My setup’s just a bit different. My sidebar’s on the far left side instead of right, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t have a taskbar.

I hate the taskbar. Seriously, I do. I hate it’s uniformity, I hate the way the start button looks, I hate everything about it, and I hate that it doesn’t MOVE. So I took it off. Now, other people do this as well; but mostly, people HIDE their taskbar. And then when you hover your mouse at the bottom edge of the screen, it pops back up again!

Mine’s gone.

Instead, I have a program called Object Dock. I paid for this program many years ago, along with WindowBlinds and several other Stardock products, because I’m a customizing freak – but really, the only one I find irreplaceable is Object Dock.

And therein lays the biggest problem people find, sitting down cold at my computer.

There are no icons on my desktop. I like to see the picture. Therefore, I have what’s known as a tabbed drawer docked at the top of my screen, and more shortcuts than god EVER intended to sit on a desktop will fit into it, neatly tucked away, sliding out whenever I hover over it.

This doesn’t solve the issue of the taskbar, but that’s my favorite part. I have a dock, far right of the screen, attached at the top, piling down, of all my open programs. This, in fact, is the major reason I will probably always use Object Dock. Always, always, always: I can reorder the icons so that like programs are together, or stuff I want to get to in a hurry are easier to reach. Do you understand? I can drag and drop the icons into any order I want.

But that’s not the best part!! I spent a lot of time IMing, and you know how a window blinks a color at you when you get a new IM on a normal taskbar. It blinks a bit, then stays lit, and there’s this bright color glaring at you…and that I missed after the first four times, since I got used to random programs doing that.

These icons bounce. Why? Because I told ‘em to. They can do any number of things, but it really gets my attention when an icon starts dancing around at the top of my screen, looking for my attention.

And of course, I have a small dock at the bottom of the right edge of my screen, with a start button.

Apparently, this is where I confused my friend. They sat down, stared at the screen, and couldn’t find Start. I clicked it, and eyes got somehow wider. Apparently, it’s completely unnatural, and horribly evil to have a start button in the bottom right corner. I was unaware of this fact.

What this has brought to my attention is that I clearly cannot sell this computer to buy a new one. See, I’d have to write down what every single shortcut in my tabs were, and redo them by hand and just…hope they’re right. There’s no way. So I have to figure out a way to get a new computer before I sell this one. At which point, there’s no much use in selling this one – I can hand it off to my mother, so she can take it to her classes.

OH! Speaking of classes! Head over to Claudia Suzanne’s site, and check out her early bird special for Ghostwriter Certification Training! If you want to make a living as a writer, there’s no better way!

And I promise, when she walks in with a computer, it’ll be a perfectly normal setup. But that’s likely the only normal thing about her – just a warning.

I’m sitting here in the ICU lounge at St. Joseph’s Hospital, just sitting – my father’s in ICU and I don’t want to be at home if something happens. It happened the other night, when we went home to get some sleep, and now I’m afraid to leave.

Thus, I’m sitting here. And because I’m sitting here, I’m looking for stuff to do. They have free wireless, yay! So FaceBook, Twitter, and Google Reader have filled many hours, for which I am grateful. However…I ran out of things to do several hours ago.

Now, many of you know that this is now a WordPress site. It is a WordPress site because I am lazy, and I do not have the time or energy to do constantly current web designs for my own site. Hell, I rarely take web design gigs at all anymore, because it’s SO labor intensive for SO little money. Therefore, I took the lazy way out and put up WordPress to make my life easier and make the site easier on the eyes and more easily changed.

Therein lays my new addiction. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is something like the SEVENTIETH template I’ve had up today. And I’m still playing with them. They’re RIDICULOUSLY easy to upload and activate, to play with, to change and arrange, and it’s like I find one that I like, but there might be one better! And so I keep looking. And installing. And changing. And playing. And oh my god is this addicting!

So, thank you all who sent me good wishes and my father good wishes, and thank you all for not making a huge deal that my site’s changed eighteen thousand times today, because it’s likely to keep changing this week. WHO KNOWS what it’ll look like when I’m done!

