The World of Stuff .com

…That I never could find

I went searching for a job yesterday, but I didn’t inquire within anywhere. In the shopping center by my house, I saw three places that were hiring: a cell phone store, a health food store, and a dollar store. Not ideal places to work at all, but I do need the money. I probably shouldn’t apply anywhere yet because if they try to contact me next week, I’ll be out of town. Plus, I turn 18 in a few weeks, and since all of the jobs probably have an age limit of 18, I might as well give it some thought and apply later. In any case, I’d say I’d have the best shot at the dollar store, if only because I wouldn’t be selling things. (Incidentally, I saw my friend Bryce working at that dollar store a few weeks ago. Did he quit?)

If you’ve been a Linux user for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard of Beryl. If not, Beryl is a window manager that allows you to customize a number of special effects relating to windows, such as transparency and animations for minimizing and unminimizing. Linux window managers typically support the ability to have multiple desktops or workspaces, meaning you can have have different windows open in different workspaces, each with its own desktop. Beryl takes the concept a step further by showing the four desktops as faces of a cube that you can rotate. It’s a great way to get used to the idea of having multiple desktops, and it looks really cool. (Here’s a screenshot from Wikipedia.)

I didn’t think my computer would be fast or powerful enough to run Beryl, and it seemed like a lot of work to install. Then I noticed it was in Ubuntu’s software repositories, meaning that I could install it (or uninstall it) with just one click. So I went for it, and it works pretty well. Beryl is beta software, so the bugs haven’t entirely been ironed out yet, but the visual effects make computing fun. I don’t go crazy with them; they’re kind of subtle. Plus, they make for a great alternative to the visual effects in OS X and Vista (are there any in Vista?) because Beryl is endlessly customizable and itself has a number of extra plugins.

I should mention that Beryl is a fork of the Compiz project, which is apparently basically the same but less bleeding-edge. It seems that the two projects are in the process of merging back into one. I don’t know when that’s going to be complete or what the new name will be, but in the mean time, you can check out more Beryly goodness by watching this screencast demonstrating a lot of Beryl’s effects. And if you want to give Beryl a try, switching to Linux is easier than ever.

From the Social Security Administration, which keeps track of these sorts of things, here’s a list of the most popular names for twins born last year. All of the top 10 pairs of names are alliterative. As a twin, I feel sorry for those kids. They’ll end up with some individuality issues or something.

Here are 10 things that have been said by nightmare web design clients. Things like: “Black on white is boring. How about hot pink on lime green? And can we make the logo spin? And Arial is boring, let’s use Comic Sans.”

Do you know what rights you have in a police encounter? Take the Flex Your Rights Quiz. I got 4 out of 8 right.