You Know What I Hate?! #2

When people use abbreviations such as "lol" in everyday speech. It is so dumb! I mean, one can sort of see why they might do it while text chatting, e.g. lazy at typing, but when you're actually talking?! There is absolutely no good reason to do such a thing, even being lazy at speech! I mean, wouldn't you say it's actually harder to say "lol" than to just say, "ha!"? And if you want to go to all the trouble of saying something with that many syllables, why not just say, "that's funny", and make yourself seem intelligible!

In other news, I just found out that my blog has had at least 150 views from around the world! Hooray!
In particular, views seem to have skyrocketed in September and October, which is very odd, since I don't think I've changed anything except maybe posted a bit more. But to those who are new here: Comment! Subscribe! Do something to let me know you're not a robot! Or if you are, by some odd coincidence, a robot, let me know!

Me And Google

Wow, this is going to be a stupid post.

Sometimes people do these things sometimes called "vanity searches", where you search your name or something of the like in Google. It seems to have grown quite popular, because some people seem to have made a little device which is essentially an advanced vanity search tool:

googlefight.com

It's rather hokey in practice, but for those who are very bored, it can be... amusing, at best.

Anyway, this is straying from the original reason I decided to write this post. So, vanity searches. They're very popular. Almost everybody has done it.

Actually, I'd be interested to know how many of 3,000,000,000 Google searches that happen in a day are vanity searches.

(want to know how I knew that? www.worldometers.info)

So, there are a LOT of vanity searches. I know that. But, getting closer and closer to the point, since this is MY blog, and MY post, you might be thinking, "when is Alex going to tell us about his vanity searches?". Well, I'm glad you asked...

So, yes. This is what you get if you search my name. The first one is indeed me, and that image is exactly what I look like. The second one, Evan Alexander MacTavish, is some weird creepy guy who likes to drink jello. No, just kidding. I have no idea who he is. If he is you, comment!

Alexander William MacTavish is this stupid kid who isn't as good as me. No, just kidding. If he is you, comment!

Now, the last one. How very very intriguing. It's one of these ridiculous self-indulgent wiki answers things which you never want to see. "But Alex", you say, "surely you didn't write that! You're far too awesome for such idiocy!". Well, dear reader, did I write that? Am I responsible for that thing on wiki answers?

YES!

Ubuntu 11.10

Last night, I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, and I've been using it for a while so I thought I'd write a little review about it.
First off, it uses a new "Unity 3d" interface, which is based on the "Unity" interface which, I believe, was originally introduced for Ubuntu Netbook edition but was slightly changed when it was merged with Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop Edition.
One of the main features of Unity and Unity 3d is the side panel thing. It is very similar to the dock on OSX, and generally serves exactly the same purpose:

Basically the main center for doing general stuff is the Dash Home. The Dash home essentially serves as hybrid between a search engine and a control center. Rather than try to explain how it works, I'll show you a few images:

As with the previous version, you can switch between windowed and full screen mode, but unlike the previous version it stays that way, and you can change it as much as you like.

In addition to the new size changing things, rather than several different dash homes, they're all morphed into one thing with different menus. You've seen the Main Menu, Applications, now Documents:

And , Music. I think this is really useful, because right from the Dash Home, you search and browse your entire music collection:

There are many other cool features that I'm not going to go into in great detail, but among them, there is a new on/off menu symbol, which is a cross between the on/off symbol and the settings gear symbol, a little pop sound which plays when you change the volume (finally!), and a cool new lock screen and home screen.

Included in this version is a new workspace switcher, which is slightly different from the previous one, but still pretty neat:

(for some reason my screenshot program screwed up and got its dialog box in the picture)

As shown above, if you click on an application with more than one window open, it shows you all the windows that program has open.
Also, the Ubuntu software center has a new look and a new logo.

I'm not sure if these have anything new or not, but take a look at the music player and photo manager:

And lastly, if you're wondering how it manages the closing/minimizing/enlarging options, you just roll over the top bar and see what happens:

So, in conclusion:
This is a great Operating System with a great interface. The previous version was very good as well, but this version also fixes many speed issues and glitches. I give this five out of five.

EDIT: I have also noticed as of posting this that the icons in the sidebar have loading bars if stuff is loading. And since it's completely free as always, go ahead and
Get Ubuntu now

You Know What I Hate?!

When people put tons of swearing in YouTube comments. Far too often you see people with RIDICULOUS usernames completely littering pages with profane spam:

I know this is probably just some stupid troll trying to get their account deleted, but I am SO TIRED of people doing this to youtube comments! People think it's so funny to put up ugly swearing-infused dung comments, all it does is annoys everybody who reads it and robs the spammer of their account.
Anyway, I've decided to make a little image to go against spamming. Check it out:

By the way, I intend to make several posts with the title 'You Know What I Hate?!', which, like this one, are just rants about stuff I hate. Be warned.

OnyX

Now here's a fun little Application.

OnyX not only lets you access hidden settings like changing the look and feel of the dock and using screensavers as your desktop wallpaper, it also has many functions which let you make your computer work better. Of course I only got it for the fun little settings (my computer works fine), but these can be very useful for general cleaning up, which you can use if you feel the need to. Anyway, here are some screenshots of my computer OnyXed:

In this image, I've changed the look of the dock to 2D with transparency effect, made the 'shell' screensaver my desktop background, and hidden the 'spotlight' icon.
I was going to do one that showed what you could do with the login screen, but I realized that you couldn't take screenshots unless you're logged in. So that's all you get.