Alright, so I got a copy of Vista Home Basic for my Lappie ( which is up for sale on ebay - hp dv9000z - go buy it damnit ) and I liked it, but I noticed that there were some things missing that Linux had that the Vista Basic didn’t. So I grabbed a copy of Vista Ultimate to throw on my desktop and personally, I’m not impressed. Visually, it’s nice, but lacks any substance. The breadcrumbs feature is VERY nice, but Gnome had that years ago, so what am I getting excited about?

BUT, there are some cool things you can grab to make your desktop look more like Linux, but have the widespread gaming, usability and driver support of Windows. First go grab yodm3d, which will give you a beautiful 3d cubed desktop - unzip it to program files as there is no installer. Not as pretty as Beryl, but what are you gonna do. Next, move your taskbar to the top so that you’ve got the Start Menu at the top left ala Gnome. Next, go to punksoftware and grab rocketdock and then grab ubericon. Install and add on some other plugins for ubericon such as runaway which is awesome. Now move rocketdock to the bottom add some icons and, voila. A hacked ass Gnome on Windows. It works for Vista and XP.

Now, the one thing I do like is the widgets, BUT yahoo widgets are already so prevalent that it’s almost not worth it to use these, mostly because there aren’t any out there that are worth a damn. So basically, don’t waste your money on Vista. The functionality that it brings isn’t worth it - unless you want DirectX 10, but there’s nothing out there that uses it, so again, pointless. You can also grab Vista Inspirat 2 to make your XP box to look Vista. And best of all, it’s all free. So save your $260 bucks, go grab some free software and enjoy! Oh, I do have to note that there is one thing that is fricken awesome in Vista. You can use any movie as your desktop background. That is bad!

This is of course just my personal opinion on it and who am I? So go waste your scratch on it if you want, but I wouldn’t waste my time.

** edit ** I was fairly impressed with the way windows restricts users to doing things by prompting them (ala the stupid mac commercial). It felt much like they took a note straight from Linux - prompting users for administrator access - and while some may not like it, those are probably the same people that need it. I thought that it was done quite well. Also, instead of installing a brico pack, you can just grab UberIcon, RocketDock, and the Royale Noir theme which is a Microsoft theme and thus requires no modification of system files. You can grab Royale Noir from there. ** edit **

Hey Hey Hey!!! So in a matter of days, I’ve gone through this entire site and added an amazing amount of functionality, including improved RSS tracking, improved photo gallery, paged comments (although comments aren’t available on anything), and NOW… a guestbook for everyone to leave us comments! It’s much like the leave-a-note feature I was developing, but it’s much more robust. Just so you know, comments are moderated, so they do have to be approved before they go up, but they will go up (as long as they’re appropriate) within the hour. So, enjoy the new features and look for some new things going on on here and on my site. I’m finally doing web design for fun.

Oh yeah! By the way, things are finally looking up for me (John). I’ve had 2 interviews with a very exciting company and I’m hoping that I hear something soon. I’ll finally be able to get out of the dismal hole I’ve been in and move away from the redundancy and idiocy of web design. I enjoy it, but there’s too much garbage out there to deal with. So hopefully soon it’ll be a side job instead of a full time thing and I’ll be able to move onto something a lot more exciting. So everyone keep us in your thoughts and prayers and hopefully something good will come of all this. It’s a really sweet position at a data center in Chicago and I’m really hopeful for it. So… Yup!

It’s been a busy day today! New plugins, new pictures, and now… A NEW SYNDICATION SYSTEM! Ok, so it really isn’t that exciting, but I’ve been wanting to track rss feed readers (if any) and some other neat things too. We’re using feedburner now, which I love, because it’s used by a great deal of the feeds that I read, so we’ll see how well it works. So subscribe and yeah! WooHoo for development!

So the photo gallery is now fully functional and it’s AWESOME! I’ve been working on getting a working version of this going for a bit now, so it’s exciting to get it going. Basically here are some milestones.

• Went through 3 iterations of different plugins - hated them all
• Began writing my own using PHP OOP and MySQL
• Wrote entire thing and implemented lightbox functionality
• Found a plugin I liked so scrapped everything I’d done and used it instead
• Found that plugin needed tweaking and that certain things on the site weren’t validating
• Tweaked plugin and now site validates everywhere
• Cheered and patted myself on my sunburned back!

I know it’s not that exciting to most of you, but I think it’s awesome. Now everyone can enjoy pictures in a fancy manner and no matter what browser you use it works great. Blind folks and those that have impaired vision can also peruse the entire site once again. WooHoo!

In conclusion. SWEEETNESS and everyone enjoy the new pictures!

The photo gallery will be down for the next few days while I make improvements to it that are long overdue. Thanks for your patience and we’ll have pictures from the shower up when it goes back live. =)

We want to thank everyone who came out for our shower yesterday (Sat. 9th). We got a lot of REALLY nice things that we really wanted and we are so blessed to have friends and family like you. You all really made our day special and we really couldn’t begin to thank all of you enough. And to all of those who could not be with us, we appreciate any sentiments {and gifts=)} that you sent our way. We were bummed you couldn’t be there, but we understand that we are not as important as other things. Just kidding. We understand. So thank you all as well. We could continue this monologue telling all of you how much we love you all and how magnificent you all are, but we shall cut it short here. So again. Thank you all. Especially the Mothers and Grandmothers who setup everything and fed everyone. =)

Well, we’ve got internet back up and running and now my portfolio is back up again, so things are all good now. Wheee. Gotta Blast!

our internet is down and I don’t know when it’ll be back up. as such my portfolio is down but I’m working on getting it up somewhere else. sorry employers. as if it couldn’t get worse. but it always does. one word left. hope.

Well, I’ve experienced some delays in getting around to the photo gallery section, but it should be completed within the next week, so for all those people who keep looking at it and hating it… I know. It’s getting fixed. =)