I just downloaded and installed Beryl on my Ubuntu desktop and OMFG! Is it cool! The window effects, the zoom, focus and not to mention the 3D desktop cube - you have to see it to really appreciate it! Br4x had been telling me about it, and it sounded cool from what I had read online - but as I just stated - you have to see it.

The themes that come with it are outstanding as well, and I can't say that I will miss the Ubuntu Brown.

Now the Dell is selling Ubuntu desktops & lappies, I wonder how that will make a difference in the world of Linux and joe-consumer. Dell is big. Real big, bigger than Gateway methinks - my experience with Dell is that they are a better machine. Although I have to say the elcheapo craptastic monitors we got at work from Dell, suck big-time! A ton have failed, and were replaced with even cheaper POS's.

Any way, I'm getting off track. I'm no where near an expert on Beryl, or Ubuntu for that matter - but this is the coolest thing I have seen in a while.

Speaking of off track

I just saw the latest Microsoft initiative today too. Microsoft Surface.

Some of you may remember the TED presentation Jeff Han did a couple years ago about mutli-touch interfaces. If not, check it out - very sweet. This is very much like that, in fact it makes me wonder if it is not exactly the same thing - maybe they swallowed Han up to move this forward. Dunno. But it's still out there as far as sweet interfaces go.

Last year Han jumped into the Startr-ups world with Perceptive Pixel, but there isn't much to the site really. Regardless, the potential for this sort of technology and interface is very 24th century, and I can't wait to see how it progresses. Hopefully it will wind up being more than a couple of cool start-ups and a micro-site. You know, kinda like the last thing Microsoft tried to flail out there before it was ready? Remember origamiproject.com? The site has changed now from the micro-site, but it still hasn't gone anywhere.

I just love this stuff though. Watch the vids on the MS site too, they are very worth while. Then take a look at this image (Br4x found it on digg).

Every so often something will happen with my desktop that I need to rebuild it. Maybe I get a new SATA drive that's faster, so I make it my new boot drive, or I build up a new desktop or whatever, XP just gets fat and slow and needs to be reinstalled (you know you do this at least once a year). I always find myself putting Ubuntu back on one of the secondary drives, and the last two times I ended up buying an additional drive to just do that. This time is no different.

There's a surprise in every box

I get to about step 4 in the installation and it looks at my id 0 drive, sees I have a Windows XP account, and asks if I want to import this user? WTF?! How cool is that! Hell yes I want to import that user! So I select yes and fill in my info and move on. What to my wondering eyes does appear? Everything! My desktop, preconfigured links to all of my other drives, folders and information from that windows account. Before you would have had to install the extra drives, and adjust some text doc to get them mount on boot every time; not any more! This is a huge step in the right direction.

I start about my business again, chatting with the fam, and installing my favorite applications and utilities. Automatix is on the top of the list. With that installed I get on with it; nVidia, Flash, Acrobat, yada yada yada.... I restart after the nVidia install, and damn it! My primary monitor is now my little 17 incher instead of my 20 inch wide screen. Gah! This happened before and it took me a 1/2 hour to get the freakin xserver right. Navigating to the Preferences menu, I open the nVidia setting manager, and notice right away it has support for both my monitors, and simply show that the big Dell is disabled. So I enable it, set it to be left of the little shooter; and KAPPOW! I have dual monitors in Ubuntu! Again with the great googily moogily! I was never able to get this to work before Feisty; ever. I wasted hours screwing around with the settings, crashing xserver, and combing forum posts and the good juju never showed for me. Until now.

Why Ubuntu still isn't a consumer product

As I happily install some cool things, like the new Ubuntu Studio, I suddenly notice that my xorg server is dead! Upon restart it wouldn't come back up and I couldn't figure out how to get it back to a happy place - so I aced the install and started with kubuntu. I should have known better - but I figured what the hell? Lot's of folks like it, and KDE is pretty slick. So what do I get for my trouble? A failed install, and errors upon updating. So again, I aced the install and here I am back to ubuntu - and I am happy again. It's this exact sort of non-recoverable GUI failure that keeps Linux off the shelves as a valid, stable consumer product. It's bad enough when windows goes south, but to get stuck at a command line because you ran an update, I don't know too many non-computer types that would deal well with staring them in the face.

My top 10 list

The top 10 things I love most about Ubuntu.... hmmmm.....