OK! Down to business.

First off, thank  you for the people who’ve commented on my blog posts here, and I am quite sorry it took me so long to approve the comments. Believe it or not, this tiny little, backwater, hole-in-the-wall blog seems to attract spammers by the boatload, and I spent a half hour today removing spam before I found the few comments that were gold. So thank you, you’re approved, and I will try VERY hard not to let ANYTHING sit as long as those comments did.

Item two! I need something more visually interesting here on the blog, so I’ll be looking through/working on/screwing around with wordpress themes today after my meeting and tomorrow. If you’ve seen a particularly fascinating one that you think I should consider using, pop me an email at trinitylast [at] gmail.com and I’ll absolutly go look, and probably appreciate it beyond words.

Last but not least! I was apparently featured on Dreaming Of Butterflies and never knew it, and it was a huge compliment as well. Thank you, VERY much Weasel. I was so shocked when I saw the referral that I think my mouth dropped open. You paid me a beautiful compliment and I am blushing from my head to my toes.

NOW! Before you take off and go about your internet lives none-the-wiser, put your headphones on and go over to Limonshire and wish Fizzylimon a belated birthday wish, and watch one of the most entertaining and (sometimes) profound vloggers on the intarwebs today. You’ll thank me later.

Go. Shoo.

So, that being said, take a look and tell me if you think this qualifies as spam, or if I should be flattered that they’re asking my opinion.

I’d rather the second, but sadly, I’m leaning towards the first.

Hi,

I came accross your page at http://trinitylast.deviantart.com/, 27,000+ pageviews is really impressive.

I just wanted to share you with FindIcons.com (http://findicons.com), an ultimate icon search engine with 287,194 free icons in 2,102 packs. It is launched last week and already impressed a lot of designers on the web.

Hope this new service is helpful and make you feel pleasant to use. We will appreciate if you spread words on your blog,http://www.trinitylast.com. We are also looking forward to your comments and suggestions to help us improve.

I apologize for any inconvenience this message may have caused. If you dont want to receive any messages from us, just click the link below and we will be noticed:

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Greetings

FindIcons.com Team

I am posting the lyrics to “I’m Just Your Mom” here…these lyrics are NOT my property, and you ABSOLUTELY should buy this song (here or here – and here’s his site). I pulled these lyrics from listening to the thing over and over because I COULD NOT stop laughing.

The Italian portion is what I hear. :p You may hear somethin’ else.

There’ve been women through the ages who have really left their mark

Cleopatra, Emilia Earheart, and of course, there’s Joan Van Arc

But my mother tops them all, and here’s the reason why;

Whenever I do one thing wrong, I can hear her cry:

Why don’t you throw me in the winter snow and leave me there to freeze

Or I’ll just die of fear or stress or maybe catch a rare disease

Or stick my head inside an oven set at twelve-hundred degrees

Hey, don’t worry, please, I’m just YOUR MOM

You never ever wash the dishes, clean your room or mow the grass

Every sunday you’re satanic when I drag you off to Mass

And boy it was heaven every day I wiped your ass!

Oh, forgive me if I’m crass, I’m just YOUR MOM!

She wants me to be happy! And to let me have my freedom

And then we’ll bake some cookies – and she tells me I can’t eat them.

She buys me all these…I…wanna say “shirts”…wth the ninty-inch lapels

And when I say “I will not wear them!” this is what she yells:

You’ll wear exactly what they tell you to, if not I’ll get a gun

and I will shoot you if I have to I don’t care if you’re my son,

and don’t think I can’t take you just because I’m five-foot-one,

I could’ve been a goddamn NUN, but I’m YOUR MOM!!

And if you EVER disobey, I’ll grab a treebranch from above,

and I’ll stick it in your eye, and I’ll give it such a shove,

then I’ll throw away the evidence and hide the bloody glove,

but I do it out of love, ’cause I’m YOUR MO!

She’s always at the hair salon where they know her by name,

and later when she comes back home, her hair is JUST THE SAME!

She tells me dad is great in bed…in fact, he’s such a stallion.

