So after having heard, seeing, and experiencing numerous Scares while using windows systems in the past, I thought I would share here a list of things anyone who uses Microsoft Windows Should be aware of.

Protect Yourself

• A website tells you that you have a virus, or spy-ware/malware has been detected.

First don”t panic, second don”t trust the source. Their have been many cases where people have been infected by malware because they clicked on the “FREE VIRUS SCAN NOW” advertisement in their browser from a website claiming that they have malware, It”s a very old trick. I personally was shocked to discover how widespread this practice actually is, but even some very well known sites have been “tricked” into running what they thought were legitimate ads on their websites only to discover they were actively infecting their visitors. Here are a couple of examples of Fake Virus scans:

Fake Vista Scan	Fake xp Scan

• Make sure you run updated anti-virus on your windows system – I  recommend Avast it”s free and updated quite regularly.
• Make sure you run updated anti-spyware on your windows system – I highly recommend the free Spybot S&D Make sure run regular scans of your system.
• If your using firefox there are a few more ways to help you avoid those types of fake scans and javascript/flash based attacks. Two extensions I make sure to install on any firefox installation are Ad Block Plus, and WOT(Web of Trust).
• Be Smart, think about what the website in front of you asking you to do. Legitimate Visus & Malware scanning sites, generally wont just pop up in your face, and beg to scan your sytem.
• Stop handing out your email address – You don”t have to give your actual email address to every website that asks, actually there is a free service that helps stop spam in your inbox by giving you a temporary email address that you can use  to register at that one website you just have to check out. Mailinator.com allows you create any email address at random and then check it just by using the email address you created, there is no actual account and no registration required. Be aware though, all email is deleted after a few hours.

Back up and Maintain!

Remember Computers are like car”s you can just Gas & Go, you have to perform regular maintenance.

• Start a back up schedule – Hardware doesn”t last forever, and losing all those precious photo”s or a huge media collection can really make things difficult for you. The best thing you can do is get some external storage, and start a backup schedule. If you don”t have much to back up you can always get a free Dropbox.com account, and have your important files backed up the web. But in case you need more than 2 gig”s of storage space and don”t want to pay for extra an external drive is really the way to go.  DeltaCopy is a great Open Source program for backing up your file. It offers Incremental backup, Task scheduler, Email notification, &  One-click restore features.
• Back up those bookmarks online – Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) works with Internet explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google chrome to keep your bookmarks in sync and backed up across computers and browsers.
• Find our more about System Restore – Answers.com provides great insight about how to use the windows System Restore feature, using it you can create restore points to set your computer back to should something go wrong.
• Clean Your registry – Ccleaner is a great way to make sure your Windows Registry stays clean, as well as helping you clean any temporary files from your system.
• Defragment your files –  Windows XP comes with a nice interface for Defragmenting your hard drive, however  in vista your left with a command line only option of Defragmenting your hard drives. Luckily there are 3rd party  alternatives to windows built in interface, which works with both XP & Vista, I recommend Defraggler.

Are you tired yet?

So once your tired of maintaining your system on a regular basis all the while having paid to have your computer tell you what to do during your free time, Keep your windows for games, and Use Ubuntu/Linux for everything else!

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I have 2 hard drives in my system, all my music & videos are kept on the second hard drive which I mount to /storage up until last night I hadn’t been able to figure out how get actual links to the folders in my home directory without dolphin file manager opening in a new window. Then last night out of the blue it hit me that I all I had to do was create symbolic links to all the files in the folders in my home directory. So I ran these 2 commands in terminal:
ln -s /storage/Music/* /home/angel/Music
ln -s /storage/Videos/* /home/angel/Videos
the * is a wild card and means that anything in those folders will be linked to. But I knew this and really felt it was a “Duh” moment on my part…..lol

I just discovered that you can go into your myspace account settings and under the option “Sync” you can set it up so updates to your twitter will now also update your myspace status. Which I think is completly great, since there is currently no myspace desktop clients for linux.

