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simplicationitudinalriffic

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Watching the first big hurricane of the season pass by a few hundred miles from here. This area had two direct hits last year, I'm hoping to avoing that this year. We're going to get a lot of rain, no biggie. The wind has been really creepy over the last 12 hours, constantly gusting and blowing in an unsettling manner. It is full of portents. Or contents, that's right, it's full of contents. Dennis is heading for Alabama, but could take a sudden right turn into my face.
--Mr.Ibis
Have to admit that I feel kinda guilty about the cynical anger that I feel about 7/7 in London, anger at the governments, anger at the people in office, anger at Bush, anger at Blair, anger at terrorists of all types, anger at the structure of politics in the world, anger at the economics in the world, anger at me for not having the power to fix these things or to even start to try fixing them, anger at myself for if I did have the power, I may also try to force my vision on the world rather than do what's best, anger at human nature, etc. etc. Sometimes, I wish I could express sympathy as well as everyone else has been showing these days.
--Mr. Lex
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(4 comments)
2005.07.09
Blast from the Past of the Moment
"Pierre A. von Kaenel" writes:
> "Simplify, simplify, simplify" - Thoreau

Shouldn't that be just "Simplify"?
Dave Sill, I wrote that down in like April of 1998, but it goes with my current attempts at simplifying my life, mostly by means of decluttering...
Amusement of the Moment
Yesterday a co-worker pointed out that, with Windows XP at least, you can set the wallpaper to an animated GIF and it will indeed animate. I don't know how long Windows has been doing this. (For some reason it doesn't work if you just right click on a web image and hit use as wallpaper, my usual method.)

Of course, a stretched or tiled animated image can be VERY annoying, and will use up like at least 1/3 of your processor. Still it can be amusing in small doses. Here's the technique:
  1. Find a suitable image. For something neat but discrete I'd suggest my own small gif cinema. For big fun, the previously kisrael'd b3ta dicussion has a bunch of cool ones.
  2. Right click on the animation and "Save Image As..." to someplace convenient on your local drive.
  3. Right click on a blank part of the desktop, hit "Properties" and go to the "Desktop" tab.
  4. "Browse" to the image and select it. Make sure to select "Tiled" "Centered" or "Stretched" along with the correct color. (white works well with most of those b3ta animations)
Enjoy! It can be very cool, very annoying, or even both!