She always shares too much. She can’t help it…she’s ITALIAN!

(aproximated)

Es patchimos patchim vastaprim qualita, schootcha menda galbacosa

mala omacastamocha pota mackapita pota masapia eye yi yi kikikiki

I don’t know what the hell she’s saying, she’s MY MOM!

I do the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping and the banking!

After all I’ve done for you I think it’s me you should be thanking!

Instead you’ve taken magazines to bed and started wanking!

I should give you such a spanking, I’m YOUR MOM!

Why don’t you just set me on fire and then shove me off a pier!

Every time I tell you something it goes out the other ear!

I can’t believe I carried you inside my body for a year!

Just forget I’m even here! I’m just YOUR MOM!!

There’ve been women through the ages who have really left their mark
Cleopatra, Emilia Earheart, and of course, there’s Joan Van Arc
But my mother tops them all, and here’s the reason why;
Whenever I do one thing wrong, I can hear her cry:

Why don’t you throw me in the winter snow and leave me there to freeze
Or I’ll just die of fear or stress or maybe catch a rare disease
Or stick my head inside an oven set at twelve-hundred degrees
Hey, don’t worry, please, I’m just YOUR MOM

You never ever wash the dishes, clean your room or mow the grass
Every sunday you’re satanic when I drag you off to Mass
And boy it was heaven every day I wiped your ass!
Oh, forgive me if I’m crass, I’m just YOUR MOM!

She wants me to be happy! And to let me have my freedom
And then we’ll bake some cookies – and she tells me I can’t eat them.
She buys me all these…I…wanna say “shirts”…wth the ninty-inch lapels
And when I say “I will not wear them!” this is what she yells:

You’ll wear exactly what they tell you to, if not I’ll get a gun
and I will shoot you if I have to I don’t care if you’re my son,
and don’t think I can’t take you just because I’m five-foot-one,
I could’ve been a goddamn NUN, but I’m YOUR MOM!!

And if you EVER disobey, I’ll grab a treebranch from above,
and I’ll stick it in your eye, and I’ll give it such a shove,
then I will throw away the evidence and hide the bloody glove,
but I do it out of love, ’cause I’m YOUR MOM!

She’s always at the hair salon where they know her by name,
and later when she comes back home, her hair is JUST THE SAME!
She tells me dad is great in bed…in fact, he’s such a stallion.
She always shares too much. She can’t help it…she’s ITALIAN!

(aproximated)
Es patchimos patchim vastaprim qualita, schootcha menda galbacosa
mala omacastamocha pota mackapita pota masapia eye yi yi kikikiki

I don’t know what the hell she’s saying, she’s MY MOM!

I do the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping and the banking!
After all I’ve done for you I think it’s me you should be thanking!
Instead you’ve taken magazines to bed and started wanking!
I should give you such a spanking, I’m YOUR MOM!

Why don’t you just set me on fire and then shove me off a pier!
Every time I tell you something it goes out the other ear!
I can’t believe I carried you inside my body for a year!
Just forget I’m even here! I’m just YOUR MOM!!

Bill Larkin, you’re my hero

First off, I would like to state that I could not find contact information on the new design and had to resort to the older design to figure out where to send this email.

The new design has removed key components of the site’s functionality – I’m aware that you may be ignoring your facebook page, and therefore will likely ignore this email as well, but I felt I must say something.

I can no longer view my friend’s pages or the music they have saved

I can no longer comment on anyone’s page, be they artists or other listeners

I no longer have comments on my page, either on my listener or artist account

I can no longer access my listener group

I can no longer simply save a song. On that same note, there are some listeners with 200+ songs, and if they want to keep them, they have to spend hours tagging if they want to keep listening to the music.

I can no longer listen to someone else’s radio, or even my own.

I can no longer search for new music

I can no longer see a list of music I have not already tagged and saved – no lists of music in genres, on Just For You, Hottest or the like.

