Creative Drivers, Vista, and God

Thus far, the Creative Labs Vista Audigy drivers have been pretty crap. I frequently get bursts of static over any audio, and only a reboot of my Media Center will fix it. But they’re betas: I can cut them some slack.

Yesterday, up popped a nice dialog box stating that my drivers would expire tomorrow, and that I could uninstall them. I didn’t see the popup until today, because it popped up behind Media Center. How handy.

Faced with a choice of a) downloading a new set of drivers, or b) running my Media Center without sound, I opted for option A.

Or, I’d like to opt for option A. Creative’s US support site is currently telling me that it “Can’t locate any sites with current domain/port credentials”, and the European support site can’t be found. It would appear that “dev1-eusite.cle.creaf.com.creative.com/support/downloads” isn’t online.

Interestingly, if I pick “Vatican City” as my location, I can work my way through a set of Italian pages and locate a new driver. Hopefully it’ll be in English.

I can’t help but imagine the Pope, tutting infallibly to himself as his Media Center pops up a message about the expiration of his sound drivers, but content in the knowledge that, it’s ok, he can download a new set of drivers from Creative. It really is all about who you know, isn’t it?

Fingers crossed: hopefully these drivers will be in English, fix my static problem, and make the Pope a very happy man.

IE DevBar Beta 3 Released

Everyone’s favourite Internet Explorer developer toolbar has received another update, with beta 3 having just been released.

More information here, and a download link here.

Enjoy - this is an essential plugin for any web designer/developer.

Apple Announce The Most Beautiful Phone Ever: Will Anyone Buy It?

We have something of a tradition at my place of work. Every time Apple - or more accurately, Steve Jobs - does one of his keynotes, we watch. Or rather read - Apple don’t stream their keynotes in live Quicktime-o-vision these days - and debate. Debate inevitably turns to disagreement, and often confusion; some of my colleagues just can’t get their heads around my love of all things Apple.

This year, sadly, we had work to do while Steve did his thing, but that didn’t stop us from monitoring various live-blogs whilst we busied ourselves with our work.

Jason Who?

I noticed a post on Outpost Gallifrey regarding this snippet of Yahoo news.

I have no doubt that this is absolute nonsense, but think about it for a second. Jason Statham as Doctor Who… A swearier, cockerney Who, who could get all kung-fu on “Zee Daleks”. Presumably he’d have to shag his way through several companions per series too.

It’ll never happen. Thankfully.

New Year’s Resolutions

Number one: blog more. Lately, this place has gathered a few cobwebs, and I’m not happy about that. Things are going to change. I might start posting less specific rambles and rants, as the mood takes me.

Number two: catch up on review material. I’ve got piles of DVDs and CDs to get through for review on Blogcritics, so I need to jump on that in the new year.

Number three: classified.

Number four: classified.

I’ll let you know how three and four pan out…