Knit Geek Life

I feel a tad bit odd going off on a technical rant here because I generally don't do so... but I'm feeling bothered at the moment, and once I spit out my official stance on this I will likely feel a little bit better... So, if you're here for the knitting and the scrapbooking, bear with me... Today, we're going to talk about Ubuntu Linux and how to strategically spread open source.

The weekend before last, I had the distinct pleasure of being able to attend the first meeting of the New Hampshire Ubuntu LoCo Team (and I'll be hosting the second meeting next month, information forthcoming) and one of the many things that we talked about was ideas for practical ways of how to introduce Ubuntu Linux as a viable option to Windows Vista to individuals, organizations and small businesses within our community... I've been doing a lot of reflecting on that since Saturday night, and I've been doing a lot of lurking along and a little bit of posting at the Ubuntu Forums and the conclusion that I have come to is our collective stumbling block is support and documentation.

I'm mostly focusing on what I've seen specifically in the Ubuntu community because their focus has mainly been on implementing user-friendly desktop Linux, but I'm sure some of what I'm going to say applies cross-distribution.

I was reading a blog entry the other day entitled The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment, more or less his experiment was an informal usability test where he sat down his girlfriend in front of a fresh install of Ubuntu where nothing had previously been set up, no additional programs other than the ones that Ubuntu came with the install by default were installed, and then asked her to complete a list of seemingly everyday mundane tasks that most average computer users know how to do... Things like surf the web, watch videos on YouTube, rip a CD, burn a CD, download music, etc. to see where she'd trip up... and despite some arguments as to whether this experiment was degrading to the girlfriend or not... there was some interesting data extrapolated from the experiment, and his conclusion that Ubuntu probably needs some sort of tutorial type documentation built into the OS for brand new users is probably a correct one... what I disagreed with was his final paragraph:

Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do. Erin’s intelligent, quick to learn and is reasonably well-acquainted with modern technology. If she had as much trouble as she did, what chance to the elderly or at least the middle-aged stand?

Granted, if you were to extract the data from his experiment alone I could see how you might come to that conclusion, but I don't think you can accurately draw a conclusion from one informal usability test. All one usability test can tell you is some places where there are rough edges that you might get your coat sleeve snagged on. I believe you have to look at the entire picture before you can draw the conclusion that Ubuntu isn't ready for the average user.

Let's take a look at Windows for a minute... Is it really that usable? If someone who was familiar with basic tasks that were in the Ubuntu Girlfriend Experiment but had never used Windows before faired any better? Would they have known what functionality Windows had built in and would they know where to go find the programs they needed to do it without asking anybody? It's kinda hard to test that because the majority have used Windows before, but I would guess you would find the same mixed results or worse.

The thing is though... In the real world, the majority of people don't sit in front of their computer and try to figure out how to do what they need to do to complete their task for hours on end. They turn around and ASK someone the minute they run into a roadblock. The luxury of Windows isn't that it's a good operating system, it's the fact that if you have a problem or don't know what program is a good one to use, all you have to do is start asking people around them if they have any ideas, if the issue is simple, usually someone has an idea. If they don't, you can start moving up the line... There are help desk lines you can call, box stores like Best Buy with things like the Geek Squad, locally owned IT companies that keep small business networks afloat, etc. If you have a problem, there's almost always someone you can talk to in person to help you figure out your issue well enough to get you back to doing whatever it is you do. The fact that Windows is inherently flawed? It doesn't matter so much because thanks to the sheer number of users, usually you can find someone to help you around your roadblock.

Windows proves that as long as there's some sort of in real life tangible support system, even the worst of flaws can be overlooked.

This is ultimately where Ubuntu falls flat on its face. Question to the technical Linux-y people in the audience. When you have a problem with your install, where do you go? Your automatic instinct is to go online, right? The website, the forums, the IRC rooms, and maybe in a moment of desperation search Google. Is this where I just described to you that non-technical people who use Windows go? No. It's not, and believe me... They don't really want to go there either. What they really want is to be able to make a phone call and say, "Umm... I can't figure this out, I think it might be broken," and have the more technical person fix it. They don't want to go wading through documentation that's written for people with more technical proficiency and gives them more information about HOW it works than they really wanted to know.... All that they care about is that it works and they can do whatever they want to do. All they're asking for is some support.

