What I've been doing...

So... what's up with me since Thursday? Been busy busy busy.

Naturally, I've whipped up a few more designs for cafepress. I'm up to 154, if you include size and layout variations for different items. Most recently I've refined the designs for the mugs, converting many to two-sided wrap-around designs; made a few from some renaissance & other fine art in the public domain (admittedly with a tendency towards nudes - I am what I am); and made a couple to let Katrina and other disaster survivors show a little attitude. The link's still in my links, presumably to your left unless you're reading this after Yahoo does some future redesign.

Last week we ordered new computers for home since the systems we had - still running Windows98SE - were getting a bit long in the tooth and doing an upgrade on them would take too much work. We got them local and when I placed the order I told them we'd stop by with a check so they could get started on building them. It wasn't until Saturday that we had time to do so, but as it turns out they went ahead and built the systems so we took them home sooner than anticipated.

Sunday was mostly spent celebrating my wife's birthday - I'm married to an "older woman" for the next month and a week. We went visit her folks and all went out to Macaroni Grill, then back to her folks' house for cake & ice cream and family time. It was nice. The book I got her turned out to not be a substantial as anticipated - it looks a bit like a trade paperback version of a Time-Life book. Oh well. I guess when you shop Amazon you really have to keep in mind that you really can't judge a book by its cover.

Saturday and Sunday night were spent setting mine up and learning my way around configuring Windows XP Professional. For us, that means switching it to classic mode and tweaking away as much as I can of the random quirky behaviors MS decided to add. (If we could have gotten Windows 2000 we would have.)

The first step was to switch to the classic theme to get rid of the candy/toy user interface. After that it was a matter of exploring all the configuration options offered up by Windows, and research the hidden ones (like the hidden Power User user type) on the ol' interweb. And, of course, transferring over my data from the old PC (whole drive copied over to C:\OldC on the new system for convenience) and installing my software. Let me tell ya... hunting down Y2K patches for legacy software is fun!

It's not over yet, of course. I've got most of the essentials - Agent, SeaMonkey, Miranda-IM, ftp clients, ssh terminal, spreadsheet, VB, PSP7, PageDefrag, etc. Beyond that, and one or two other work-related items, it's pretty much going to be install-on-demand. Then I've got to get my wife's new one set up. Wish me luck.

I'm planning/hoping to compile a list of the tweaks and configuration changes I've made, and my reasons for them. For now, here's a useful little program I used along the way. It makes a lot more Windows components optional than are normally, allowing you to strip out the programs and services you know you don't need, giving you a leaner, meaner, computing machine. There's a free limited-capability/unlimited-term trial version available for download.