When the night is darkest and it has been my longest day, you are the light that helps me find my way. The strength you have shown me and tenderness you give are what makes my life so much easier to live. I wish for you life’s happiness and all the kindness that can be found, for no more is your path a lonely one that walks on solitary ground. My hand I give to you when feel you can not walk on, my heart I give to you when you feel that all is gone. Life has shown us travesty’s and pain no one deserves but in that pain we found a strength that no man can bring undone.

I love you Mark and I hope you have a wonderful birthday and I look forward to spending many many more with you!

~Prologue~

My name is Angela, my family calls my Angie, my husband and friends call me Angel. I”m 34 years old and the words that follow I attest to being my life in so far as I can recall it. I write these words more as way to cleanse my soul then as any act of revenge or rebellion. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and so my experience”s with certain systems will reflect those institutions. It”s my hope that someone with the proper knowledge and access to proper avenues will read my story and that it will help them to better understand  and maybe even help some other child.

~The End of the Beginning~

I remember well the first day I ever set foot inside a courtroom, though now the exact details of the incident that lead to my arriving there are bit blurry, but I was thirteen years old at the time. The courtroom itself smelled of old wood, the courthouse must have been at least one hundred years old. I remember there was a wooden separator in the room which kept those attending court separate from those that were actually running the courtroom. Rows of chairs lined the room, and lots of people had filled them up.

The judge called my mothers name and another man read the charges. I don’t remember exactly what the charges were but I knew she was being charged for not sending me to school. A charge of course that was ludicrous as she had sent me to school, I simply chose not to go. As such my mother had decided the only way to protect herself was to go to juvenile and charge me with what they call incorrigible charges. She told the judge she had done so and the charges were dropped against her.

The next few months after this are a bit of blur, I seem to have a lot of those, lapses in memory or fuzzy memories in my youth. I do know I was lost, confused, and very angry as a teen. My mom was twenty years old when I was born, Most of my early memories in life are of Family gatherings, or parties, most of those parties included lots of people as I have a very large family, there was also lots of alcohol. I have to admit that most of my memories of life prior to leaving home are not happy ones. I”m the oldest of four girls, the youngest two being twins.

Somewhere around the age of five Somebody, whom I believe to be an uncle, molested me. The problem is I can only remember flashes of this, I don”t remember the face. My reasons for believing it was this certain Uncle were because he was the one who had the opportunity. I only began to remember the event after hearing a speaker tell her story of being molested, at which point I think maybe nobody really believed me, at the age of 15 I was known to tell a few tales. My mom claimed to believe me she says this is why at age five she took me to a counselor, but as far as I know the visit only happened once. I never truly dealt with it, it’s just there.

A few random memory”s of those younger days stick out in my head but I don’t actually recall details of most things. My father, though I’m sure he loves me and always has, was never a big influence in my youth, he was there as my parents are even now still married, but he was never involved very much. My mother ran the roost, and still does.

After those early years my next big memory is the one of which I wrote about already. That first courtroom introduction, was just the beginning of a long road and  many, many, courtroom visits. Most of the time I was charged with

Today I will walk away and forget the pain you burdened me with for so many years. For years you asked me what was wrong, and for so many years I didn’t know either. But, now I realize I was always striving for that impossibly high bar you set, and just when my fingers reached it you would raise it ever higher.

What was wrong with me, was that you never protected me, you never said “It’s okay I love you just as you are”, and when I tell you this is the reason, this is what is wrong, you say I never let you. Well my job was not to let you my job was to be a child. If children had their way parents would never put out any stops.

When you felt the job wasn’t worth your time anymore, you decided to have the state pick up the slack. Do you have any Idea what it’s like to be a child who feels alone and forgotten. Locked in a room, far away from home a child who feels like the world is looking at her like some tainted soul. I was locked up with murders, and armed robbers, There we’re girls I new well who, started fire’s that accidentally killed people inside, and for what? Because you couldn’t deal with me? Because you washed your hands of actually being a parent to me?

