I've been sick with a cold for the past week, the longest I can remember being sick in at least 8 years. So I've been using that as an excuse to take a break on promoting Joystick Johnny, though I still have a whole list of things left to do on that. I've still managed to get some other things done, though.

Mainly I've been putting together my portfolio/resume for a job. Right now I'm looking out for a front-end web development job where I can do as much design as possible.

Since a lot of UI positions nowadays are asking for DHTML and AJAX, I figured I'd put together a portfolio piece to brush up on my Javascript, etc. Here's a glimpse of that, which I'll talk more about in the next couple of weeks.



Also, this weekend I installed Linux on my laptop, which is my first time as an at-home Linux user. I just got tired of XP running frustratingly slow, so I went looking for a minimal OS I could put on it.

First I tried a couple of Live CD distros like Puppy Linux and Slax because they are minimal and require almost no configuration. Puppy Linux was almost what I was looking for, but it was pretty rough around the edges and was unstable. I liked Slax but I couldn't get it to connect out to the net. However, using that turned me onto KDE, which I thought was pretty slick, so I decided to bite the bullet and install Kubuntu.

Other than figuring out the right partitions to set up, installation was pretty easy. Out of the box, I could connect to the internet and it even found my Windows network without any configuration whatsoever. It's a nice looking OS, runs snappy on my 1.4 GHz laptop, and has all of the right apps built-in, plus a slick package manager for when I wanted to grab FireFox, etc. The only thing it can't do right now is play DVDs, due to some known bug.

I even did some web development with it right away, making a minimal journal-type web app that I can use instead of messing around with plaintext files on a share, or the bloat of online Office-style apps. I might release that to the public when I work out the kinks.

Hopefully I'll have more things to show off later this week.