I guess this is my beef... I've done a little more reading on the Ubuntu Forums this week than I have in the past, and I keep tripping over frustrated people who were enthusiastically told by a more technically savvy friend that Ubuntu Linux was secure, easy to use, and didn't crash like Windows.... and were tossed an install CD, or told to go download it and try it... and then they were abandoned by their enthusiastic friend, and left with an operating system that introduced some totally new concepts... like a package manager (I TOTALLY didn't understand what a package manager was when I first started... and I'm supposed to be a "technical person") and ultimately, a lot of complex needs that the user had no idea how he/she is supposed to meet because all these programs have funny names... and asking anyone for help on the forums or IRC generally results in a string of command line instructions that make the average user's head hurt (mine does!).

The result... The user thinks the operating system sucks because the dumbass who suggested it in the first place failed to realize that not everyone is nor wants to be as technically proficient as he/she is, and did not offer any support to the interested party in making the transition, nor any warning that there are still a few things that can snag you up in regards to setup depending on what you're trying to do. I can't emphasize enough... It is SO SO SO SO essential if you're serious about spreading Ubuntu to back up your claims of stability and ease of use with support, ESPECIALLY in the setup phase. To put it bluntly, your negligence undermines the efforts of the community to spread Ubuntu. If you aren't willing to back up your suggestions with support, it's my personal opinion that you shouldn't be suggesting it in the first place.

So, what's the best practice you ask?

Let's start with switching someone for home use...

Your preliminary mission before you even mention the big L word is to get your friends and family to switch to open source software in Windows. This is an excellent and often underestimated tool in opening peoples minds to making an operating system switch. Firefox (Web browsing), Pidgin (Multi-protocol IM), OpenOffice (similar to Microsoft Office) are the big three that you should be getting people aquatinted with, and teach your friends about SourceForge, this is where many of your open source Windows programs live. Get them in the habit of looking for and downloading open source solutions instead of buying or pirating closed source ones. Remember, Ubuntu isn't the ONLY thing you're promoting here, you're promoting open source solutions as a whole. If you were successful at switching someone to at least ONE open source program, you've been successful.

So, you've got your friends and family hooked on some open source software on Windows... This is when you can start dropping hints about switching operating system. If you've already got them switched to programs that exist and are commonly used in Ubuntu... it's an easier sell. But not so fast! Before you stick that disk in the drive of their computer, you need to make sure you really know what they're using their computer for. You need to make sure that their daily life doesn't depend on some closed source Windows app that has no close equivalent in Ubuntu or depends on a Windows app that's easy to install and use but while it's possible isn't the easiest thing to set up in Ubuntu. If there isn't, you can start to proceed, if it does... You start weighing your options... Can the program be parted with? Can the program be run in WINE? Can the program be run in a virtualization of Windows? Or is making the switch just not a good option for this person at this time? Sometimes it's just not a good time, and if after evaluating their needs and they're not ready, DO NOT SWITCH THEM, there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth if you do.

You also need to take a look at file formats things are saved in... Most especially, music. Did this person download any DRMed music, and if so... What's your recourse? Can it be opened in Ubuntu? Can you convert formats somehow?

Once you've got these questions answered and a plan for things set in place, then you can proceed to install Ubuntu... and your job is NOT done once the installer is finished and the updates are run. You need to be taking the initial initiative for setup. Most average computer users will want you to do the more tricky things like making sure the right drivers are installed and making sure Flash installed properly. Help take care of the little details that while they might not be super difficult to do, your user friend probably doesn't really care about doing themselves... In general, it's the basic setup hump that tends to be the most difficult to get people over anyway.

Once things are installed and set up, do a crash course in where to find things. Acquaint them with the menu system and point out what programs do what. Go over how to use the package manager, and have them try it. Point out where the settings are, and how to get into the file system. Most of the time you'll find that people catch on pretty quickly after a quick tour, and of course.. Make sure you're available to answer questions after you go home.

It's been my personal observation that you might get a few questions the first week, but for the most part people tend to catch on pretty fast and in general are pretty happy with it, so long as you were courteous about making sure their needs were met, and didn't go forcing a solution that wasn't going to work. As long as you're realistic about things, it tends to work out pretty well.

Egads... I haven't blogged in a week. Whoops. I had a hard week last week, not something I particularly want to get into the nitty-gritty details of, but I came out of last week feeling acutely unbalanced... and despite my valiant efforts to balance myself in recent months... the psychological help, the medication, and all... while there has been some notable improvement, things aren't really all that much better in a practical day to day get things done sense.

