"I've got my pants off so it's hard to hear!"

The title of the last entry, "Rolling Stones: Steel Wheelchair Tour", is from an episode of The Simpsons. I don't think it's a very popular episode really, it's one of those future-flash-forward episodes showing Lisa in college. In her dorm room is poster with this caption and an image of steel wheelchair. Somehow it always stuck with me. That or I've seen that episode too many times.

I touched a little on "logic" in the last entry. So I'll talk about "logic" once again. Now I wish I had saved the URL to the blog in question as it was very, very funny. One of these left-wing blogs that blame all the worlds problems on George W. Bush. Apparently children and starving to death and kids aren't being educated only because of Bush in the past 2 1/2 years. Local state jurisdictions? Teacher unions? A department of education that's been broken since the 60s? None of these things are to blame for the status of education system. It's George W. Bush and only George W. Bush. Oh and the budgeting for the public schools. Now there was this one episode of The Simpsons which had this joke. The teacher hands out this state aptitude test and tells the children something to the effect of "now children remember: the worse you do on this test the more money the school gets. So don't knock yourselves out! heh." Ironic that this blog author actually advocated giving the worst scoring schools more money. As in the worse they are the more money they should get. Right! Keep expectations lower, blindly throw more money at a problem, create more bureaucracy with little to no accountability! That'll fix the broken public schools!! What do ya mean that's stupid and illogical? Pffffffff.....

Still find it ironic a person would practice and apply a joke from The Simpsons.

Is it possible I'm running out of stuff to write? Nahhh. How about another person I admirer? I now admirer Dennis Miller. Actually I've mentioned him before and you if you read one of my prior postings you'll note the apparently inspired-by sound to it (it was a paraphrase of a response to some environmentalists). I admirer Dennis Miller because he tells-it-like-it-is and isn't afraid to be pro-Bush which seems not that common from the public never mind celebrities. And the anit-French thing. That was awesome :-). You can see what I'm talking about in his latest HBO special.

I am currently watching this show called Big O. It's a new show on Cartoon Network. The only reason I mention is because something backwards has happened. This show obviously has a heavy influence on it from the Batman Animated Series show. So a Japanese animated show has now been influenced by an American show. Normally it's the other way around. The Japanese seem to love the Anime. And this Big O has all kinds of similarities with that Batman series. The Batman series was very, very well done in case you missed it. Has some sort of cult following (and not just kids either).

It's been since June 18th since I last wrote and discussed LiteStep so I think I should write about it again. To catch up on this "LiteStep" see my entry from June 18th, found in this archive (you'll have to page down a bit, it starts with "*Step").

*Step: The Sequel "This time it's personalized"

Whilst last we left off LiteStep is a program you can use as your "shell" for all versions of MS Windows. No more Start menu or perty desktop icons or convenient My Computer conveniently located where it is on everybody else's desktop.

So how do you install LiteStep?

A good question. If you happen to have Windows 2000 (any version) or Windows XP Pro (or later, not home) you happen to be in luck as you don't even have to look at a text file. For Windows 95/98/Me users you will have to do some text editing. But it won't take more than 5 seconds. NT 4 users will have to do some fancy registry editing.

Fortunately there's a special "shell loader" that makes all this unnecessary. This program is called "ShellOnV2" and is located at the web site dx 1 3 (new window). Full instructions are included both on the site and with the program but it still has some what of learning curve so I will go over briefly.

Get your ShellOn

ShellOn is like a menu system. You use ShellOn to prompt you for the shell you want to load when you first logon to Windows and after a few seconds (or whatever depending on your options) it loads your default shell for you. So essentially instead of Windows loading, finding Explorer.exe and popping it open, Windows finds ShellOn.exe and executes it instead. You then have a choice of which shell you'd like to load.

To install it all you need to do is download it to a particular location like c:\ and double-click to extract. There's no setup program or system changes that take place. Next bring the folder you extracted to, if you followed above this is c:\shellonv2 and open config.exe, giving you a screen similar to the following:



First you want to make ShellOn your shell using this icon:

As you'll notice you didn't have to do much work this way :-)

Second you'll want to add a shell using the + sign icon right above the "name" column header (). This will bring up an "Add shell" dialog with a space for Name and Path and a "capture shell crashes" check box. The first thing to do is to add Explorer.exe because inevitably you will have to go back to it at least every so often. So enter Explorer as the name (you can enter anything you want but Explorer would seem to the most accurate and descriptive) and use the little folder icon to bring up a browse dialog and find your Explorer.exe. Depending on where you installed Windows this may vary but the most common locations are C:\Windows\Explorer.exe and C:\WinNT\Explorer.exe.

Now let me slow down a moment. It occurs to me at this point this article may be way over the head of some people. If you find yourself struggling to "browse" to the Windows folder and a file called "Explorer.exe" you're most likely not advanced to use LiteStep. If you you're following a long anyway you obviously have enough drive to learn it though and I commend you. However this probably the easiest part of the whole process as we haven't even got to the LiteStep part yet. If you do know enough you've successfully found Explorer.exe and added it to ShellOn please keep reading.

Once you've found Explorer.exe click the "Open" button and the path to Explorer will appear in the path box of ShellOn. I highly recommend checking "Capture shell crashes" as it is a very useful feature for any shell including Explorer.

I should also mention here if should ever decide to go back to Explorer.exe and forget all this ShellOn/LiteStep stuff there's a handy icon for doing so. Simply select Explorer in the list and click the icon right next to the "Set as Shell" icon named above. Explorer will now be your shell (after a relog/reboot) and ShellOn should never bother you again (it can safely be deleted without any consequence).

Now the main reason for ShellOn, for me at least, is so I can always go back to Explorer if I need to for some reason. But it does have other features like loading a particular shell based on user name. For example if you share your computer with some one else and you both have different user names under your user name ShellOn will come up and load your default shell for you and under the other user name ShellOn won't even load and Explorer will simply pop-up so the other person(s) won't even be able to tell LiteStep or ShellOn is even installed. Or you maybe your room mate uses some other "alternative shell" out there. This and the other ShellOn features are very great and useful but beyond the scope of my little blog article. You can find all that useful information in the help file.

There's two places in ShellOn to set preferences and settings. One is the icon all the way on the left at the bottom of the screen, the screen tip says "Profile Options...". Instead of trying to explain the options I'll show you an pic of mine:



Keeping in mind I'm the only user on my computer and have only one profile.

One last thing you may want to do is set Explorer.exe as your default shell. You'll note the option right there on the main screen. Actually this is a fairly incomplete article and I suggest visiting LiteStep.info for further information before continuing.

Stay tuned for further articles.

  ¶ 3:02 PM