1. It's super easy to install, and fast
2. It now easily supports dual monitors
3. Automatic imports of Windows user profile
4. Automatic mounting of NTFS drives
5. Almost all the apps I need are preinstalled
6. Beryl
7. It's free
8. Great online community
9. Great applications for it, and they're free too
10. Tux

Ya know, when I bought the damned thing it ran fine - made it all the way home from Philly with no problem - it was a long drive mind you - but we made it. Thanks to Jcal for driving the Jetta home.

Any way, so I start pissing around with the little stuff to get going, the doors and weatherstripping leak in some places, the bolts are stripped and/or rusty, I wanted to put the stock seats back in, etc.... Not to mention the bits that it needs to pass PA inspection - the steering had too much play, I need at least 2 new tires, the stinkin reverse light switch busted; that's about it really.

Hi ho, hi ho... off to work I go....

A few weekends ago, I yanked the water pump to put a new one on, and check the bolts on the timing chain cover. Everything was fine until I reinstalled the water pump and the last bolt sheared! GAH! %$##! I didn't even put a lot of pressure on it. So now I have to strip it down to the timing chain, and remove and reseal all of it, and get the busted bolt out. Luckily the bolt was sticking out about 1/2 inch from the block. Now I have the timing chain cover back on, cleaned and sealed, fresh paint on the harmonic dampener, and lower pulley.

With that all sealed up and cured, I can get to the water pump next. I have the ever popular Ford Blue on it as well, and a new Flex Fan to go where the super freaking heavy stock fan was.

Uncle Bob, Stay off my truck!

I also ran into a total Uncle Bobbed repair/adjustment on my Oil Pan. Some dodo decided to slop a bunch of crap all in the low oil tube, rather than buy the plug - so it looks like there is a bunch of brass slapped to the inside and outside. Looks like total crap. I started looking about for a new oil pan, and OMFG! They are expensive. Come to find out EB's need a dual sump pan, and they range from $80 to $225 depending on what you get. Needless to say, with a fresh coat of paint - I am happy with my crap-tastic pan. It doesn't leak - so I will replace it some other time.

I finally reinstalled the stock front seats, leaving me close to the point of buying new tires for it. I really want to get it legal and on the road this summer, so I can get the soft top on it, and tool around with Ding & Dong in the Bronco - they enjoy it as much as I do, especially since they can both ride up front: no airbags in the 60's - well, at least the kind you find in the dash of a truck.

I bought some hydraulic hood lifts from Tom's Bronco Parts in Oregon, and they are awesome! So long to the 2x4 holding up the hood on this baby! I also bought some hood pins as well as a complete weatherstrip kit, and some new door latches and posts.

What's next

I really need to get some new seat belts, a reverse light switch, new tires, the weatherstripping installed... what else? I want to get some body grommets to plug some extra holes, but I might just use some sheet rubber and 3M adhesive, then place the sound deadening/insulation down over it. I also have to get the cushion foam for the rear seat so I can get it back together and installed.

Eventually I want to get a new distributor, electronic ignition, replace the wiring harness, sweet set of 18" rims on it, new paint, good stereo, new dash and guages, carpet, the list is endless.... But that's why it's a project.

I have to say that when I first discovered the news that Adobe was going to acquire Macromedia - my heart skipped a few beats. I mean, they already had GoLive (which is a POS), and with how poorly the last version of the Acrobat plugin performed I thought for sure my favorite development platform was going to get the short end of the stick. That's probably will Gates and Balmer thought too, and YAY! We were all wrong!

When I heard about some of the features they were working on at the last FITC in Toronto, I knew I was going to be all over this release like a fat kid on a dough nut! I have been using the Web Premium Collection of CS3 for a week now, and so far I absolutely love the enhancements they have made. I am not going to say changes - because that would completely false. Everything that is different in all of the applications is; so far; a well-needed enhancement.

My biggest love right now is two fold. First the redesigned palette system is awesome- and best of all, ithe pallettes are the same from Flash to Photoshop. The collapsed dock on the side really has done wonders for me working in Flash; in that I can now have all of my palettes docked on the side of main monitor, and split the screen of my secondary between the timeline and actions window - so I can actually see everything that I am coding. It would have been nice to something similar in Dreamweaver too, but I can understand why it isn't.

This fact stresses how easy it is to navigate between applications now, and I can effortlessly transition from Photoshop, to Illustrator and finally into Flash with precision that here-to-fore was something dared only in the wildest of dreams. In fact, it wasn't 2 weeks ago I was cursing Macromedia and the way I had to go from Illustrator into Flash and how screwed up things had gotten.