Why is it that one week, I am extremely productive? I spend the appropriate time working, I'm able to keep my apartment fairly organized and can keep up with my laundry and dishes... and then I slide back into the funk where I sit at my computer chair for hours on end staring at the wall, flipping mindlessly through twenty different open applications and browser windows, not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing, but feeling great anxiety that I should be doing something and occasionally wandering around aimlessly around the apartment... WHY?!

I don't understand this about myself, and I feel utterly powerless to make it stop happening. Something has to change... but what? My options feel narrow right now...

When I can come here and announce that for dinner tonight I went out to dinner, ordered a dish with the word "tofu" in it and the description containing the words "vegetables" and the phrase "stir fry", and I report back that I actually liked it, I think we can say I've made a breakthrough.

The description for the dish, if you ask me, was actually off. I can't remember the exact title, but I think it was something like "Stir Fry Tofu" and the description mentioned stir-fried vegetables, tofu, and jasmine rice. The rice was actually what made me order the dish, I figured so long as I had rice, if I couldn't stomach the veggies and the tofu, I at least had that. In my head, I was picturing large chunks of vegetables and tofu, and rice on the side... but what I actually got was more of a fried rice dish, with finely chopped vegetables and two bite tofu pieces.

There's no other way to say it than this... This was the perfect dish to introduce myself to veggies that I have historically never eaten. I'm not entirely sure which veggies I actually did eat... I know for sure there were carrots and onions, I'm a little more sketchy on what the green things were. I fairly sure there were green peppers and possibly zucchini, and there may have been a little spinach as well... but I'm not sure. At any rate, there were cooked veggies. And I ate them. And I didn't hate them.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the tofu. It's not the first time I've had tofu, and I guess my feeling on it is that it's odd. It doesn't taste bad... It just sorta takes on whatever flavor it's with... but it's just an odd texture. It's not the sort of texture I feel repulsed by per se... but it's just an odd sensation in the mouth. It probably will take more for me to get used to, but it's a start.

The fact that the veggies were so finely chopped is really what made the dish a little more accessible for me. A historic vegetable problem for me has been the fact that since I do have some texture issues, taking a large bite into a cooked vegetable tends to be an overwhelmingly unpleasant sensation. The fact that the veggies in this dish were cut so small, and were mixed in with rice... something I do like the texture of a lot and is familiar... it was easy to shovel in the veggies and not be terribly bothered by them because they blended in and were somewhat masked by the texture of the rice.

This sort of dish is probably something we'll try repeating at home... Maybe not this exact one, but dishes with rice bases mixed with various veggies, chopped finely... and perhaps over time, we can experiment with what size the veggies are cut, and see if I can't handle something a little bigger in the future. Make baby steps towards it, and see what happens.

Despite the fact that Matt and I had been debating getting rid of the TV portion of our cable (I rarely ever watch it, and he ends up watching it and wasting ridiculous amounts of time on it), somehow we ended up upgrading to getting a DVR after we discovered that our cable box's power supply had cracked. I guess it ended up being something like $7 more expensive than the package we already had... so, I guess might as well. I remember from the last time Matt had a DVR it did make our TV watching habits actually go down seeing as we could just pick out what we wanted to record and then watch it whenever.

It's also an HD box, so we've been having fun finding out what exactly was shot in high def... and I guess we have a preview of Showtime for a few days, so we ended up recording an episode of This American Life last night and watching it during dinner today. Oh my god does that show have amazing camera work... and Ira Glass didn't look anything like I expected... Well, except for the nerd specs. I guess I'm going to have to snag up the DVD for season one.

For once, I actually went grocery shopping. As in... made a menu plan, made a list, went to the store and bought things.

In our house, going to the grocery store is one of those things that should happen on a weekly basis, but often doesn't. More often than not, what ends up happening is we end up going to Target to pick up the very basics of eat at home type food... milk, spaghetti, cereal, soda, Kraft dinner (I'm ashamed to admit how much we actually do eat Kraft dinner)... OR we end up just saying screw it and going out to eat.

The simple act of grocery shopping itself just seems to be one of those things that's difficult for us... Doing it effectively requires beforehand planning. Making decisions on what sort of meals you want to eat for the next several days, figuring out what you already have and what you need to buy... all before you get in the car to go to the store. Doing those preliminary steps just seems to be difficult for us, and often we've skipped doing them... which generally leads to frustration at the store because we don't know what we want so we either over buy or under buy, or forget to buy that one thing we really really needed.... and when you're constantly doing something wrong like that... your inclination to go to the grocery store AT ALL kinda falls by the wayside.

