No worries, mate... that parole businesss can be a real worry, so I asked 'em to scrap it for our peace of mind.  I mean, we should have some tenure and security after going to great effort to customise our cells with elegant Windowblinds and the like.

Oh well, now that we've got paroles out of the way, I think conjugal visits should be next on the agenda with prison management.

Hey BoXXi, what was it that those SOB's accused you of?

hmmmm........first customization goes back to the days of DOS . I used to get specialized drivers for my video cards to work with AutoCAD. The drivers let you change fonts, colors, menus and create floating, iconic menus......sound familiar?

Most of those Video Card companies have disappeared now....STB, Oak Tech, Boca Research, Diamond, Orchid, Hercules.............

Once Windows caught on I went to Norton Desktop to get some added "customization"

Eventually got around to updating to XP and did some web searching to come up with Windowblinds and StyleXP....tried both and quickly realized Windowblinds for the better product....purchsed Windowblinds stand alone in January of 2001, Object Desktop 3 or 4 months later......

Regular and persistent skinning in the first degree... carries a honorary Hotel California sentence.  Now he's booked in he can never leave... but then BoXXi was never one for half measures.

Whoa! I guess customization has been around longer than I thought!

Sorry, cp! BTW- what did they accuse you of?

What hasn't he been accused is more like it!!!!  Cp has done everything from taking a great bunch of skins and assembling them in such a manner they create sensational screenshots, to making bold and bodacious comments on other peoples work. I mean, just take a look in the screenies gallery and you'll see he has a rap sheet as long as yer arm... probably longer.

In fact, when prison management runs out of sigle letters to name new cell blocks - like A and B, etc - I reckon they should name one CP in his honour, so great are his contributions and service to the cause

Also, I reckon the recreation area should be renamed the 'Po and Skinhit Wing'... and the infirmary the 'DrJo Wing'... and the prison library after Jafo, with a sci.fi section named after our resident Vulcan, Fuzzy Logic.

And let us not forget "Jeff Bargaman Hall," for he hath given us so many of these great apps!

I saw screenshots of litestep, and when I went digging into what exactly it was, I found geoShell. (The old, true geoShell. Not the outdated, seldom updated, patchwork mess you'll find today) Then I started developing for it, worked with one of the guys on getting skinning going in it and then started working on my own skinnable apps. From there I was pretty much sucked in. Kapsules followed and now my employment with the company that haunts your dreams with visions of titlebars and pushbuttons.

Oh, I shouldnt forget Mac Vision, which lead to litestep. Jeff was 14 then

Precisely... we shall now refer to the prison workshop gallery as the "Jeff Bargaman Hall"

And we can't forget our great founder, Brad Wardell.... the swimming pool shall henceforth be adorned with lily pads and be named "Frog's Pond"

Oh, and we can't forget the contributions of Neil Banfield.... therefore I propose we name the skylights in the Jafo library the "Banfield Wndows"  Orright, they're not 'exactly' windows - and they'd sure look better without the security bars - but they are certainly more aesthetically pleasing to the eye thanks to his WindowBlinds.

Ooops, I almost forgot Zubaz for his Zubish contribution - the code we use when we don't want prison management knowing what we're talking about.  I'm not too sure what to name in his honour, tho... perhaps a Zubish dictionary that new inmates can keep under their bunk mattresses to give 'em a 'heads up' on prison-speak.

Ausvet...I was always wondering why Swan Hill didn't have an Institute of Technology...

Jafo went to RMIT ...

Brilliant! The only problem is that, in Zubish, words are never spelled the same way twice!

Hmmmm! Didn't think of that! Well it's gonna be a mighty thick dictionary, then... we'd have to have several Zubish variants for each word

Gawd, its just occurred to me that newbies wouldn't be able to hide the dictionaries under their mattresses/bunks....

Oh well, we'd have to have a shelf or three in the Jafo library dedicated to the Zubish volumes.

They get mattresses?! Spoiled brats!

Yeah, I thought that... us old timers have to scrounge around for an old bag to fill with anything soft we can find.  Mine's filled with bits of scrunched up newspaper, discarded cleaning cloths from the kitchen... and any time somebody shaves off their beard, I snaffle the hair for my 'mattress' bag.    

Only drawback to that' however, is when they got real coarse hair and refuse to use conditioner cos it's considered too sissy... it's like sleeping on a bed of nails.

Man, I bet that smells funny...

Yup, sure does... all the refuse goes into the conditioner/grinder and comes out the other end all mashed together and looking much like a really long turd... smells a lot like one as well.

An inventor friend of mine is inventing a politician recycler.... they're supposed to go down the grinder chute and come out the other end as half-way decent human beings.  As hard as he may try, I just get the feeling there's no way on Earth it's gonna work.  Every time he updates me on how it's going, that George Thorogood song comes to mind... "Bad to the Bone"

Oh yeah, when we get our new art gallery dedicated, I reckon we should have some Goth stuff hung on the walls and name it after our very own KittyMalone.

All in favour say Aye!

Holiday cursors for me.

I went to download.com and saw this thing called ObjectDock,I tried it and it worked so well I tried another Stardock freebie,WindowBlinds.Both looked so good and ran so well and were so easy for a newb like me to use,I bought WB's and a WC sub.Shortly thereafter I realized there was much more to Stardock than those two apps.I upped my WB standalone to ODNT Ultimate and have been given a life sentence of downloading and learning to skin as well.

As for a favorite,I seldom use a WB without a DX theme,and DX is without a doubt my most loved program.

There you have it,my entire skinning life history.