So I decided to have my own Natty Party, went and bought a kilo of 85%++ dark chocolate (they have an excellent lindt sale at walgreens), brewed a couple litres of tea and took 11.04 for a test spin.

Very fancy, I admit. But not utilitarian fancy... For example, the menu is a combination of a magnified gnome-do and the linux-mint menu. Everything hovers in 3D glory. But I am not quite sure if I like this sort of menu. Maybe with a few keyboard shortcuts but not on its own...

I can't easily find a way to shuffle things around in the main panel at the top. I also can't figure out how to move that application-dock-panel to the right. I like to have everything on the right. I am not a left-hander and I resent things that force me to clumsily switch to my left hand.


And there is too much Mac-iness that I don't like. All the program-related menus appear in the top panel. I absolutely loathe this behaviour in Mac - one of the many reasons why the Mac interface is not so "intuitive" or appealing to me.


I tried to do some simple image manipulating and resizing. In typical Ubuntu contrariness, everything already installed was definitely not what I wanted/liked. Sometime natty eye-candy is just not enough.

Currently, I am on madbox on my oldest laptop (Ubuntu 10.10 kernel + Openbox +SLiM, WinXP on my daily laptop and a stripped down Ubuntu 10.10 64bit on my analyses laptop. I don't see the nattily-dressed Ubuntu making a grand entry on any one of them for now. Seems to me that most of the nattiness has been adopted at the cost of flexibility.

It's Natty release day.

That's Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity - a new desktop environment with a shady and rocky past fraught with disagreement and warfare between Canonical (the Keepers of Ubuntu) and GNOME - the erstwhile desktop of older *buntu flavours.

Regardless of all this strife-torn history, millions around the planet will be celebrating with Natty parties. Including dear neighbouring cities, Ithaca and Rochester.

However, there is no such Natty install-party in Buffalo. In fact, the Ubuntu mirror at UB has not even updated to 11.04 final-release YET. Charles Profitt , lead contact of the New York State Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) Team asked me if I would be interested in organizing one.

If only I had the time.

If only...

I don't.

That's not very Natty at all.

I really like Sonora Carruseles, but LOL!

If I were to use just two words to describe my ballet class with Kolleen Fischer today, I would say, simply magical. I seriously felt as if time had stopped and frozen into a spectrum of snowflakes as we danced and dissolved every single muscle into the music.

We started with a brilliant Rudy Apffel piano adaptation of the Pavane originally written by Gabriel Fauré back in 1887.
and continued to many Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn classics.

I don't know how Kolleen picks exactly the right piece for every single exercise... but she does. I think they must have carefully tailored the sound system at the studio to bring out the best in piano music. I also met Joe Cipolla - co-founder of the Configuration School of Ballet.

My back muscles are so sore now but I am far from being tired. I am energized! It seemed odd to me at first that dancing would make my back muscles ache so much but it makes perfect sense now. Ballet is so much about posture. I slump at my desk all day so no wonder my muscles feel like they have met their maker on judgment day!

I feel like I have finally found a dance form that challenges every part of my body and awes me completely at the same time. I don't think I am doing justice describing just how beautiful that hour of ballet was to me. Sometimes words are just not enough...

If you have always been fascinated with ballet and share a passion for classical music, come and dance with me next Monday! You will be completely and utterly sore afterwards but then who isn't after a delightful session of time travel?!

I wonder how this will look like a year from now...