But... It's becoming more and more apparent that something has needed to be done in this department. The way we've been doing things isn't exactly financially prudent, and it isn't exactly healthy either.

That's why there's a second reason why you should probably be shocked about my trip to the grocery store yesterday. I proceeded to buy everything I needed for the recipes I picked out from the vegetable, organic and world sections of our local supermarket. With the exception of organic milk and a bottle of white wine which happened to be at the other end of the supermarket. I bought no meat. All the recipes I picked out were vegan and from The Post Punk Kitchen.

Why is this shocking? Here's a hint... I am deathly afraid of most cooked vegetables. I wouldn't say I hate them... because at this point, I really don't know. I'm just afraid that I am going to hate them if I try them and I'm not going to be able to get the taste out of my mouth regardless of how much milk or soda I drink and how many times I brush my teeth after consumption... and I'm afraid I'm going to offend someone if I have a bad reaction to something I've eaten... If I try something new and dislike it, I tend to have horrible anxiety attacks.

Having a food related anxiety issue is probably one of my more socially difficult problems... I have a hard time explaining it to people, especially since I feel like I'm going to be judged harshly for it. If you do any google searches for "adult picky eaters" you're eventually going to trip over somebody's nasty blog entry about so-and-so's girlfriend who threw a fit because she was too picky to eat anything served for dinner even though it was all perfectly normal food that 90% of the population likes and how said girlfriend needs to grow the hell up and eat it anyway.

I'm almost terrified to look for help online just because any time I come across one of these bitch rants, I'm reduced to tears. There have been times in my life when I was at someone's house for dinner, was extremely hungry, and sat down to dinner only to discover that everything on the table was something that I didn't eat.... and I didn't handle this discovery gracefully. The reaction was a look of horror and then running off to sob in the bathroom because there was nothing I could eat, and now how everyone would know my embarrassing secret of having the eating habits of a three-year-old. How utterly utterly unfair it is not to like some very normal foods that people eat...

If I try to eat it, the reaction is far worse if I don't end up liking it... The running to the bathroom to throw it up, the trying everything to get the taste out of my mouth, the panicking because it tastes unpleasant.... and crying because the whole ordeal is just so goddamned embarrassing, and feeling like you've failed everyone because you just can't seem to do this without causing a bit of a scene...

I wouldn't be like this if I could help it. If there's anything I wish, it would be to like this stuff. To not be afraid of this stuff.

But the message is clear, it's shameful to be a picky eater. Shame on me for being such a bad bad horrible person.

I'm trying to be better about it.

The interest in veggies is somewhat inspired by the fact that meat just doesn't seem to be settling very well with Matt anymore. We need to be eating a less meat-heavy diet for his sake...

Fruits and vegetables have always been my nemesis. I generally don't have the same sort of food issues with meat... which is why my diet has been so heavily carnivorous, I'm totally fine with trying different kinds of meat, trying meats prepared different ways... Fruits and veg? They're absolutely panic inducing.

Growing up, there were three acceptable veggies... Only to be served raw. Celery, green peppers and cauliflower. Everything else I couldn't eat. Mostly, I ate a lot of celery and green peppers because I usually would only eat half of the cauliflower. As I got older, I started eating a few other things... Lettuce, spinach, carrots, onions, the occasional radish... Enough to eat the majority of your average restaurant salad.

Cooked veggies... Not so much. As a child, I could do tomatoes, so long as they were in the form of tomato sauce, fully pureed, no tomatoey lumps. I grew less picky about the lumps as I grew older... and I started eating salsa without complaint... but I still can't eat a tomato by itself. Potatoes are okay, so long as they're mashed or french fries.. but no other preparation is acceptable. Most other veggies, not acceptable cooked if alone. Sometimes they can be acceptable in soups or casseroles where the main ingredients are stuff I eat... Usually because undesirables can be easily picked out. It's less scary that way.

Beans seem to be the thing that's most quickly growing on me... Lentils are the only one I can say definitively that I like. I'm learning to like garbanzos (aka chickpeas)... Tonight's dinner was Brown Rice and Garbanzo Beans. I wouldn't say I was 100% thrilled with it, brown rice has this tendency to cook up crunchier than I like... I'm not sure if it's cause we're cooking it wrong or just because it's that way... and I sorta felt like the can of garbanzos it called for was too many garbanzos... but I ate a bunch of them, I can't say I really liked them... but they weren't horrible, I probably could learn to like them with repeated exposure.

