061130 00:13 by iDRMRSR

Ahhhh, ratz. I spent most of the day UBUNTU-ing.

I finally found something that put a charge in my shorts. There's a windowing system out there called Beryl which actually puts your graphic card to use. Looks like what I imagine Aero on Vista will look like. Semi transparent windows, which wiggle and bend as you move them around, transparent task bars, loads of colors and reflections and animations out the wazoo.

Unfortunately it's BETA code, so like when you maximize a window, it may just turn completely black inside...or scoot up above the top of the screen so you can't grab the title bar and yank it anywhere. However when it's working, it beats the SNOT out of Windows XP and makes OS X look like the ugly sister, from what I've seen of videos of OS X on YouTube.

It's got all the candy colored clown they call the Sandman, all right. Had to slap on quite a few tweaks for my Nvidia graphic card (which is five years old BTW).

SO then I thought I'd impress everybody and prove that I could POST to alt.slack. I installed PAN, the only newsreader I could find which does Yenc and multipart post reading/decoding. Very slick, almost like AGENT and completely FREE.

That is, until I tried to post a PIXTURE. I selected the NEW POST option. NO ATTACHMENT ICON...no way I could find to attach a binary. Sheesh.

I clicked the HELP and it went to some web page for the product, and when I clicked USER MANUAL I got a page ALL TO FUCKING TYPICAL OF LINUX..."We're working on this!". Yup, no manual of any sort. I'm getting used to this now.

Looking for FUN STUFF, I found this program called BLENDER which is a BRYCE clone. The only thing is, the User Interface requires a creature with eight tentacles to simultaneously press three keys at a time whilst engaging left clicks and right clicks AND thrumming the scroll wheel.

I imagine I would require two or three hours on the Krel Educator to figure that one out, but then my mind would be even more fried than it is.

Oh, there are tutorial VIDEOS out there, loads of them, but they download at 4.3K or slower. Apparently they aren't intended to be actually viewed by anybody who didn't write the software. I gave up after trying to download one of them for an hour.

I think I managed to get it to do a rather flat looking render of a cube partly lit on a blue background. Screenshot is on ABS. Gotta be the WORST User Interface I have ever seen!

I haven't got to the point yet where I could live without Windows functionality, though I do regret not having a windowing system like Beryl. I was kind of hoping I would SEE THE LIGHT, but thanks to UBUNTU, I have only been able to pull the wool over my own eyes.

Vista, I'm ready for you.