Story time. I still run Windows for one purpose. Or more specifically, for one program: Sid Meier's Alpha Centari (SMAC). I'm not much of a gamer and those take-over-the-world strategy games are about all that appeal to me, and SMAC is the best of the genre. So since my laptop came with XP, I have to dual boot to play SMAC.

A few years ago I "bought" (aka licensed or rented) a copy of VMware and ran Windows right on my Debian box. VMware is really slick commercial virtualization software. But as I recall, I paid like $300 for it. Pricey and restrictive, but slick.

(This will be the first in a series of rants/posts about my latest laptop adventure.)

So I recently bought a new laptop. I don't really need one so I bought a cheap Acer model. The laptop came with WinXP Home edition.

I have to confess, I don't use Windows on a daily or even weekly basis. I'm lucky that way. :-) In fact, I've avoided XP almost totally. Sure, I've played with it, but it's not like I know it well. So with the new laptop I figured I'd partition it as a dual-boot machine just so I could keep and play around with XP.

The first thing that hit me when I booted XP was how bad the initial Windows graphic is. It sucks. It's grainy and shitty looking! Com'on, this isn't the video hardware. If Microsoft has to run in VGA or some lo-res screen, they should use a graphic that doesn't show how grainy the screen is. But I'm being picky.

We had the NIC to the server debianHELP runs on lock up Friday. This resulted in the site being down over the weekend (!). We're back up now, firing on all cylinders...

Given the site's theme issues with IE, I just dropped in our new theme. This one is a bit lighter and makes extensive use of HTML tables rather than the oft-problematic CSS.

Like most things, it's a work in progress so it'll no doubt undergo tweaking.

If you're running IE, let me know how it looks, since it'll be some time before I can get to a Windows machine to check it out.

Hey, why didn't anyone tell me that the header of the site was displaying improperly with IE? I just noticed it today when viewing the site from a Windows machine with IE.

Rather than mess with the CSS issues (I assume that's where the problem is), since I'm working on another theme I opted for the "solution" of warning IE users. Lazy yes, but the problem isn't too serious.