It's going to be slow journey, I think...

We've wanted a new TV stand/entertainment system pretty much since we moved in to our new apartment... but seeing as buying a new couch and a new kitchen table were more of a priority at the time, we decided to hold off on it. This past week, someone suggested to Matt (I think it was his father) that we go down to Ikea to see if they had anything suitable.... so, we decided to go down to Stoughton, MA yesterday morning to see what they had. We ended up with this Besta/Inreda setup, which when you break it down into pieces is comprised of two Besta bookshelves (the two sides), the TV stand (in the middle), and two doors that slide on tracks, and the tracks hold the three pieces together.

The shopping experience itself wasn't too bad. One of the things that somewhat surprised me was the hands off approach of the staff on the display floor. There are people available to answer questions, but they mostly stick near information desks that are scattered throughout the display floor. If you need assistance, you go find them. This doesn't really bother me considering that I am a New Englander and there are unspoken rules about customer service here where you are allowed to greet a customer with a hello and inform the customer that you're available to help, but you give the customer space to browse... and you only approach and ask if someone needs help when their body language is signaling "Okay, I'm lost. I want help but I don't want to ask." I just was kinda taken aback when I was giving off my "I'm lost" body language and there was no employee response because unlike every other furniture store on the face of the planet, there was no employee ten feet behind me stalking.

For those of you who haven't been to Ikea, the process of shopping for furniture goes like this... You pick out what you want, and write down the model number and row and bin location down on the back of a brochure containing a store map and a "what I want list". When you're done, you go down to the warehouse area of the store, and find all the pieces you need from the location numbers you wrote down, and take them to the checkout. Again, not an entirely bad experience... except for the fact that we ended up getting a cart with a busted wheel that didn't drive straight... and it would have been really nice if there had been more employees working the warehouse area, some of the boxes are quite heavy and would have been easier to get on the cart if there'd been some employee assistance.

Overall, not a horribly bad shopping experience... If everything was based on that, I'd shop there again.

Unfortunately, no. Once you get home, you still have to build this stuff.

My parents and aunt and uncle came over for a few minutes once we arrived home to help bring the boxes inside, and my first clue that this was going to be a bad afternoon occurs. While Matt's bringing in one of the boxes, it slips and he gets a paper cut on one of his fingers... and the reaction was quite over dramatic. You'd thought he cut his finger off. My family, wisely, left us to finish the task at hand once all the boxes were inside.

The first step, building the physical TV cabinet and book shelves wasn't so bad... Yes, the Ikea instructions are as horrendously bad as everyone says they are. There are no words, only pictorial directions... however, if you've ever bought prefab furniture elsewhere, it's more or less the same sort of construction, you've done one.... you've done them all, and those went together fairly smoothly and without much complaint.

Then it came time to put the rails on.

The thing about the Besta line of Ikea is a mix and match set... For the meat and bones of it, there are pre-drilled holes that you put dowels into and screw things into it and whatnot... but when it comes to stuff that's an option extra, like the rails the sliding doors go on, there are no predrilled holes because it's not something that everyone who buys things in the Besta lineup uses.

Matt put one on by hand without pre-drilling holes before it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to pre-drill them. Then realized, "Hmm... It would be a good idea to pre-drill these." He digs around in his tool box for his drill bits. The smallest one he has is much too large for this application that has extremely tiny philips head screws. This is when the first temper tantrum ensues. He was sure he had one, but where is it now? Gone. Yelling, cursing and general angriness ensue.

Now... the logical thing to do in this situation is tuck your tail between your legs, get in the car and drive three minutes to Home Depot and buy a new drill bit. However, this is my husband... so mumbling, grumbling and more swearing ensue and he sets out to put on the second bottom rain by hand. He almost strips several screws in this process, which leans to more yelling, swearing and overall angriness. All the while complaining that he's "too hot". This whole scene takes about two hours.

When he finishes, still quite angry, I tell him that he's NOT putting on the top two until he goes to Home Depot and buys a drill bit because I am not putting up with the theatrics any longer. He relents, takes a shower, and we go to Home Depot and buy the drill bit, go out to dinner and then come home to finish that top rail. It takes a total of fifteen minutes to attach the two final rails. With no complaining.

We decide the shelves on the two sides can wait until later and he decides to start putting away the electronics in the middle. In this process, we discover that the power supply to the cable box is cracked, which is probably not exactly safe to be using. My husband throws another temper tantrum, because you know... Broken cable box means he wants to watch TV right this minute.

