Yes, yes, I know it’s an odd name for a blog post but let’s be creative! The only reason I like St. Patrick’s Day is for one particular dessert that you can only get from one place. Shamrock Shakes from McDonald’s! I spend the entire year craving their minty flavor and on St. Patrick’s the planets align and the fast food industry gives MickieD the power to give us green shakes. Or something like that. If you haven’t had one yet and if you aren’t in the 2% of people who don’t like ice cream, then go out and get one. It’s worth the $4 or whatever ridiculous price they charge. One of these days I’m convinced to buy a shake-maker and fill it with mint ice cream. It would be like selling hotdogs at a baseball game.
Alright, enough temptation of desserts (I do apologize if I made anyone break their diet). On to the second part of the title. A plugin. This particular plugin is for WordPress, is my favorite. And comes with lots of wonderful updates. It’s known as Fluency Admin from Dean Robinson. I personally have found it to be the best plugin I’ve ever used. In addition to making it compatible with WordPress 3.1 (the plugin now stands at version 2.4), he also adding in a “Just Write” function which cuts away everything except the post/page editor. It is quite useful for long posts where focus on content is important and eliminating distractions is essential. Here’s a screenshot: 
Along with the Just Write feature he also added in a setting to change the administration menu color and made the drop-down menus of the admin bar rounded. I suggest you try it out on your WordPress-powered site. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without this plugin. As always, Donating to him always helps the plugin development stay alive!
The long-living need for gum often entices me to try out new flavors. More than often they turn out bad, e.g. Berry Mint from Stride, not the best combination. This time Orbit took two fruity flavors and made them clash. It came out to be a long-lasting delicious gum. My only critique of it would be a little more lime flavoring, tasted too melon when I’m used to something more akin to Sour Patch candy. I’m not planning on trying any more of the new Orbit for fear of losing trust in their brand but they did a great job with this one considering it holds to the traditional sugarfree recipe. Decided to have a little photographic fun with the exceptional packaging. If I can (and hopefully not messing with any copyrights?) I’ll try getting a repeating pattern tile of it.
I must say I’m thoroughly impressed with this release! Just booted it up off a flash drive and it was amazing. As a matter of fact I’m writing this post from the release candidate right now, and loving every second of it. The icon theme is comparable to that of a Mac, the theme is cleaner than the pope’s mouth, and the font is so small but crisp. Even my site looked better in it. Without say the assortment of Minty wallpapers which follows each release was nice enjoyable. It came with a smooth metallic theme, which gave a new twist to the mint aspect. I’m trying to find an excuse to install this even though it’s not the final version. This definitely takes Mint beyond the boundaries of Ubuntu and firmly plants a new branch in the Linux world! I decided to change around the normal embedding of a screenshot and put it into the header, so above you’ll see a nice photo.
One of my favorite flavors of Linux was released recently but taking a new approach. Perhaps they got tired of the corporate-minded ideals that are finding their way into Ubuntu or perhaps they just wanted to start a fresh branch. Whatever the case, Linux mint has now released a crisp new branch in their family tree: Linux Mint Debian. Debian itself is the parent of Ubuntu and the grandparent of Mint, now she becomes the parent of this new system. Below I’ve uploaded screenshots of the system running by itself and with an added wallpaper from Gnome-Look. Although the new OS has just been born I can see great potential. The image file and further infomation can be found on the Linux Mint website.
**You can expect to see a post about my business cards fairly soon!
The final version is now available. I have also released a custom set of news icons to match the minty theme, enjoy. I also apologise if this theme causes anyone to crave mint ice cream, it was what came to mind when I created this. The background deserves quite a bit of credit as well, seeing as it makes the theme come alive. The author is Daveyboy and I would like to personally thank him for his excellent work and allowance of my use of his artwork.
