Skittles caught a Hawk!

Ok it’s probably just a woodpecker, but still, this thing was huge! It’s hard to tell from the picture, but for a bit of perspective, that beak is probably 3+ inches long. Melissa hid in the bedroom while I tried to catch him with a towel. He made it very clear he didn’t want anything to do with me or my towel. He circled my living room a couple times, slammed into a mirror and then flew out onto our patio. Looks like he chipped his beak on my mirror. Poor guy.

After a bit of googling Mel figured out that it was a Northern flicker Woodpecker.

20 cent Apple logo mod

So I decided to hack apart my laptop and give it a bit of color this weekend. I had seen people with custom apple logos on their laptops around the net for a while now. I eventually tracked them back to icolours.ca. They sell quite a few custom filters on their site for only five bucks a pop. That’s not a bad deal, but I figured I could pull off the same look on my own for a fraction of the price.

I had some green and red velum left over from my paper lantern project, so I figured I’d go with the red macintosh look. If you want to go this route Hobby Lobby sells velum for cheap. Usually about 10 - 25 cents a sheet depending on the color and pattern.

Logo with back lighting on

The whole process was pretty easy for my Macbook Pro. All I had to do was remove two small screws and pop off the back of the LCD screen. Once that was done I just taped the cut velum over the clear plastic apple logo and replaced the white filter. I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to try it yourself you can check out these sweet video instructions. Happy logo modding!

Logo with the back lighting turned off

Being sick is boooooring

So, yea, being sick is really boring. There is only so much TV a guy can watch before getting all loopy headed and depressed, right? Right. So I’ve been trying to come up with little projects to keep entertained while not over exerting myself…. you know what that means right? Yea, lots of nerding out on the computer…

Songbird
I decided a little while ago that I’ve had enough with Itunes. I never really liked the interface, and I especially didn’t like that it started deleting my music without telling me. So I did a bit of research and happily discovered Songbird.

Also I discovered I really like Dr. Steel

Songbird is a full featured completely free open source music management application developed by Mozilla. Perfect! I had actually discovered songbird a couple weeks ago, but it wasn’t until my downtime that I had a chance to move my music library over and get it all configured. I’m still getting used to it, but my first impressions are all great. Just like firefox it supports a multitude of awesome plugins, and if you want to change the appearance of the app there are plenty of “feathers” for it too. Feathers, cute huh?

New Dock
I had known it was possible to modify the dock under Leopard for a while, I just hadn’t had the time or motivation to do it. Well… this week I’ve had nothing but time so I figure I should get to it.

Truedock + Power Indicators + Dark Separator

The process was actually much easier than I thought it was going to be. All you need to do is replace the default “scurve”png files in your dock resources directory. You can find all the required info here as well as quite a few pre-made doc images. I ended up mixing and matching to create something that worked for me.

AdBlock Plus + Add-Art
I also installed some new firefox addons… AddBlock plus in conjunction with Add-Art has made for more pleasant web browsing. Addblock plus blocks ads and Add-art replaces them with art. My one complaint has been that so far the “art” is almost more obnoxious than the ads are. I mean, wtf is this?

“this was the worst I’d ever cut up before. I cut open my old appendix wound, stuck pins on the inside of the wound and swallowed a broken light bulb.”

Seriously? I mean, in context I’m sure this is a powerful story… but I really don’t want to see it while checking my Hotmail.

Add-Art cycles the art every 2 weeks, so I’m willing to wait it out and hope the next round of art is more palatable.

Vote for my zombie!

Here is my entry for the current Jinx.com photo tweakfest. You can check out and vote for your favorites here. (vote for me!)

The first place prizes are: 10,000 J!NX Gold (100 bucks), an exercise DVD, a ****ed-up duck, and a new family.

Wish me luck!

Mother Bear Update!

Well I figured Mel would probably finish her bear before me…. but two? She finished two bears in the time it’s taken me to finish half of mine. In my defense however, she is using a gigantic yarn, and as a result she only has to use half the stitches I do. Anyway, we’re having a good time making them. I know it’s not a race, but even so, I’m going to try and finish mine tonight…

Skittles the photographer

This year Skittles got his very own camera for Christmas. It attaches to his collar and sees everything he does.

Skittles has been wearing his camera and taking pictures for a couple weeks now so I figured I would start showing off all of his hard work. Skittles has his own photoset on my flickr page that I will continue to update as he takes more and more great pictures. Check it out here.

Projects Update! Layered Transparent Light Installation complete!

I’m just about finished with the Layered Transparent Light Installation! You can read all about the final steps here.

St. Francis Cube

Not exactly sure what they’re doing, but in the meantime the giant plastic cube in the middle of historic downtown Santa Fe makes for a fun juxtaposition.

Mother Bear

So a couple weeks ago I stumbled onto the website of a really wonderful non-profit called Mother Bear. Their goal as stated on their homepage:

“…is dedicated to providing comfort and hope to children affected by HIV/AIDS in emerging nations, by giving them a gift of love in the form of a hand-knit or crocheted bear.”

“The simple gift of a hand-knit bear with a tag signed by the knitter has touched children with the message that they are unconditionally loved.”

Since Mel is an expert knitter and I’m just learning how to crochet I figured this would be a wonderful project for us to do together. Our patterns just arrived in the mail today. Check back for updates!

Happy Halloween!

Skittles was a lobster this year. So intimidating!