He then decides he needs to go to the bathroom for awhile, which is a detail I only share to explain that in that process he got sucked into a Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo DS, and when he came out of the bathroom, he contently crawled into bed and kept playing. I mistook this for a sign that it was safe to go take a nice long hot bath. Why I was in the bath all of the sudden, I hear another string of swears and stomping of feet and boxes being kicked around the room, and him trotting into the bathroom to tell me that he scratched the TV stand when he put the TV in and it's really really noticeable. At this point, I'm extremely frustrated with him, because if he'd waited fifteen minutes I would have happily helped him carry the TV and put on the stand, and nothing would have gotten scratched and I'm extremely tired of the three year old style tantrums. I tell him to not touch another thing and go play video games. He protests, because he wants it all done now, but eventually resigns to going and playing Final Fantasy and then going to sleep.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that throughout the entire day every time he would stop to look at the instructions, he would lose a tool he needed to complete the next step. I must have had to get up to look for screwdrivers hundreds of times yesterday because he'd yell and whine until I did.

When he crawled into bed, I locked myself in my office and told Outlandish Josh that "Ikea makes me envy you single people!" and vented about the day's events. (Thanks for listening, Josh. It made me feel better.) Thankful, that the worst was over.

I'm torn on whether I'd buy Ikea again. It certainly was a painfully frustrating day. Maybe if I do, I make sure father-in-law helps to avoid all the irrational crisis that will likely ensue if my husband does tries to do it alone.

That said... I have before and after pictures.

This is what we started with:

This is the end result:

I am quite pleased with how it did turn out, and how much nicer and less cluttered that area of the living room looks now... so I guess it just might have been worth the pain.

If you're not married to a wellspring of video game news, the new Grand Theft Auto came out today. I can't tell you if it's any good or not, because I don't really play games like that... but as an observer of one... It's pretty impressive.

By impressive, I mean when it comes to all the mundane details... Like the people randomly walking down the street or jogging in the park... the street lamps... the fact that you can go to the bowling alley and actually bowl, and the music playing is the sort of the stuff that you'd hear when you'd walk into a bowling alley... the radio stations in the car complete with realistically fake ads... I heard there are full television shows that you can watch too. It's all strangely realistic... and I keep finding myself wandering in the other room to watch him play the darn game.

I also did a couple of pages from my photos from DrupalConBoston2008!

Amy Teets - Sleeptight Sampler

Scrap-shop.fr - July Freebie
Melany Violette - Shining Star Mini Scraps
Lauren Bavin - Scrabble Alpha
Go Digital Scrapbooking - Ready For Spring

Aja Abney - My Wish For You
Amanda Behrmann - Diva Page Kit
Be Audaicious Designs - In This Moment
Jeanette Bollinger - Feb Color Challenge
Leah Riordan - Blog Freebie Kit
Melany Violette - Felt Alpha Turquoise Blanket Stitch
Melany Violette - Metal Fasteners
Melanie Willmann - Dotm

Here are the layouts that I've done with some of my wedding photos.

Credits: Melany Violette - Timeless Mini Scraps
Melany Violette - Tropical Dreams
Shabby Princess - Sweet Serenity: Alpha
Background Unknown

Credits: ???

Credits: Jeanette Bollinger - Feb Color Challenge

Credits: Aja Abney - My Wish For You
Melanie Willmann - Dotm
Scrap-shop.fr - Little Flower: Copain
Unknown cardboard corners, carboard and staples, flower and scrap paper

Retro Diva Designs - Be Mine

QuickPage Made by Sya (syapotter), using Summer Sherbet by Becki Kress
Vicki Stegall - Rock On
Amy Fenner - Girls Night Out

Awhile back I put myself in to try out Woopra, this fancy web stats app thing. I finally got my approval yesterday.

I'm impressed. Sort of.

The "sort of" part being the only operating system I was actually successful at installing their stat viewing software on was Windows (running in VirualBox on my Ubuntu machine).

On Mac OS X, I installed the beta of Java 6 and was able to install it (after finding a tutorial on how to install it on someone's blog), but upon trying to load the program... errors.

On Linux, the shell script to install it appears to be borked.

Windows... Works fine on install. At least I had a copy of Windows I could try it on. Grumble.

It's neat to see your live stats... but after all the pain with fiddling with Mac and Linux only to give up and install it Windows? Didn't really make it feel very worth it.