Windows XP IS TEH BEST EVER, and raging that Microsoft expects people to buy Vista. What do they expect Microsoft to do? They’re a corporation who wants the people to buy their new toy, same as any other company would. While I’m certainly no Microsoftie (anymore at least), I have to say that my thoughts on the whole operating system debacle have mellowed somewhat.

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Shakespeare is one of those playwrights which I always felt like I had to grit my teeth and bear him during high school English studies, and in the past, seeing his plays performed were often a test of mental fortitude and the ability to quickly decipher rhyme, riddle, and jest and not fall behind. If old Bill could see his work being performed by the talented actors of the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI, I’m sure he would be quite proud of their adaptation of his famous A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I had the pleasure to attend last night.

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Even when I was in the mountains of Colorado, I found time to watch Steve Job’s new keynote speech announcing the latest updates to the iPhone software and the phone itself, the long-awaited iPhone 3G. Everyone knew it was coming for the past few months, and most people (including myself) were looking forward to it.

But seriously, Apple - if you’re going to jack up the fees for monthly rates to AT&T from $60 a month to $70 a month, then at least have the decency to tell your customers on your website. It’s glaringly obvious to anyone who saw the old Apple Store option for the iPhone; the entire box with the monthly subscription fees has vanished. Now, I understand that technically Apple is only a manufacturer and they are not the controllers of AT&T’s prices. But Jobs knew that his partner would be upping their rates, and he says nothing?

The cost of the iPhone plus the old smallest minimum monthly fee (approx) for the 24-month contract: $399 + ($60 x 24) = $1839

Cost of the new iPhone and the new rate: $199 + ($70 x 24) = $1879

It’s not the comparably small increase, it’s that they’re blatantly hiding that it was made. Bad form, Apple. But I suppose you’re no stranger to removing information from your website.

We had been hearing about the tropical-storm weather that was happening back at home in Wisconsin and the rest of the Midwest states all week while we were in Colorado, and found ourselves consistently dreading our return to Brodhead - not only because of the “don’t want to see the wind and water damage to the house” but more immediately because of what we figured would be fairly ghastly travel conditions.

We were definitely not unfounded in that thought, because although our flight was supposed to get out of the Denver airport at about 5:50PM, it was consistently delayed for about an hour and a half before finally taxiing like a bedraggled goose into the terminal. Dozens of equally bedraggled passengers from the previous flight staggered off the plane, and we were finally allowed to board at around 7.

Once in the air, the pilot informed us that because of the Midwest storms, we were going to be taking a rather unorthodox approach to Chicago O’Hare - flying all the way down south, through Oklahoma, then angling up to the northeast in order to avoid the huge storms that were stretching from Kansas all the way through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Midway through the flight, the pilot directed us to look out towards our left at a storm pulsating over Wichita, Kansas, something that he and his copilot told us was “the largest storm we’d ever seen in the air.” (I was on the wrong side of the plane, so my dad took over the filming responsibilities.)

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For the past few days, my family and I have been visiting relatives in Colorado state. Although there’s always good reasons to visit family members in other states (and I love the mountains; a huge change from Wisconsin) my foreign exchange sister is heading back home to her native Tajikistan in only a few more days and we wanted to take her someplace special outside of the Midwest before she leaves America. In an excellent coincidence, her hometown of Dushanbe is sister cities with Boulder, Colorado - only a few miles from where we’re staying with my aunt and uncle!

Boulder received a simply amazing gift from Dushanbe several decades ago: an ornate, exquisite, and completely authentic teahouse that was apparently built in Tajikistan, and then transported to Colorado and rebuilt. The insides are filled with amazing ceramic artwork, statues from Tajiki folklore, hand-carved cedar pillars, and of course great food. It was fun to go there with a Dushanbe native, of course - she could translate all of the Cyrillic (Russian/Persian/Tajiki etc) characters all over the walls and tables for us, and the waitstaff seemed to be particularly attentive to her. In Tajik culture, like many other Central Asian countries, the teahouse is like a coffeehouse for us - people socialize, conduct business, and generally relax while enjoying their tea. Frankly, most tea is healthier for us than coffee, so maybe it’s something that we Americans should be adopting! The tea was great, of course - they had an entire menu of varieties they could serve, and each person received their own steaming and steeping teapot to get to the perfect level of brew.

The place in general is simply gorgeous, and I wish these pictures could do it justice. Check out this website for more information about the teahouse and the Boulder-Dushanbe partnership in general. According to my own reading and a little alcove they had in the teahouse, ground has been broken in Dushanbe for Boulder’s return gift - they’re providing a state of the art cybercafé. Since it’s been about 20 years since the teahouse was given to them, it’s good that they’re finally returning the favor!

NOTE: I was going to add some nice, big full sized pictures to this post so that I could attempt to communicate this place’s beauty, but Wordpress’s poor little photo uploader is not working (and after searching the help docs, it looks like hundreds of people are having the same problem with this version). For the time being, I hope these links will do. Each photo is about 2MB each.

-=Entering the teahouse=-
-=Ceramic carvings on the outside of the teahouse=-
-=The Seven Beauties sculpture and fountain=-
-=One of the twelve hand-carved, unique cedar pillars=-

Obviously, the site all of a sudden looks very different than it did previously. I’ve decided to scrap the old static parts of the site that heiseheise.com used to have as its homepage and just use Wordpress entirely for everything - there’s no point in wasting the all-important home page on something that hadn’t been updated since December of last year.

The new and hopefully improved site uses the pretty-looking Talian theme, with my own modifications of course. Over the next few weeks, I hope to get my little brother’s amazing wallpaper artwork up on the site so that he can start building himself a fan base. The kid is entirely too modest over his Photoshop-created wallpapers; he really knows how to make these things and his friends and family use them all the time on their own computers.

Only thing I need to do now is create a fix in the .htaccess file that will cause all of the old links to /blog/p?=whatever be redirected to the new /blog/-less version of the website; otherwise all of my links that I’ve strewn about the internet are going to be completely useless!

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