.blindness.

I've long been dissatisfied with both KDE and Gnome. The idea of an intergrated desktop environment is great, but it has to occur at the operating system level, as it does on Mac OS. Since the two applications I use most heavily are Firefox and Thunderbird, and neither are "true" KDE or Gnome apps, using either one always feels discordant and slightly "off". Also, as you're supposed to use the crappy applications that come with the environments, I always find myself running KDE apps under Gnome and vice-versa, seeking the one I prefer (gEdit over Kate, but amarok over whatever Gnome uses).

But since they won't buy me a Mac at work, I was using KDE as the lesser of two evils. But the other day I decided to try out Xfce, a much more lightweight windowing environment that really works well and it's fast. Then i decided it was time to get compiz running, so after a bit of hacking I have everything running perfectly.

Also I switched to slim, a much more stripped down version of xdm or gdm or kdm or whatever those are called. Now I'm finding everything more convenient, plus with all the bells and whistles of compiz and emerald (and what bells they are!). I couldn't get amarok to behave without KDE so I've switched to exaile, which isn't quite as nice of an interface but works pretty well (though I had to muck about with python to get it working).

I set out to start writing an application to manage the label(s), hoping to try out my Rails skills and actually fulfill a useful need for my life. I've been using Ruby on Rails for about six months now, part-time, and there is still one thing I absolutely struggle to comprehend: JUST HOW GODDAM FAST YOU CAN DEVELOP IN IT. Yeah, it was a Saturday afternoon and evening sitting in front of the laptop, but by the time I went to bed I had the application to the state where I could use it - leaving only "bonus" features, design and interface issues left to do.

Mad props to the polymorphic associations plugin, though I didn't realise it existed and I wrote a complicated controller/view setup for "Notes" (essentially comments) that uses a crapton of eval statements....

Pennsylvania, we blew it. I blew it by not registering for my absentee ballot earlier, when there was still time for me to follow-up after not receiving it. The rest of the state blew it apart from those few wonderful counties that CNN is shading dark blue, of which mine is not one of them.

Enough of this pseudo-live blogging stuff, I'm going to bed.