The second thing I found to be surprising actually is that they all run faster on my machine at work. I haven't noticed any improvement at home, but my machine at home is kickin' fast. My aged desktop at work performs better with CS# than it did with CS2 - go figure. The one thing I did not install this time was Adobe Version Cue. I wanted it with CS2 last time to try and work in a more collaborative fashion with the folks i work with - but that never really came to fruition, and no one had any interest in a new thing to be tried. So I left it off my desktop this time around.

There are plenty of features I have to try, and will be doing so diligently over the coming months as I get more into it. Features I am looking forward to giving a whirl are the animation to actionscript conversion in Flash, as well as the SPRY framework in Dreamweaver.

I'm not an Adobe fanboy either, there are something that I hope they finally got figured out here too. One of the biggest is some of the glaring inconsistencies in the Flash development UI. Especially how the components work and the routinely poor documentation for newly released features, components, classes, etc... Photoshop had been floundering for a couple of version too, with no real upgrades or reasons to keep up with the latest version - but the release of CS3 has changed that. They uncorked a big one here.

I'm sure I will get disillusioned soon enough, but for now I'm as happy as a tornado in a trailer park!

Driving home from work today I stumbled on to a lot of somethings that made me laugh out loud over the beeping of my little friend. I decided to drop some tunes on my iPaq Media Companion so I could see how it worked with my ever-so-high tech tape deck player - and what to my wondering wifi should appear? No less than 7 unsecured wireless networks just along my 5 mile route home (there were a couple/three secured ones too).

I know, so freakin' what! That's not all that many. But it is oh nay-sayer! You see, I live in a town of around 7,000, and to have that many open networks along a 5 mile route is pretty remarkable. What's more, that my little HP could pick them up and yalp at me whilst I wizz by at 40 mph - is pretty damned astounding. I'm excited!

I've been wanting to do some War Driving - and now I have laptop again, and apparently a pretty good wifi sleuthing tool, I think I shall! I may even start a map showing where all of the networks are. hehehehe..... I probably should take this opportunity to make it clear that I have no intention of trying to hack any ones network for ill-effect. Purely geeky fun, so if you're thinking of getting po'ed at me for what I just said.... don't.

Any way, the music that this things pumps out is pretty rockin'. I was expecting to have to crank the deck way up in order to get good sound, but I didn't - quite the opposite. I had to turn the volume down on Media Player, and then adjust my deck accordingly. Even the microscopic onboard speaker has decent sound quality - I expected to be like a PC speaker of the olden days, but avast! The sound came pouring out in good definition. This iPaq is a sweet little gadget - and I really like it. I just downloaded Flash Lite for it, and I am installing right now in fact - well, not right, right now - but you gets the drift.

If anyone is looking for a good all around PDA, that is easy to use, easy to carry; the HP RX4240 is your PDA. It's relatively inexpensive, and is fairly feature rich for the low cost. $259 at Amazon.com.

I have been playing around with a bunch of news toys lately, and I have really become attached to my little iBook. OS X is sweet, it's a fun little diversion from windows. My latest things is handheld devices, and designing the web to fit them.

It is quite astounding really how many sites completely ignore what handhelds are good for, and very succinctly rendering the site totally useless on many handhelds. So what would any self-respecting web geek do? Yup! I went and bought one so I could become a master at the mobile web platform. Very Zen isn't it? NO? I didn't think so either.

HP iPaq RX4240

This is the coolest thing since sliced bread. No really, this little chunker is awesome! It's about the size of my iPod (had it wintered well), and surfs the web, send email, and will easily connect to any WiFi source it can detect.

Where this all really ties together is that I found an app online that will allow me to sync the iPaq to iCal. Using The Missing Sync, I can avoid installing Outlook on my home desktop altogether. Which I like since the copy of Outlook that came with the iPaq is old, like Outlook 2002 old. meh. losers.....

Making the cogs turn

Fitting it all together is a piece of cake. Google Calendar has a feed that will allow you to subscribe to that calendar using iCal. This is awesome since the feature is built right in. No hax0r required. You simply add your appts, dates, whatevers to google, sync to iCal and connect your pDA - and w00t! w00t! It's a ménage à trois of technological goodness. All without setting foot in Outlook. Well, almost - Outlook mobile is the viewer on the iPaq - but I can live with it.