I can no longer see who is subscribed to me, subscribe to someone else, or indeed, listen to music I’ve subscribed to

The site has lost almost all functionality with this design. If there were drop-down menus, if there was still a comments section, if a thousand things you took away were still available in some form, the design would be perfectly fine. But you have removed all ability to use the site other than to simply stream music. If I wanted that, I’d use any number of other sites. Your site was unique and perfect. If it’s not broken, you don’t fix it. You have rendered the site unusable, and are ignoring your user-base’s complaints.

As someone commented on your Facebook page, you have emulated a classic mistake once made by the Coca Cola company – the redesign is New Coke. We do not like it.

Offer the new design as an optional ‘fullscreen’, use it as an alternative interface somehow, that’s perfectly fine. But you are going to lose 5,000+ listeners this way, and you will not get them back.

Signed,

A previously avid supporter and active promoter of your website, Lona Nicholle

First off, I would like to state that I could not find contact information on the new design and had to resort to the older design to figure out where to send this email.

The new design has removed key components of the site’s functionality – I’m aware that you may be ignoring your facebook page, and therefore will likely ignore this email as well, but I felt I must say something.

I can no longer view my friend’s pages or the music they have saved

I can no longer comment on anyone’s page, be they artists or other listeners

I no longer have comments on my page, either on my listener or artist account

I can no longer access my listener group

I can no longer simply save a song. On that same note, there are some listeners with 200+ songs, and if they want to keep them, they have to spend hours tagging if they want to keep listening to the music.

I can no longer listen to someone else’s radio, or even my own.

I can no longer search for new music

I can no longer see a list of music I have not already tagged and saved – no lists of music in genres, on Just For You, Hottest or the like.

I can no longer see who is subscribed to me, subscribe to someone else, or indeed, listen to music I’ve subscribed to

The site has lost almost all functionality with this design. If there were drop-down menus, if there was still a comments section, if a thousand things you took away were still available in some form, the design would be perfectly fine. But you have removed all ability to use the site other than to simply stream music. If I wanted that, I’d use any number of other sites. Your site was unique and perfect. If it’s not broken, you don’t fix it. You have rendered the site unusable, and are ignoring your user-base’s complaints.

As someone commented on your Facebook page, you have emulated a classic mistake once made by the Coca Cola company – the redesign is New Coke. We do not like it.

Offer the new design as an optional ‘fullscreen’, use it as an alternative interface somehow, that’s perfectly fine. But you are going to lose 5,000+ listeners this way, and you will not get them back.

Signed,

A previously avid supporter and active promoter of your website, Lona Nicholle

Rather than post this to a thousand in-boxes that are not interested in reading an infinitely forwarded email, I am posting this here for all to see, and linking. Because yes, it’s important – but no, I don’t believe in chain letters in ANY of their forms.

Advice from an Israeli Agent

Juval Aviv was the Israeli Agent upon whom the movie ‘Munich’ was based. He was Golda Meir’s bodyguard, and she appointed him to track down and bring to justice the Palestinian terrorists who took the Israeli athletes hostage and killed them during the Munich Olympic Games.

In a lecture in New York City he shared information that EVERY American needs to know — but that our government has not yet shared with us.

He predicted the London subway bombing on the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News stating publicly that it would happen within a week. At the time, O’Reilly laughed, and mocked him saying that in a week he wanted him back on the show. Unfortunately, within a week the terrorist attack had occurred.

Juval Aviv gave intelligence (via what he had gathered in Israel and the Middle East) to the Bush Administration about 9/11, a month before it occurred. His report specifically said they would use planes as bombs and target high profile buildings and monuments. Congress has since hired him as a security consultant.

Now for his future predictions. He predicts the next terrorist attack on the U.S. will occur within the next few months.

Forget hijacking airplanes, because he says terrorists will NEVER try and hijack a plane again as they know the people onboard will never go down quietly again. Aviv believes our airport security is a joke — that we have been reactionary rather than proactive in developing strategies that are truly effective.

For example:

1) Our airport technology is outdated.. We look for metal, and the new explosives are made of plastic.

