Been a While

Like many other lazy American's I don't write in my blog on a regular basis. Not that I have any regular readers I keep on pins and needles awaiting my next post. In fact, I don't think I've made more then a few cents with the Google Adsense. None of that bothers me though, in fact my blog is more for my own use than anything else.

I did come up with a new idea for a blog; Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2 in a new body with the same devious plan to take over the world. I hope to use it to help what little creative side I have in me. In setting it up I did discover all the new things added to blogger. As usual, I was impressed with how Google improved Blogger. Speaking of Google and their glory I finally got a chance to play with Picasa. I honestly never cared for picture applications that take total control of your pictures. I find in most cases (especially with customers), they just make things complicated and difficult to organize. What pictures show up in my application, vs what pictures are really in my picture folder or somewhere else on my computer. Although Picasa is no exception to this, I did find it's ability to edit photo's fantastic. I made this dashingly ugly photo for my Vigo blog (surprising I could find no decent pictures of Vigo on the net).

On a side note I've been using Ubuntu 7.04 on my bench machine at work. I added a two-prong double action switch so I could easily go back and fourth between Windows and Linux if need be. I keep it in Linux most of the time, but I admit I have gone back to Windows to run check disks on NTFS drives and to use Visio. Unfortunately I have yet to find an open source equivalent to Microsoft's Visio. Honestly I don't use it enough to sweet it. Ubuntu has been great though. It lacks some basics that prevent it from becoming any real competition with Windows. For example, the ability to play DVD's and MP3's out of the box. No big deal for a geek like me to figure it out, but I can see where the average user would get annoyed real quick. I do wonder if the machines Dell sells with Ubuntu can do those things out of the box.