Let's start in the relatively sheltered field of making everyday things impossible.
My CD drive seems to do silly things; if it's copying significant amounts of data or burning a CD, it seems to upset the whole machine and make it reset itself. I had a look at it and checked that it was all plugged in properly; I've yet to see if this has fixed anything.
That's not the important bit. This object here:
is what I call the clamp-lamp. It's light, clips onto things, and makes things brighter. Normally it shines on my desk (mostly on my keyboard) without reflecting off the monitor. This is a Good Thing.
So, my computer tower is on a shelf below my desktop. This meant moving the lamp - the first time, it was a fairly easy process; the lamp attached easily, and was promptly turned so I could see what I was doing.
Returning it to the monitor shelf was, in short, a trial. It was unclamped, then I spent three or four minutes twisting the flexible stick-thingy through various positions until it finally returned to the shape you see above. The problem was (of course!) solved by bending it exactly the way that it wasn't supposed to go, in order to get it to where it was meant to be.
From here, it was a straightforward process to twist the lamp back around to face the desk rather than the wall and the ceiling. Sound too easy to be true? It was! The plastic bit at the top of the stick thingy that covers the bit where it attaches to the lamp and the wires poke through seemed to have just been backwards, but in reality must've found a way to be inside-out, upside-down and randomly twisted through sixteen or seventeen dimensions. Another minute of fiddly poking and prodding, and it finally went back into place.
Except the clamp was now backwards, and had to be turned around the right way. And - it seems to be a theme - it wouldn't turn. So the stick-thingy had to be straightened out again so that its plastic cover could turn properly with the clamp. Eventually, it ended up the right shape again.
There's been another small tweak on my layout, which you can see in almost everything that isn't IE. It now has "»" characters on the ends of list items with popup submenus. This, however, isn't the tricky bit. When you hover them, the » vanishes; hopefully, this should make it clear that there's submenus.
Moving along, I'm sure everyone's seen El Busho's note to Ms Rice at the UN summit. I'd originally considered a simple photomanip to change the text, but there's really no way to make that photo mock George more. So, instead, I present my icon-sized vision of what would happen if it were to be slipped into his speech notes.
I had wanted to animate it, alternating between George and the "I gotta pee" speech from Forrest Gump. Alas, this wasn't to be - but I think the expression works excellently there.
And that's about it for the moment.
My CD drive seems to do silly things; if it's copying significant amounts of data or burning a CD, it seems to upset the whole machine and make it reset itself. I had a look at it and checked that it was all plugged in properly; I've yet to see if this has fixed anything.
That's not the important bit. This object here:
is what I call the clamp-lamp. It's light, clips onto things, and makes things brighter. Normally it shines on my desk (mostly on my keyboard) without reflecting off the monitor. This is a Good Thing.
So, my computer tower is on a shelf below my desktop. This meant moving the lamp - the first time, it was a fairly easy process; the lamp attached easily, and was promptly turned so I could see what I was doing.
Returning it to the monitor shelf was, in short, a trial. It was unclamped, then I spent three or four minutes twisting the flexible stick-thingy through various positions until it finally returned to the shape you see above. The problem was (of course!) solved by bending it exactly the way that it wasn't supposed to go, in order to get it to where it was meant to be.
From here, it was a straightforward process to twist the lamp back around to face the desk rather than the wall and the ceiling. Sound too easy to be true? It was! The plastic bit at the top of the stick thingy that covers the bit where it attaches to the lamp and the wires poke through seemed to have just been backwards, but in reality must've found a way to be inside-out, upside-down and randomly twisted through sixteen or seventeen dimensions. Another minute of fiddly poking and prodding, and it finally went back into place.
Except the clamp was now backwards, and had to be turned around the right way. And - it seems to be a theme - it wouldn't turn. So the stick-thingy had to be straightened out again so that its plastic cover could turn properly with the clamp. Eventually, it ended up the right shape again.
There's been another small tweak on my layout, which you can see in almost everything that isn't IE. It now has "»" characters on the ends of list items with popup submenus. This, however, isn't the tricky bit. When you hover them, the » vanishes; hopefully, this should make it clear that there's submenus.
Moving along, I'm sure everyone's seen El Busho's note to Ms Rice at the UN summit. I'd originally considered a simple photomanip to change the text, but there's really no way to make that photo mock George more. So, instead, I present my icon-sized vision of what would happen if it were to be slipped into his speech notes.
I had wanted to animate it, alternating between George and the "I gotta pee" speech from Forrest Gump. Alas, this wasn't to be - but I think the expression works excellently there.
And that's about it for the moment.
