There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.

Plants vs Zombies (29  hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off.  2 or 3 to go

Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game.  I wish I had more time for it

The original Top 200 Photo #16 was: and now it’s: which has fallen just one position from #15.  Pretty funny that they’re both fireworks - although on very different scales!

This was originally the #17th most viewed photo nearly a year ago:

and now my #17th most viewed photo is:

which has fallen from #13

Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora.  It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:

[caption id=“attachment_5340” align=“aligncenter” width=“379” caption=“Fuduntu Initial Boot”] [/caption]

I decide to jump right into the install before doing any messing around.  I like their logo, “Punny Name, Serious Distro”.  Not surprisingly for a distro that started off as a modified Fedora, it uses anaconda for installation.  The first question I get is the hostname.  Then comes timezone and root password.  After that is partitioning and the install finally begins.  Overall, not too many options.  It’s neither the easiest installation ever nor the hardest.  I’d say it leans towards very, very easy, but I think Linux Mint actually wins for the easiest, nicest installer.  (And Ubuntu - which I haven’t installed for a few months now might edge it out of second place)  Overall, the installation is extremely quick, but I’m cheating in that it’s in a VM so, of course, I don’t need to worry about CD or DVD drive speeds.

The original Top 200 Photo in the #18th spot was: and the current #18 photos is: this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.

~Last year, when I created the Top 200 feature, this was photo #19: with 1239 views.

Now the #19 photos is: Which is a fall from #14 when the Top 200 Started.

Dan and I started a website called Comic POW! Where each week we go over the best comics of that week.  It’s been going for approximately 3 months and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.  The main feature is posted every Friday, but we occasionally have content on other days.  I’ve also started writing for Player Affinity.  They saw my work and invited me to write for them.  My news articles are posted on Wednesdays and my reviews on Fridays.  (With extra reviews sometimes appearing on Mondays and Tuesdays) Here’s one of my latest reviews.

Since it took about a year for my Top 200 photos feature to run its course, I wanted to go back and see how things changed within the Top 20 in that year.  When I posted the feature, this was #20:

With 1194 views

This is the current #20:

OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program.  I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and I was thinking about it for weeks until the light bulb went off.  I wrote my idea and just had the idea to work on it recently.  I have to say that, overall, QML is pretty awesome for making a quick GUI.  I’ve always struggled with GUI code, but with QML I was able to put together a quick GUI in about 20 minutes.  Now, don’t judge QML too harshly because my plasmoid looks ugly.  It looks ugly because I just put together the minimum GUI to implement grabbing data from my Data Engine.  Once I get everything working right, I’ll fix it up.  After all, GUIs are really so easy in QML that it can be the icing on the cake in the end.

I’ve installed Debian here and there on different computers in the last seven or so years that I’ve been using Linux.  I almost ended up being a Debian person, but the Fedora book at the bookstore was more comprehensive, so I was set along the Red Hat path.  On the one hand, I’ve often envied Debian both for its ease up upgrades and for its stability.  On the other hand, I like having the latest stuff.  KDE 4.8 is about to come out and I’ll be restless for the next few months before it makes its way into Fedora.  So Debian’s never quite been for me.  I’ve heard a lot about Aptosid (formerly Sidux) which turns Sid (the unstable repo) into a usable distro.  Of course, Ubuntu does this along with a little extra polish, so I figured I’d see what Aptosid’s up to.