Your consciousness affects the behavior of subatomic particles
- or -
Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once

Wish I could remember what my thought process was when scribbled that… hmm…

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

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

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.

When my vitals settled down a little bit they took blood samples, mucus samples, and chest x-rays to figure out what was making me so sick. Strangely enough, everything came back negative. I didn’t show pneumonia in my x-rays, and I tested negative for both the cold and flu virus, and they ruled out bronchitis as well. My doc was pretty stumped. He said he figured it would have to be a nasty bacterial infection to be able to push my temperature that high. Since my co-workers got sick as well, I’m blaming it on some crazy Indian bacteria that hitched a ride, but who knows.

After four hours hooked up to an IV dripping saline into my arm, 800mg of Motrin, two Tylenol, and four antibiotics I was able to go back home. Now I’m taking an additional five day course of antibiotics to kill whatever this thing is. Here’s to hoping this goes away without much more of a fight!

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!

Still frames can be found here. It’s a little bit creepy being able to see inside my own head…

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 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.