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This is the first year I’ve decided to completely ignore the scary side of Halloween. And yes, this is a permanent thing, and will include when I have kids. In fact, that’s the main reason I gave it up.

I have to admit, I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. My pastor said something about it in early October 2005, and nothing since, but I’ve been turning it over in my mind since then. It makes sense to me. We don’t have a “Let’s pretend your mother and I are married to different people” night, a “Let’s pretend it’s okay to kill people” night and we don’t really need a “Let’s pretend we’re afraid of ghosts, witches and the dark” night. Fear is not rational. Good sense, sure, but not fear.

My parents walked a very fine line when I was a kid, making it fun while completely discarding the idea that we were pretending to be afraid of things. I went out as a clown or something. Not a scary clown, either. I don’t think I can walk that line, of pretending to participate but not traumatizing my kids.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m going to be a complete stick in the mud about it. There’s other ways to celebrate, and I’ll do my best to make sure my kids don’t feel left out completely. There will be parties, and there will be candy, and there will be fun. Just no scary costumes. Here’s where it’s good to know some like-minded people.

Honestly, the only thing I miss about giving up Halloween is I’ll never get my chance make up a really great medieval/priate/Jedi costume. I do have a friend planning a medieval wedding. Maybe I can convince another friend to have a marriage at sea. The Jedi thing is totally out, but after the last three movies, who cares anyway?

Here’s what I’m looking for in a theme:

• Largely off-white. I’ve seen some cool stuff done with dark backgrounds, but it just isn’t for me. The cream you see behind this post is about as off-white as I’d get, and I think it’s a bit strong. (In fact, now that I noticed this, I’ll probably fix it before anyone even reads this post.)
• Whiter controls. Most themes have buttons and controls the same color as the background. It all blends in together too much for my taste. The few themes that don’t have buttons that are darker than the background. I want lighter.
• Color as an accent. While I don’t require the background color to be perfectly grey, I definitely prefer an off-white (as I mentioned above). But small amounts of color as an accent are nice.
• Not distracting. Patterns, gradients and shadows are not for me.

Any ideas what qualifies? I realize I’m being picky here. I’d love to see a theme start from the Mac System 7 look, remove some of the patterned junk, and add a bit more color.

A few things I noticed:

• My ATI drivers are now working. I thought they were before, but the frame rate is so much better now that they must not have been. Also, my screen is now entirely on my monitor. I knew this was a driver issue, but I had no idea how to fix it before.
• Firefox 2 is, of course, a huge improvement. I really missed spell checking. Firefox is not about to knock Safari off as my default browser on the Mac (at least, not until it does multi-platform extension/history/bookmark sharing via WebDAV), but it’s nice to have something respectable on the Linux box.

Now, for the bad things:

• I wish I’d kept better notes of the customizations I did to Dapper. I haven’t got the Windows key functioning properly yet.
• I still don’t like the theme. It has curved corners now. Big deal. That isn’t my problem with it; it’s simply ugly. Yes, I know there are other themes available. To my eye, the Human theme is the best of a sorry lot. I am, perhaps oddly enough, not looking for something that looks exactly like Mac OS X or exactly like Windows XP. I am simply looking for something clean, with nice color accents, and that doesn’t look like it has been beaten to death with an ugly stick and then left outside in the heat of summer for three weeks to rot. Oh, and left-aligned window titles without shadows would be nice, too.
• #include "std_rants/menubar.h"

Several attempts to re-install Ubuntu 6.06 later, I was forced to conclude that something was wrong with my power supply. Since it was an integrated power supply from Antec and I don’t feel like giving them any more business, it was time for a new case.

I picked an X-QPack, which is a microATX case. It’s available in several colors, but the Langley NCIX had only black and blue in stock, so blue it was. (I have something of a hatred for black PCs. It has always struck me as the trendy way to avoid beige for the clueless.)

It’s slightly larger than my Antec Aria was, but this is both good and bad. Bad, because it’s slightly too large for my desk. Good, because it’s much easier to work inside and seems to do a better job of keeping components cool.

The X-QPack offers a 420watt power supply (compared to, I believe, 300watt). Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a fan on the power supply.

The case is actually remarkably well thought-out; the motherboard mounts on a drawer that slides in and out. There’s an carrying handle integrated into the front panel, and has knock-out panels for two 5.25″ devices and a single 3.5″, plus space for two internal 3.5″ drives. Despite the small space, there’s room to screw everything in on all mounting points. If I was going to describe this case in just a few words, it would be “tabs into slots mounting hardware.”

It’s a good thing it was well designed, or I wouldn’t have figured it out. There was no documentation at all.

The downside to this case is that all the sides are clear plexiglass (or something), and the rear fan has an integrated and bright blue LED. Not a big deal until you combine it with how ugly the inside of my PC is. At least I’ll know if someone steals my hard drive.

I’m largely back up and running now, and trying the 6.10 upgrade again (but this time, through the GUI). I think this is the very last piece of adhoc hardware I will buy. My next purchase is going to be a Mac mini, even if it is to replace my PC.

Tried to upgrade to Ubuntu machine to 6.10 last night by doing the source list change thing. I guess I messed up somewhere, because today my Linux machine shows a Kubuntu boot screen for a few seconds before crashing.

I’m relatively sure that someone with knowledge could fix this. But I’m going to chalk it up as another lame newbie mistake and reinstall. I’m more amused at the total chaos that’s been caused than upset.

I did notice before trying to restart that Firefox has the real logo now. I didn’t expect Ubuntu to go that way.

From PCWorld comes A Brief History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads

Been a while since I last updated, so here are a few random things I miss on the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop:

• Top menu bar. C’mon, the jury is not out on the best location for the menu bar anymore. It’s been settled for all but the most die-hard users of operating systems that get it wrong (which is, unfortunately, most operating systems). At least offer a top menu bar as an option. I don’t think this will ever happen.
• Custom date formats. I hate dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, and so on. I want yyyy-mm-dd, which is actually the Canadian standard (even if it is infrequently used). I actually found several alleged solutions to this via google, but ultimately none of them actually worked.
• Alt-tabbing while dragging. I can alt-tab between applications, and I can drag between applications, but I can’t alt-tab while dragging. This is something both Mac OS X and Windows have solved.
• Stale forks. For idealistic/political reasons, up-to-date versions of some software are quite hard to install under Linux. Firefox and Thunderbird are great example of this.
• Expose. I know there’s a hack to add it, but I’m looking for something more seamless. I imagine it’ll be in a future version.