Exciting Rainstorm

Uh, yeah. Severe weather would be a good description. I was out in it all! Kristin and I decided to take a drive last night and watch the storm as it rolled in. Wow! What a cool cloud display! It was sweet. Then as the storm gathered over us, we realized that this was going to be a real drencher. The raindrops were pounding relentlessly against the top of our car and virtually rendering the wipers useless.

We decided to go over to the institute and check on Kristin's sister who is an EFY counsellor. Normally she'd be fine, but she decided to ride a motorcycle to EFY this week and we didn't want her to try to ride in such a storm. When we got to Harrison, it was a river. There must have been between four and six inches of running water on the street. I was sending up plumes of water from both sides of my car driving down the street. Water was seriously coming down in sheets. It was great! It reminded me of rainstorms on my mission in Texas where it floods every time it rains. Although this storm was considerably slower than real desert thunderstorms, it was impressive nonetheless.

Now, for all you Windows XP/2003 modders out there...

I found a great website where you can download icon sets, skins, and even themes or visual styles. The site is CrystalXP.net. If you want to install a visual style, you will first need a UX Theme Multi-patcher to patch your uxtheme.dll file so that you can install non-Microsoft themes on Windows XP/2003. Email me if you would like a copy of the UX Theme Multi-patcher. (j s c h i l l [at] w i n t o o l s [dot] c o m) My theme currently looks like the included picture: kind of a subtle replacement of the original Windows XP Luna look with a more glassy, shiny look, complete with a Tux penguin as the Start button. :) Another good site to visit if you're modding Windows is Everaldo.com. Everaldo Coelho is the graphic artist who brought us the awesome crystal icon set used in many Linux distros. He makes some of the best-looking icons in the industry.

Also, for any of you wishing to try out Linux, I have good news for you (at least if you have a broadband connection and a nice CD burning suite.) Visit Slax to download a very nice copy of a very nice pocket operating system. There are various flavors of Slax to try out. Download the ISO and then burn it to a CD using the "Burn ISO Image" option on your CD burning software. Once you have the CD burned, you can simply boot the computer off the CD and you'll be off and running Linux in no time. The best part is that it is a live CD which means that it won't mess up your Windows installation already on your hard drive. It'll just run off the CD (or out of RAM if you use the copy2ram option when booting.) Special thanks to Tim Mikesell for pointing this great flavor of Linux out to me.

Anyhow, I just wanted to post some stuff today because it's been a while for me.

Take it easy, y'all!