Chapter XXII: Desktop Wallpaper 101

Image of the Day: Screenshot of New Desktop

Being semi-creative, it was a source of personal chagrin that my original desktop background, although lovely, was created by someone else and is a reference to an inane icon of popular culture.

Today, I decided to create my own sui generis desktop background and formulated the procedure below. Besides resulting in a personalized work of art, it was also great for releasing tension.

1. Buy a 0.5 mm Bic Cristal ball point pen with red ink.
2. Using industrial scissors, crack the casing open 1" above the nib of the pen and remove the ink cartridge.
3. Place a pristine sheet of 8.5" x 11" white paper on a table and put the ink cartridge on top of it.
4. Pound the ink cartridge vigorously with a hammer until the resident in the apartment below you comes up to complain about the infernal racket and how he has three midterms on Friday.
5. Cease pounding and dab the wet ink with a paper towel until it is dry.
6. Scan the paper into your computer at 300 dots per square inch.
7. Open Adobe Photoshop, and increase the contrast until there is only one shade of red against a pure white background.
8. Using the Color Replacer tool, color all of the white space black.
9. Crop the result until you have a pleasing composition that fits your screen resolution.
10. Save the file and set the image as your desktop background.

Update: It has come to my attention that near the center-right of this image appears to be the silhouette of a rather callipygean nude woman sitting on a stool with her back to the viewer. This is purely coincidental, but awesome nonetheless.

Chapter XXI: Blogospheric Pressure

What would you think if every Albertson's supermarket in the country installed a magic portal that would instantly teleport you to the nearest Ralph's? That would be pretty stupid, right? I mean, if you've got customer through your door, you certainly don't want to give him a path to your competitor, not until he's bought something from you first, anyway.

And yet many people who would agree with that fail to apply the same logic to website design. You might have noticed this blog contains relatively few links to other websites. I want to keep you here, reading my ramblings, and having a plethora of external links would give you chances to escape and get caught up in someone else's ramblings.

Thus, I only link to pages that have very little content--such as an image or short article--so your attention won't be stolen away. Indeed, linking to a website that is superior or more interesting than my own would be the height of foolishness, in my mind.

And of course, we have all seen the blog that has a thousand links to other blogs in an infamous 'blogroll' that isn't relevant to the reader at all. These blogs also tend to have bright wallpaper against which the text is unreadable (but then again, it is usually unreadable even if you could read it), as well as cacophonous background music. One might even click one of those links, hoping to find a page with something intelligent on it, only to encounter another awful page full of links.

It is like those devious porn sites which have hundreds of alluring thumbnails, all of which are merely links to other pages covered with thumbnail links. If you follow this path all the way to the end of the rainbow, and you are lucky, there is nothing but a few disappointing pictures, whose only saving grace is that they are of appreciable size. At least, that's what I've heard.

In any case, a couple people have linked to my blog to theirs, and I feel compelled to return the compliment. It really is a compliment since these blogs are better written and more frequently updated than mine. So at the risk of losing what meager readership I have...

The Little B Journal - Inspiring and/or (usually 'and') amusing blog of a recent graduate of Western Washington University.
Andrew - Who? - Insightful musings of a young Canadian father.
Black Eye Sunrise - My brother who used to write poetry, but stopped after becoming a cog in the corporate machine of a mid-sized technology firm.
Real Stories of a Railroad Cop - Personal blog of a Michigan police officer. I was randomly directed to this blog by blogger.com and it really humanized law enforcement for me--more than any TV show can.
Random Thoughts - Somewhat existentialist (read: boring) daily journal of a UC Irvine undergrad.

In other news, I've been having really wierd dreams the past few days. But more on that later.

Image of the day: Bestickered Trash Can in Architecture Building Stair Court

Chapter XX: The Idiot Box

As you might know, television sets are sometimes referred to as 'idiot boxes' in the popular parlance. I am not sure why this is so, but I surmise it is because a TV resembles a rectangular prism (a 'box', as it were), and contains an idiot (Bill O'Reilly).

About a week ago, Cal Poly administrators decided to overhaul the channel line-up accessible in the on-campus dormitories. The decisions regarding which channels to add and which ones to drop were made using a student survey about what they want to watch.

Unfortunately, it appears that my TV preferences differ dramatically from those of my peers and nearly all the channels that I enjoy watching were axed.

ESPN2 , FSN, and the Travel Channel were all removed, which means no more televised poker. This is probably a good thing, since watching televised poker is the second most unproductive activity in the universe. The first being attending Professor Howell's lectures (18th C British Lit).

The also cut out all the shopping networks and Christian programming. I speak of these together since they are essentially the same thing. If you strip away all the organ music and empassioned quoting of Bible verses, televangelism is just infomercials for Christianity. I don't necessarily mean this pejoritively; after all, the elements of argument--logos, ethos, and pathos--are the same whether you're convincing people to find Jesus, or to buy vacuum cleaners. I enjoy studying the speaker's persuasive technique, irrespective of the product.

What I am most upset about, though, is the loss of CSPAN and CSPAN-2. Believe it or not, these were the first two channels I would cycle through whenever I turned on the TV. I can't stand news shows, like FOX News, MSNBC, even CNN to an extent, that give brief summaries and soundbites of the days political developments and then offer biased commentary (called 'analysis'). Only on CSPAN can you hear the whole speech, get the whole picture, and reach your own conclusions. I'm especially mad that the [Cal Poly] Administration decided to pull this crap right before the Senate confirmation hearings for Sam Alito. Sure, a lot of other stations are giving live coverage, but every 5 minutes they cut to one of their 'analysts' to tell me 'what it all means.' I just want to watch the hearings uninterrupted, damn it!

It seems utterly absurd that the Black Entertainment Television channel was added when only about 2% of Cal Poly is black. 99.9% of us are Americans, so CSPAN would hit a much larger demographic.

That said, getting HBO, HBO2, and HBO Signature is pretty cool.

In other news, Brian's Empire Poker account is still cursed. Seriously.

Image of the Day: Inflatable Chairs My Roommate Mounted To The Wall And Ceiling