Weather and more space

Great weather here in the midwest today, isn't it? Currently here in Bloomington we are experiencing a mix of rain and freezing rain. We're just at the freezing point, so the weather can't really decide what to do. It's supposed to get down to 17°F over night, so things should be interesting in the morning. Conditions currently have the rain on the trees freezing as can be seen in these pictures taken from my dorm room window.

In other news, my roommate who moved out over Christmas break but decided to leave a lot of his stuff behind in a big pile on the floor, finally came back for it last Sunday night. This was only after I had my RA get in touch with him and tell him if the stuff wasn't out of here by this last Sunday it was going to be thrown away. So anyway he came and got it, so yesterday I set about rearranging the furniture in the room to make it more comfortable for only one person.

Here is a view from my door. My old arrangement had my computer desk rotated 90° toward the door with desk with the printer on it facing it and my bed on top of both of them. I had to use a ladder to get to my bed!

Here's my bed (now thankfully on the floor). This used to be my roommate's half of the room.

And here's my door. Notice all of the extra junk. Next to the door is my roommate's desk and against the wall is his disassembled bed. In the corner, you can even see the ladder that I was talking about earlier.

I'm still working on getting my stuff spread out into more convenient places. My fridge and my coats have migrated into my roommate's closet along with the vacuum cleaner, but here's still a lot of places to put things that are still vacant. I'll be working on filling as many of them as I can, so my room doesn't look so crowded. Until next time.

New Linux; New Eye Candy (Suck on that Vista)

As you can tell from my header, I'm not the biggest fan of Vista. I've been experimenting off and on with Linux for almost a year now, and I must say, I'm hooked. I started off with Mandriva 2006, then upgraded to 2007. Finally, about a week ago, I decided to try something new. I'd heard about Ubuntu, about how user-friendly it is, and about how easy it is to use. Well, because of Mandriva I was addicted to KDE, so I decided to try Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu). At first, I was a little bit put off. They dumbed down the interface drastically, so much in fact, that there was no longer a root(administrator) user. This disturbed me somewhat, but I discovered that this could be turned back on, so on we go. Next, I got my video drivers working, proprietary at first, but then I switched back to open-source because of something I'll get to in a minute. Then, I got my mouse working. It worked fine, except for the forward and back browser buttons, but I got that up and going. I still don't have side-scrolling, which I miss, but I may fool with that later.

Finally, I discovered Beryl. Quite possibly one of the most stunning bits of eye candy I had ever seen. And it has blown anything I had seen about Vista's new UI right out of the water. Beryl is a desktop manager that is capable of stunning 3-D environments and special effects. I'll just let the pictures do the talking.







I rest my case.