Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

You can choose a theme/style for yourself that’s different from the default.

To do this:

1. click on “my account” on the left sidebar
2. choose the “edit” tab when the “user account” page comes up
3. right at the very bottom, there’s a section called “theme settings”
4. choose whatever theme appeals to your mood of the hour
5. and, of course, click on “submit” to save your changes.

The other set of things you could enable/disable is the set of “blocks”. In the section called “block configuration”, use the check-boxes to hide things you don’t want to see (I’ve masked out the smileys, for instance - I hardly ever use them).