I have spent years hating myself because you told me I wasn’t quite right. For years you tried to convince that I must have some “mental issue” that prevents me from being normal. But I know different now. I know that to be normal is to be different, to stand up for what I believe and to stand up for how I feel, different is normal it’s what makes the world the place it is.

For years you blamed me for not being the parent you should have been, and the only time you said you were sorry was in a flurry of drunken tears. You asked me to be honest and when I was, then you told me I was wrong. When I wanted to be and express myself, you looked at me through disapproving eyes. I spent my life looking for your approval. Well today I won’t do that anymore.

You asked me to trust you, but never gave me a reason to. You asked me to be there for you and tend to your feelings, well I’m your child that’s not my job. You say you love me, but your actions say you only love me if…. I may have been a difficult teen, but I was not as difficult as some have been. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t drink, I wasn’t a horrible person. Just a young person trying to deal with her feelings.

Today I refuse to allow you to have that control over me. I will no longer hope for you to see me for the person I am. I will love myself, I have so much to give. I will not parent my child without the same guilt tactics that you used on me for so many years. I will instead encourage my child to identify his feelings and be okay with them. I will encourage him to stand up for what he feels is right, and I will tell him he doesn’t have to work to please me, because honestly I’m pleased with all my children being just who they are. I don’t expect them to be anything other than who they are.

Today I am strong, and I will live my life in the manner in which I choose, today I will not compromise who I am to bend to your or anybody else’s will. I may have walked the road alone for quite a while, but I know now that I am worthy of love, that the worth of my life is not the value which you put on it.

Well yesterday, my son’s old CRT monitor finally decided to quit working. We don’t have the cash at the moment to run out and get a new monitor, so my husband was kind enough to give him his monitor. It was decided that my hubby could use the laptop for what he does. So I formatted it, then installed & Setup Kubuntu for him. He’s pretty happy with it. That left us with one computer that had no monitor, so I decided to bring it into the living room and make good use of it.

This computer is a Gateway GM5478, it originally came with windows vista and has always had a few bugs that made it not work well with Linux, also dual screen doesn’t scale in linux. The one other issue that kept me from making it a mythbox is that the t.v. tuner(an AVerMedia M791) that came with the system is not supported by linux. So knowing all that I decided to put Vista back on it for our purposes.

I finally figured out how to make apt:// urls work in firefox kubuntu. apt:// urls allow you to install software at the click of link in your browser. The fix was actually rather simple, just run the following command in your terminal.
sudo apt-get install apturl firefox-3.5-gnome-support
After running the command head over to allmyapps and test it by trying to install one of the programs they have listed.

You told me that you loved me, but then you turned away; you taught me that what I felt was important then you would not listen to what I had to say.

Years I spent trying to define, whose fault it was & all the while it made no reason and I only pretended better with time. Feelings are okay you say and yes you can cry, but when I tried to truly feel you didn’t understand why.

I never meant to cause pain only to understand, yet somehow still I’m caught up in this madness that only you seem to be able to follow.

So I installed Kubuntu 9.10 RC and it is definitely beautiful. The font’s look quite nice, and everything just feels smooth. I didn’t have any of the sound issues which occurred with jaunty so all my sound was working out of the box! As far as differences go, here are a few improvments:

1. In 9.04 firefox and other GTK applications, just looked like GTK applications, however in 9.10 even firefox looks beautiful, I’m assuming that means that gtk-qtcurve has been updated in some manner.
2. Speaking of firefox, Kubuntu Karmic now sports a new Firefox installer and it did make things a whole lot easier.
3. Kopete now supports facebook which in my opinion is a plus
4. Karmic feels faster and I suppose that’s because I’m now using the ext4 file system which is the default setting.

Overall I would have to say that Kubuntu Karmic just feels nicer, It’s not clunky or resource consuming and my overall feeling of it is one of comfort.