A few things have changed since my previous Desktop Feng Shui.

My older Viewsonic LCD no longer works, so I ended up getting an HP w2207h LCD. In fact, BOTH of my Viewsonic LCDs no longer work, so my wife had to revert back to using her smaller, older Samsung SyncMaster 730B LCD. (She didn't want to get a newer LCD.)

I really like the HP w2207h, esp because my wife was able to find it for about $160. It only comes with VGA and HDMI inputs (no DVI), so some people might think that's a big drawback, but it doesn't matter to me. My cousin is about to visit from Georgia, and we do a lot of video gaming, so I will use my LCD to hook the 360 up via HDMI, so we have the option of playing on two systems simultaneously (sometimes we will play our own games at the same time, other times we'll play multiplayer games together). Anyway, for $160, it's practically a steal. Furthermore the HP can rotate into portrait mode, which I like to use a lot.

Hit the jump to see the latest Desktop Feng Shui.

All apps are set up on my Windows 7 laptop and everything's running smoothly, so that means it's time to spruce up the look and feel. I'm quite pleased with the freely available Tokyo Tower Windows 7 Theme. It has a nice gradient sunset over the horizon filled with purples through blues. I'm pretty sure the picture was taken from the top of Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills.

Hit the jump to see the desktop screenshot.

To help my coding Chi evolve to the next level of greatness, I have recently purchased a bamboo plant to accompany me on my hacking adventures. A couple pickies...





Now perhaps I need a nice picture frame on the wall. Perhaps of one from our recent Grand Canyon vacation. ^_^

Was in a mood to tinker today. I've had an idol PC sitting around for a while now, so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on it. So far, I like what I see. It was very easy to install. Just downloaded an iso from www.ubuntu.com, burned it to dvd, booted from the dvd drive, then installed, and all my hardware seems to be working fine. Ubuntu includes a packaging system that makes adding/removing software very easy. In the screenshot below, you can see i have Firefox, Pidgin (multi IM client), terminal (used it to run the Adobe Air installer because it doesn't use the packaging system), Twhirl (twitter client), Gnometris (tetris clone), and the standard Ubuntu File Browser.



I'm definitely impressed with how easy it is to get up and running with Ubuntu. Last time I used Linux was the RedHat distro in college in '96 through 2001. I could definitely see Ubuntu being a great place to do web development (assuming I wasn't using ASP.NET).