by Matt | Mar 7, 2005 | Culture
I’ve been asked in the past few days to try and explain this whole “desktop customization” thing. I’ve tried to find a reason for it, a reason why I enjoy it so much, but I can’t. All I know is that it’s easy once you get the basics down and that there are so many basics to get down that the web litteraly contains thousands of pages devoted to mundane things like changing and icon. Group those with sites about background wallpaper, helpful widgets and windows themes and you have yourself a community. A friggin’ huge one. Sites have been created to round up folks like me and provide a sort of group theropy by letting us show off all our cool ass desktops in monthly threads about desktops themselves.
It’s an odd hobby I admit, but believe it or not it’s one that I enjoy. I suppose I enjoy the challenge of hacking Windows to bits and redoing everything that could possibly be customized. That, and on the rare occasion that someone sees my computer, I love to get those “what operating system is that” or “how are you doing that” comments. They hit the floor when I tell them that pathetic old Windows is running and OSX-esque dock bar, interactive icon labels, a media player strait out of a scifi movie and that half my desktop moves, blinks, jiggles or is interactive in a dozen other ways.
Anyway, I figured I’d write up a little guide to help explain all this and break down the past of customization into easy to handle chunks. So, press on dear reader, click that read more button…
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by Matt | Mar 5, 2005 | Music
Rodeo. A foreign word to most of us, ingrained social event for Texans. You can’t be in Houston without going to the rodeo at some point. Last night six of us went for this years festivities. I’ll break down your average rodeo for those unfamiliar.
Rodeo – noun:
A yearly event that may contain any combination of the following: calf roping, bull riding, trick horse jumping, hat and belt buckle vendors, beer, tacos and any type of food imaginable “on a stick”, immediately followed by some sort of live musical performance typically, but not exclusively, by a country western artist. May contain additional carnival attractions and games as well as frightening “carnie folk”.
It’s actually a tad more involved than that, say, about 72,000+ people worth.
Last night was fun. Interesting and different but fun. We actually went to the rodeo on Black Heritage Day. The musical performance was Alicia Keys and the crowd was quite heavily populated with thousands of 16 year old black teenage girls. It wasn’t all bad. The performance wasn’t as horrible as I imagined, she has a talent for the piano. unfortunately the acoustics in Reliant Stadium suck huge panda wang. It was horrible to listen to. Echos, bad bounce, distortion, the whole deal. Worst possible audio setup I’ve ever seen. The stadium is designed to make football games seem loud. That has the side effect of unnaturally amplifying concerts to the point of distortion.
The audio was quickly made up for with a “yard” long margarita. The sausage-on-a-stick and pizza-on-a-stick helped too. Oh, and lastly, to everyone in Houston, Funnel Cakes suck. You people don’t know what you’re missing. Fried dough is where it’s at baby. A funnel cake is fried dough’s poor white trash cousin.
It was certainly an interesting evening.
by Matt | Mar 3, 2005 | Friends and Family
Lauren’s brother gave me a call last night and said that his friend had tickets to a Houston Aero’s game, center ice. I’m not one to turn down hockey, especially when the seats rock, so off we went. The game wasn’t half bad, the Aeros won 2-0 against a rather pitiful team from San Antonio. When I think of San Antonio, hockey isn’t exactly the first thing to pop into my mind. Then again, the same could be said about Houston. At least it was fun. And with the NHL sesson in the shitter, it’s about all I’ve got. This is actually my 3rd Aero’s game this year and they’ll be more to come. Chris’ friend Jake gets tickets weekly and we’re going back on the 14th. So, huzzah to my brother in law for hooking us up with some hockey. Apparently it was Chris’ first hockey game too. By the end he was yelling “hit the bastard” along with the rest of us. He’ll be a fan in no time.
Hockey, the greatest sport on earth.
Oh, and extra thanks to Jake and his camera phone for the pictures!
by Matt | Mar 2, 2005 | Web
Just a quick test of w.bloggar. Apparently the new version works with TypePad and WordPress now. We’ll see.
by Matt | Mar 1, 2005 | Tech, Web
I’m going to give Chris the benefit of the doubt here and not only allow comments but allow anyone to make them. I’ll see how Spam Karma does. As of this weekend, journal.php will no longer be a valid link, so update your bookmarks. I’m going to be poking at this template a bit and seeing what I can come up with. I was unsatisfied with the hack I found to embed login fuctions within the comment pages (hense the lack of it) as well as a few things here and there. The title of this page in 10pt bold Courier is also ticking my off. That’ll be changed shortly.
Chris has also mentioned that having pull down menus for my archives is some sort of technological achievement, so I think they’ll stick around for a while. I kind of like them.
Also, this theme is apparently made of only three graphics. I was amazed when I started to fiddle with it. Good ol’ CSS, surprising me again. Let me run this idea past you guys: same layout, but a white content section with a darker background to the sides and a blue-ish neon glow coming from underneith (where the gray gradiant is now). I dunno, it was an idea. I doubt it will happen.
Ok, so, test her out, comment away. Tomorrow I’m going to move this to /blog/ and create a splash page, main page and a few other stray content pages. After that I’ll tidy up some of the CSS to my liking.
Oh, and if Chris could point me in the direction of a journal posting program (like Zempt or z.bloggar for MT) it would be greatly appreciated. 😛
Matt out.
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