Yesterday I bought a new phone, an AT&T 8525, also known as an HTC Hermes. There were many driving forces behind this decision, but the main one was its support for wifi Internet connections. It is a great phone, and I will most likely go into more depth about it soon, in another post.

A few weeks ago, shortly before Ubuntu Linux 7.10 was released, there was a news item that popped up on Digg detailing how Canonical would send out copies of Ubuntu (at no charge) to users. I figured, what the heck. I already had Ubuntu 7.04 installed, and was going to obviously update to 7.10 via the update application in Ubuntu, but I also have been trying to get others to install Ubuntu. A lot of the time, it isn't very convincing to people to see that the operating system they are about to get on their computer was burned onto a CD-R. I know, I know, there is absolutely no difference, but there's a reason that marketing departments were invented, and it is because people trust something that "looks" professional.

This isn't really much of a news item, I just thought it would be fun to post a picture of the desktops of the three OS's that I triple-boot on my computer. I currently use Acronis boot loader to load either Ubuntu Linux (currently 7.10), MacOS X (currently 10.4.6), or Windows XP (x64 edition). I spend most of my time in Ubuntu, but I jump over to Window occasionally if I have to do something major in Photoshop, and to MacOS X on the odd occasion that I need to test something (such as a website template).

So here are my three desktops, each showing their respective browser (and creator-company's homepage), native media player (except for Ubuntu), and native file Explorer:

I added a small text ad from Google AdSense on the side of my page (under the menus)...mostly because I just wondered how it worked. Like most people (even if they don't know it), I'm grateful to Google for coming into a world of annoying pop-up Flash ads, and basically redoing the entire landscape to consist of minimalistic, unobtrusive text ads that generally offer fairly targeted advertising. They have lots of good options to fit within your existing layout, which is also appreciated.