2) He talked about how some idiot tried to light his shoe on fire. Because of that, now everyone has to take off their shoes. A group of idiots tried to bring aboard liquid explosives. Now we can’t bring liquids on board. He says he’s waiting for some suicidal maniac to pour liquid explosive on his underwear; at which point, security will have us all traveling naked!

Every strategy we have is reactionary.

3) We only focus on security when people are heading to the gates.

Aviv says that if a terrorist attack targets airports in the future, they will target busy times on the front end of the airport when/where people are checking in. It would be easy for someone to take two suitcases of explosives, walk up to a busy check-in line, ask a person next to them to watch their bags for a minute while they run to the restroom or get a drink, and then detonate the bags BEFORE security even gets involved. In Israel, security checks bags BEFORE people can even ENTER the airport.

Aviv says the next terrorist attack here in America is imminent and will involve suicide bombers and non-suicide bombers in places where large groups of people congregate. (I.e., Disneyland, Las Vegas casinos, big cities (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) and that it will also include shopping malls, subways in rush hour, train stations, etc., as well as, rural America this time. The interlands (Wyoming, Montana, etc.).

The attack will be characterized by simultaneous detonations around the country (terrorists like big impact), involving at least 5-8 cities, including rural areas.

Aviv says terrorists won’t need to use suicide bombers in many of the larger cities, because at places like the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, they can simply valet park a car loaded with explosives and walk away.

Aviv says all of the above is well known in intelligence circles, but that our U. S. Government does not want to ‘alarm American citizens’ with the facts. The world is quickly going to become ‘a different place’, and issues like ‘global warming’ and political correctness will become totally irrelevant.

On an encouraging note, he says that Americans don’t have to be concerned about being nuked. Aviv says the terrorists who want to destroy America will not use sophisticated weapons. They like to use suicide as a front-line approach. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s effective; and they have an infinite abundance of young militants more than willing to ‘meet their destiny’.

He also says the next level of terrorists, over which America  should be most concerned, will not be coming from abroad.  But will be, instead, ‘homegrown’, having attended and been educated in our own schools and universities right here in the U.S. He says to look for ’students’ who frequently travel back and forth to the  Middle East. These young terrorists will be most dangerous because they will know our language and will fully understand the habits of Americans; but that we Americans won’t know/understand a thing about them.

Aviv says that, as a people, Americans are unaware and uneducated about the terrorist threats we will inevitably face.  America still has only a handful of Arabic and Farsi speaking people in our intelligence networks, and Aviv says it is critical that we change that fact SOON.

So, what can America do to protect itself? From an intelligence perspective, Aviv says the U.S. needs to stop relying on satellites and technology for intelligence. We need to, instead, follow Israel’s, Ireland’s and England’s hands-on examples of human intelligence, both from an infiltration perspective as well as to pay attention to, and trust ‘aware’ citizens to help. We need to engage and educate ourselves as citizens; however, our U. S. government continues to treat us, its citizens, ‘like babies’. Our government thinks we ‘can’t handle the truth’ and are concerned that we’ll panic if we understand the realities of terrorism. Aviv says this is a deadly mistake.

Aviv recently created/executed a security test for our Congress, by placing an empty briefcase in five well-traveled spots in five major cities. The results? Not one person called 911 or sought a policeman to check it out. In fact, in Chicago, someone tried to steal the briefcase!

In comparison, Aviv says that citizens of Israel are so well ‘trained’ that an unattended bag or package would be reported in seconds by citizen(s) who know to publicly shout, ‘Unattended Bag!’ The area would be quickly & calmly cleared by the citizens themselves.

Unfortunately, America  hasn’t been yet ‘hurt enough’ by terrorism for their government to fully understand the need to educate its citizens or for the government to understand that it’s their citizens who are, inevitably, the best first-line of defense against terrorism.

Aviv also was concerned about the high number of children here in America who were in preschool and kindergarten after 9/11, who were ‘lost’ without parents being able to pick them up, and about our schools that had no plan in place to best care for the students until parents could get there. (In New York City, this was days, in some cases!)

