Stacerella

am·bi·vert
Pronunciation: ‘am-bi-”v&rt
Function: noun
: a person having characteristics of both extrovert and introvert

This is what I am. I tend to oscillate between being the two all day long. Mostly I’m extroverted at work because, well, I have to be nice and shit to people, but when I go home, it’s alone time for me. Or, in our flat, that translates into quiet time in the kitchen, crafting, or time parked in front of the computer for a few hours to recharge my batteries before interfacing with the husband a bit as we drift off to sleep.

I couldn’t imagine being an ambivert and having kids. I’m too moody to be want to be around them for long stretches of time without losing my mind so I would be sending them over to Joe, who is an introvert, all the time. Hee. This is why I’m much more suited to being the world’s bestest auntie. Trust me on this. I rock as an aunt! (Only because I can send the kids home with their parents after I’ve shifted into my introverted moods.)

For the hell of it, Joe gave me a bare bones copy of the new gOS that Wal-Mart has been selling with PCs in their stores (or will be soon, can’t recall if they’ve started yet). gOS stands for Green Operation System, and the idea is that because it’s smaller and takes up less power resources to run it, it’s better for the enviroment. *raises one eyebrow* Um, yeah. I have my suspicions, but what the hell, right? 

I booted off the disk and waited for it to load. It took a few minutes, and the screen rolled up over and over again like my PC was possessed, but it did load in the end. The first thing one notices is the arrangement of icons on the desktop. The gOS desktop reminded me a lot of the Mac OSs where the bottons on the bottom all popped out or zoomed in as you rolled over them. After some poking around in the various menus, I managed to tweak a few settings so when I rolled over them with my mouse, not only did the icons get much bigger but they did this cute little animation that radiated out in two bigger but transparent rings around the icon. Very cute.

I was also able to change my background, but when we did a screen caputre and tried to save it for this blog the next morning, we had a much harder time finding my hard drive and other drives because I was booting off a disk instead of a drive. Oh, well. 

So, yeah… here is a screen capture of my test gOS desktop. There weren’t many default backgrounds to choose from, but I chose the sweet ladybug one because it was the coolest of the small lot.

The only thing that seems to bug me (excuse the pun) about gOS is that it sported all kinds of Google-centric program icons and link icons. I was really worried this was Google backed, and their were poising themselves to take over the world much like Microsoft did decades ago. And as anyone who works around computers or online will know already, Google is going after Microsoft with a vengence by offering all kinds of compariable free online software (Google Docs, anyone?), so I became a tad alarmed this OS wasn’t truly put out by the makers of the Linux Ubunto platform, an OS I love and run on my laptop at home. My fears were abated when I read the About page within the OS. At the bottom of the page there is a disclaimer stating gOS isn’t affiliated with Google in any way, but chose to include icons links to free online Google apps because that kind of business practice is in line with the ideals, values and goals of the Ubunto creaters.

There is a full blown version of gOS that you have to pay for, but the bare bones one doesn’t look that bad. Joe wasn’t impressed with it, but perhaps that’s because we didn’t have it loaded on a hard drive and didn’t have any software loaded to use within the OS. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. So, until we set up a dual boot with gOS, this little test of ours will have to suffice as our test drive of gOS. Perhaps there are others out there that have already put this OS through its paces and have blogged about it. I recommend looking them up. It’s an interesting idea for an OS, and as I said, it’s from the makers of the Linux based Ubunto OS, so it’s can’t be crap, right?