Diary of a Wolfeman

So, after all this time of just using the default video drivers on the laptop, I decided it was high time to upgrade to the full ATI driver and see if I couldn’t get Compiz to work. Lo and behold, I give you screenshots!

First, the Holy Grail of Compiz: the Cube!

May the Cube be with you!

Here it is again, showing off the 3D-layered effect:

Shuffling the windows

And now, the feature that makes me smile for no reason whatsoever… I give you: Wobbly Windows!

Now, there are one or two of you out there geeky enough to notice that I appear to be running KDE4 – and you would be right. 4.1, in fact.

So how do I like it? Whoever decided that desktop shortcuts were bad and that we should have these stupid folder views on the desktop instead should be beaten. Alot. Oh you can have icons on the desktop, but they have a hover menu that keeps popping up every time you mouse around the desktop that gets annoying.

There are other little annoyances as well. Say, I’m choosing my time zone and I choose “Pacific – Los Angeles”. What kind of a clock does it give me? A 24-hour clock. Nobody in civilian life uses a 24-hour clock in the USA, you’d think they would realize that and make 12-hour be the default for that time zone. I could go on for about twenty minutes ranting about the date format too, but apparently us Americans have been doing it wrong for centuries now.

Funny, considering how we all immigrated from somewhere else. We must have decided writing “Friday, September 26th” was somehow more revolutionary than “Friday, 26 September”. I’ll admit that year-month-day for shorthand makes great sense as a linear progression of largest-to-smallest (and makes sorting computer files much easier) but I have been using the proper American month-day-year for 30-some-odd years now, and it screws me up every time I run into a British day-month-year notation.

At least we’re all using 4 digits for the year now.

I’m rambling. Must be bedtime.

What? Wait! It wasn’t me, I swear!! It could have been anybody!!

Unless, of course, you are talking about losers who don’t update their blog, in which case yeah, ya caught me. My apologies.

So, on to what I have been doing lately: short amounts of free time have been gobbled up by Fantastic Contraption. Gee, a toy where I can build things that do stuff? Hell yeah I’m playing it!

This past weekend I did something I haven’t done in a couple of years: I went to an actual SCA event, instead of an un-sanctioned one. Acorn War was down at Willamette Mission State Park, and for once we got a nice spot in the shade. Just three of us this event – Illyana, J and myself. Tolerant wasn’t feeling well for a couple of days prior, and everyone else had prior commitments to deal with.

The event was pretty small, but the weather was gorgeous – low to mid-80’s during the day, and just cold enough at night to make you appreciate the heavy blanket. Blessing of all blessings in a small site, the drummers were actually GOOD so I wasn’t kept up all night by idiots who can’t carry a beat. (I have no problem sleeping while good drummers play.)

There were a couple of good parties on Saturday night, but once again I wasn’t really comfortable barging into someone else’s encampment and they weren’t exactly running out the welcome wagon, so I tripped along tent-ward and just enjoyed the general ambiance. All in all, a nice relaxing weekend.

Ahh.