He stresses the importance of having a plan, that’s agreed upon within your family, of how to respond in the event of a terrorist emergency. He urges parents to contact their children’s schools and demand that the schools too, develop plans of actions, just as they do in Israel.

Does your family know what to do if you can’t contact one another by phone? Where would you gather in an emergency? He says we should all have a plan that is easy enough for even our youngest children to remember and follow.

Aviv says that the U. S. government has in force a plan, that in the event of another terrorist attack, EVERYONE’s ability to use cell phones, blackberries, etc., will immediately be cut-off, as this is the preferred communication source used by terrorists and is often the way that their bombs are detonated.

How will you communicate with your loved ones in the event you cannot speak to each other? You need to have a plan.

If you understand, and believe what you have just read, then you must feel compelled to send this to every concerned parent, guardian, grandparents, uncles, aunts, whomever. Don’t stop there. In addition to sharing this via e-mail, contact and discuss this information with whomever it makes sense to. Make contingency plans with those you care about. Better that you have plans in place, and never have to use them, then to have no plans in place, and find you needed them.

If you choose not to share this, or not to have a plan in place, and nothing ever occurs — good for you! However, in the event  something does happen, and even moreso, if it directly affects your loved ones, then this e-mail will haunt you forever.

Telling yourself after the fact, “I should have sent this to so and so, but deleted it as so much trash from old Bill Jones, plus, I just didn’t believe it”, will not change anything. You were alerted, had the chance to do something, and instead of erring on the side of caution, you chose to disregard, if nothing else, a sensible, valuable warning.

So you know, 50,000 words works out to roughly 1667 words a day for 30 days. That’s around three to four pages. You can do this. ANYONE CAN DO THIS!

If you don’t have an outline, don’t worry. Just start writing. Don’t worry about plot, don’t worry about character histories, just write. You can edit, change anything you want, and impose plot later. Get the story DOWN. Get the sequence of events WRITTEN. Don’t worry about syntax, tense, grammar or punctuation. Don’t worry about how corny or not corny it may sound.

Just write.

Now, no, chances are, no bestselling books will be written during this month. Not unless you’re already published and established and you have some SERIOUS experience writing under deep pressure.

Which should take the pressure OFF. Don’t write the ‘next great American novel’. There isn’t one anyway. Write a novel. Write a story. Write something insane, and amazing, and ridiculous. Write something that will make someone’s eyes cross, write thousands of twists into it, write it so fast and hard that it makes your blood pound as you type.

You are not required to keep it g rated. *wink*

And just to give you perspective? This post is roughly 290 words long. That’s a fifth of a daily count already. It took me maybe ten minutes to write.

You can do this, guys. Anyone can. It doesn’t have to be great. Just do it. You’ll be thrilled with what you’ve got when it’s over. As bad as it may be? To write a 50,000 word novel in one month…no one will care.

Because they’ll all be jealous of what you’ve done.

So, in honor of this wonderful day, I have here some awesome things to make your Halloween teh kick ass!!

Edible Spider:

http://edible.com/shop/insectivore/oven%20-%20baked%20tarantula%20/

Zombie Food:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetpeacupcakes/sets/72157621917380263/

Melting Head Cake:

http://www.doitmyself.org/2006/08/melting-head-cake.html

Bloody Brain Drink:

Bloody brain

Boys and girls, remember your goal: 50,000 words in one month.

Don’t try to edit, don’t make it flow. Just write. One the material’s on the page, you can do whatever you want with it. This month isn’t about perfection – it’s about getting your ideas down on paper. It’s about getting your thoughts moving, your juices flowing, your muse a-hoppin’…anything else you can think of. It’s about WRITING.

Don’t worry if it sucks, if the plot’s bad, if it has no plot. All of that can be fixed later. No one cares right now if the characters all have the same names, if they all sound the same, if they all went to the same school.

Get your ideas DOWN. Get it hashed out. Turn your thoughts into those little black marks. Once the black marks are on the white page, they can be moved, changed, edited, or deleted. You can do anything you want with them. But they have to BE there for you to play with them.

So write! And we’ll see you on the other side.