Jack

I don't really want this blog to just become a place where I put pictures of my baby.... but he is the cutest, so it's kind of hard not to.

The Man Himself

He's so cute I can't even hold the camera straight...

Ok, but really, he's cute.  For those of you still with me here's a general update on my life.  Stephanie and I have been spending our Saturday's attempting to remodel our house.  With a lot of help we got the laminate floors done and we're working on baseboards.  We usually end up spending more time taking care of our baby more than we do working so it's a very long process.

I've been thinking about getting my phone set up to publish to my blog, then I will update this much more often.  I'm sure you all will highly enjoy that.  

Speaking of phones, I never really thought I'd be the kind of person to put a picture of my wife or kids as my phone/computer wallpaper.  It's not that I was against it, I just never really thought I would care so much that I would go through the proces to change it... My cell phone now has a picture of Jack, and our new iPad that we just bought (as an anniversary gift to ourselves) has pictures of Jack as the lock and home screens.  My computer however does still maintain it's StarCraft themed background.  

That's all for now.

cheap as free

I was scrolling through my past posts, and noticed that I last updated you on my desktop background before The Hunger Games came out.  Well it's been a while since it came out (I've even seen a new movie since then) and I have since updated my desktop background.

However before I tell you about that I have to go back in time and tell you about my current electronic situation.  Over the past years I've slowly been accumulating odds and ends that would make a great home office someday, and it had finally taken shape.

Most of these Items were purchased from the BYU Surplus Sale that happens every month.  A great way to get cheap stuff.

So as you can see I now operate my laptop as more of a desktop with two monitors.  It's nice, I usually have a web browser open on the main screen with music controls, chat windows and other extras open on the secondary side (my laptop screen).

Also the soundbar/speaker that came with the monitor is very nice as far as computer sound goes.  The monitor also functions as a 4 port USB hub, which is nice for plugging in and charging my phone, ipod, kindle, and camera.  It's for sure worth a lot more that $60.

So with that in mind... I'll make a new post about my new desktop background.

nothing

I realized that I haven't posted anything for a while (almost a whole month!) and I feel like I don't have anything to post, which today, might be true.  Nothing important has happened to me today, but over the past month there have been a few random happenings that are somewhat noteworthy.

It's funny how we tend to focus so much on the here an now.  Many a person will say, "oh nothing's happening.." when really only two days ago they won the lottery.  After something is over I tend to forget about it.... if only excitement happened in retrospect.

So in lieu of some more interesting thoughts that swim in my mind, I will simply provide you with some pictures from some random happenings through the last months...

My car was paintballed!  Luckily our neighbor saw it, told us, and we wiped the paint of while it was still wet.  There might be a little bit of pink still in the grill though.

I quit working at Taco Time and subsequently stopped drinking 32 oz of soda everyday.  I'm always looking out for my health.

I worked for a handful of weeks at an industrial ceramics facility.  I worked with a mason who built/repaired kilns.  This is a picture of an arch (over the kiln door) that I made... woot.

 At one point in the month we took some BYU graduate family pictures... These may or may not be a surprise for my mother for an upcoming holiday.  I took this one and edit it a little for fun... (click on it for big size)

To come in a future post: my new desk, my new tv, and some thoughts on other things :P

new theme!

You all may remember my infrequent updates on what my desktop background looks like.  My last update was in August, but it's changed since then (twice actually, not counting today's).  For the past three months I've had my desktop background a wintery Christmast theme, which was great for December and even part of January, but now that Groundhog Day and Valentines Day have come and gone it was well time for an update.

This weekend, tickets for The Hunger Games movie went on sale.  I'm pretty stoked for this, and I'm planning on buying tickets soon.  In honor of such, I have created this:

I'm still playing around a bit with some of the fonts, but that's the gist of it.

For those of you who care, all the updates to my desktop have been chronicled in my flickr photostream. (yeah, just those 5)

Fit to curl

That right there would be me, throwing the winning rock!

Pretty good for a first time!

I am also, a most excellent sweeper.

Desktop Update

Since HP7.2 has come and gone (great movie btw) I decided to update my desktop background:

I thought about creating countdowns for each game... but I don't really have the time (or need) for that right now.  But in also exciting news, the apartment we will be moving into has internet and cable as part of the rent, so I'll have the ESPN channels I need to watch all the BYU games :-)

Also, I got this background from this page on the Cougar Board

1 weeks

I recently got really geeky, and I created something so wonderful I just have to share it.
For the past three months or so I have had various pictures of BYU basketball players as my desktop background, but as BYU basketball ended, so too did the backgrounds.  I didn't feel like finding any special pictures at the moment so I just opened up the default picture folders that Apple gives you, browsed through some of the pictures (they give you a lot, some cool B&W pics, some weird nature ones, and a couple classic pieces of art).  I ended up picking this Japanese looking wave painting called "The Great Wave."

As I enjoyed my new background I began to fantasize of how great it would be to have a truly functional background, one that could display the time or date perhaps, or maybe show weather or have a calendar even.  So I began a google search for 'function desktops' or 'live desktops' even 'auto-updating desktop pictures'...  and although it took me a bit I was sitting in a boring class, so time wasn't an issue.

Eventually I stumbled upon GeekTool 3.0, and well, it's a tool for geeks!  With the program (a simple system preference pannel) you can create "geeklets" that allow you to take auto-updating images, files, or unix-shell commands and paste them on top of your existing desktop image.  It's really a great and amazing little tool, and as far as I'm aware it's for mac only, which makes me feel special.

I browsed a website where people had uploaded pictures of what they had done to customize their desktops and also uploaded files and scripts of their geeklets.  Some of them were really cool, and eventually I made my own desktop collection:

Now, the most exciting part of this is in the front and center of my desktop, a countdown!  This I'm particularly proud of because I had to do a hefty bit of editing to the geeklet I downloaded inorder to get this one to show up just the way I wanted it to.  I however did not go in depth enough to program it to read of singular times with singular units (1 hour, instead of 1 hours).  And this is why I am pleased to announce that I have precisely 1 weeks, 1 days, and two hours until my last class is over :-)

(Sorry this post is so long, but another new toy of mine is Bowtie, a desktop-level iTunes controller/identifier.)