The Blog: Laments From La Mancha

So I’ve upgraded ye old MacBook to a 15.4″ MacBook Pro and I’m totally digging it. When I first got my Mac in 2006, I was a complete newbie. This time around I’m a total pro and I’m making sure that everything gets setup right the first time around. I’m organizing all my stuff, taggin’ photos in iPhoto, I mean the whole deal.

In an effort to keep things tidy on my desktop and dock, I decided to stack programs in stacks so that I can get to them quickly, but I won’t have 100 icons there. So with new stacks come some new icons. So yesterday, I spent a few hours and made some stack icons. Now, don’t get too excited, I didn’t do anything really original in my creation with the exception of the plaque on the front which Amber and I tag-teamed this morning. Everything else I just dumped off the net searching for icons. So again, all original props and copyrights to the original authors and what not.

Here are some screen shots of them in action:

Here are the original .png files. Please enjoy them.

Chat Tools Icon

Creative Tools icon

iTools (iWork & iLife) Icon

I used CandyBar3 to change the folder icons.

Dude… I love Mac

My dad and I used to pump quarters into this game all the time when we stopped at the K-Mart (I think that’s what it was) in Traverse City, MI when I was a kid. Man, I was totally stoked when I saw this ad on G4 TV today…. Mmm…. Peter Gun Theme rules!

Dude? For Real? An earthquake in Fort Wayne? Well, no exactly, but we certainly felt the aftershocks this morning.

At about 5:36 Michelle and I were woken up from a dead sleep to the whole house shacking. The rattling lasted about 20-30 seconds before all the motion stopped. The cats took off and Link is still under the bed more than a half an hour later.

Nothing fell off the wall (haven’t checked the house yet as it’s still dark), but man, that was totally wild. How crazy is that?

Apparently the event happen happened in Olney, IL and was a 5.4 quake (about 280 miles away). How crazy is that?

Update: We just felt some weird shaking here at work at about 11:17 am (kinda like that feeling you get when a not so well made elevator comes to rest) – what a strange day. (it was a 4.6)

You’ll notice that every now and then my writing on this blog trickles down do almost nothing. Well it is not because you are unloved or forgotten, it is merely that I am working on other projects. One of the projects that I have been working on is building a little writing community called, Slanderous Tongue.com.

It’s a completely anonymous writing project where you have a chance to share your works, rough drafts and get feedback and suggestions from others who like to fancy themselves as novice writers. I’m Oberon (I know, I just got done saying it was anonymous). It’s nice to be able to write a narrative, a poem or just mess around with an idea without feeling the pressure of completion and to be able to read good stuff from others.

For example, this past weekend several of us went to go see the Fort Wayne Komets play (they won 6-4 btw). And while were there we decided that our next little project should be writing a story where our character attends this very game. That was the only requirement. Below is the beginnings of my idea.

Have you ever been caught off guard by the absurdity of your present circumstance? Not your every day generic oddity or strangeness, but rather the providence of the truly bizarre? The kind of bizarre where you find yourself standing in the rain without any pants, in hand cuffs, and your mother’s voice is blathering in your blue-toothed ear badgering you about why “you don’t call as often as you used to” and that “you sound down” and wondering if “you’re on the marijuana”. So stunned in fact to find yourself doing whatever it is that you are doing that the only words or sounds that can express in any finite capacity the very nature of your here and now is uncontrolled maniacal laughter?

This was one of those moments for Kenny Legume. As he lay sprawled out in a divaricated tangle, a tiny pink fluffy bunny gripped in his right hand staring up into the guts of the suspended scoreboard, the languid laughter gurgled up from his belly and spilled out like a pool blood onto the ice rink.

Where’s it going? I have no idea, but that’s part of the fun. So if you fancy yourself a bit of a writer and would be interested in taking part in sharing your works in an anonymous fashion (copyrights retrained to the real life person though), drop me an email at oberon at slanderoustongue.com