Ch- ch- ch- changes... (to the blog)

...Turn to face the strange!

Okay, well, not that strange.  I just figured that, with a few other recent changes in my life (that may or may not appear here), it was high time to update the computerized version of myself.

I started with my computer's desktop.  I've never been able to leave well enough alone, including the look of my computer.  I've tried Samurize, putting html on the desktop, dual monitors, aftermarket Windows themes, and the like, but now that I'm down to one monitor for a while and pretty happy with the desktop slideshow feature and most of the Aero chrome of Windows 7, I decided to give Rainmeter a go.  Here's the result (for now / click to make it bigger):

It's the Elementary 1.2 skin, just rearranged a little.  The guy who made it did a great job, but I had to shift stuff around to get the clock and weather where I wanted them and add a "D" drive to the system monitor.  The little buttons at the top-right are from somewhere else and control Winamp.  Something is amiss with my Winamp install, or something, causing the song title not to show up, so I just left Winamp in "Windowshade Mode."  This lets me control the volume, too, which is nice.  I found the desktop image at Simple Desktops.

Now I'm going to move on to my blog / website.  As of this writing, if you go to www.mnthomp.com, you get a  really stupid looking page I through together with Google Pages.  It does what it needs to, I suppose, but it's pretty lame.  My plan is to move my "steaming pile" blog to mnthomp.com, since even though the blog is still kinda lame, it's to a lesser degree.  We'll see how it goes.  (I'm using this mashable article as my guide.)

Also, I went hiking yesterday, which was fun.  Would have been better if I were slightly better prepared for the snow and ice, but still good for the first one of the season.