Monthly Desktops

Been running two monitors now for about a year. Keeping things tidy.

that's what I'm currently using

To start the new year, I put up this Drew Barrymore picture. No explanation needed: Happy New Year, everybody! :yay:

I brought back an old favorite from 2007 - Gisele in a Santa hat. I did some improvement to the hat, as if anybody's going to be paying attention to that. I figured out the posting problem - the ImageShack links are already formatted, you need to just paste them in. :dunce:

'>This is what happens when I try to post an image with the forum editor. It's Kristen Wiig, by the way. I used the bbcodeXtra extension for this one.

Got far enough along migrating everything to the new computer that I felt I could spare the time to refresh my Halloween wallpaper from 2 years ago, here's the new revision: Redid the rock under the jack-o-lantern and the witch; what looked fine with the old, weak graphics card looked like crap with this one. Looks a lot better now.

For the dog days of summer, cooled down my desktop with a shot of the highest part of the Goat Rocks Wilderness, one of my favorite places. Though I haven't actually climbed up to where this photo was taken, probably from the Pacific Crest Trail. Lower down are old growth forests and lakes and stuff...more my style...view those rocks from a distance. Anyway, I got this picture off Wikipedia: There might be mountain goats in this picture, but who could tell? Just be a white spot... I didn't do much to this photo, just resized it and cropped a little off the sides. Plus, it had a couple streaks across it, which I smudged and airbrushed out as best I could…

My new 4th of July wallpaper, featuring Joanna Krupa: She makes me feel so patriotic... :dribble:

Since the weather's getting warm, time to get out of the sun; got Mila Kunis sitting in a nice, shady spot: The scrollwork I drew with Inkscape Lite on Puppy Linux (live CD). It's an SVG editor, but will export a bitmap as a PNG which you can work with in pixel-based graphics programs. I exported it as scroll.png and copied it to my USB stick - since it's formatted to FAT32 I can use it as a shared partition between Linux and Windows. Rebooted to XP, opened the file in the GIMP, cleaned it up and colored it, and pasted it into the wallpaper. All very simple, drag and drop, no command line needed. Why does anyone still think Linux is hard? I did the drawing with …

I've not posted one for a while, so here goes.

I'm ready to see spring, but spring is late this year - got it on my desktop, though. This is a shot from the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, with Mount Baker in the background.

Finally replaced my Christmas wallpaper, shortly after we got the Christmas tree taken down - a few days ago, in other words. Got a shot of the Painted Badlands in Death Valley from the National Park Service website. When I get tired of the rain, I can look at this and consider why it's not so bad. The terrain in this picture is very similar to this area, except here it's all covered with trees... You may note I'm using a higher resolution, got a better monitor. Still only 15", but it's an LCD - much sharper than the old CRT we did have. A freebie, not new but a big improvement. You might also notice some new icons, like the Firefox external profile manager bet…

For Christmas wallpaper, I painted a Santa hat on Zooey Deschanel:

Didn't take time to find a new picture for this month - just recycled a shot of Laura Prepon I used 2 years ago, changed the background. I think I did a better job with it this time. What happened to October? I'm sure I posted one last month.

Since I had the mountain last month, I decided to go to the beach this month - specifically, Whistling Bay, US Virgin Islands. This time I added on at the bottom, 150 pixels more sand to make space to park my icons. Turned down the brightness, too - I guess this is how it would look if you were wearing sunglasses.

Cool picture of Mt. St. Helens at sunset. Seems like I may have used it before...anyway, the only alteration was to add another 60px of sky at the top to make it fit my non-wide-screen. Came out pretty good, I think.

After leaving Zooey Deschanel up for 2 months (she is awful cute), I decided she needs a rest. I reworked an old favorite, Charisma Carpenter wrapped in the flag - rotated the image, superimposed it over some fireworks. Not my best work, but it'll do.

It's Zooey Deschanel: I've been sick, didn't want to spend much time or effort, so I just used a picture I'd already downloaded. You can see the boundary between the gradient I added and the background of the photo - I could have fixed that, but didn't bother; I just smudged it so it's less noticeable and called it good. I'm feeling much better now, by the way. ;)

For April I've got Avril Lavigne on my desktop - Avril is French for April, of course (I'm sure you knew that).

Never did find a picture I wanted to make March wallpaper from; bored with my Valentine desktop, I finally just used a pre-made one I had on hand that came in an email from a certain California environmentalist group: It had their logo and URL in the corner, I smudged them out on this screenshot - I thought it would be verging on a violation of forum rules about spam and political advocacy. Anyway, it's not related to spring or St. Patrick's day at all - but it is a pretty cool picture. It needs a girl in a bikini, though... :P

For this month, I made a Lisa Kudrow valentine. Could use a little more cleanup work, but it was getting late...

Found this shot of Megan Fox from How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, thought it would make great wallpaper. Couldn't sharpen it as much as I'd like, but oh, well...

For my December desktop, I put a Santa hat on Drew Barrymore:

In honor of the start of the NBA season, I've got the Portland Trailblazers' Blazer Dancers - six of them, anyway, from last season. Not the best picture quality, best I could find on the fan sites which are not copyrighted. Enlarged and sharpened it as much as I could get away with, it's not too bad, I think.

Here's my October Halloween-themed desktop: