Screensaver Things

 

I have had some cool screensavers. Everyone was fascinated by my Mac laptop's screensaver Soundstream, for example - a toy that made sparkly waves in response to input from the mac's microphone input. For a while I was partial to Electric Sheep - a screensaver that generated fractals through an online, Folding-at-Home style distributed processing algorithm, and whooshed them together in super-cool looking feats of video morphing.

But the coolest screensaver ever is definitely Picasa's "My Starred Photos" screensaver. The way my photo export workflow goes - download to Picasa, star the ones worthy of uploading (i.e. not blurred and noisy and ugly), upload to Flickr - results in a rich history of starred photos on my copy of Picasa. Whenever I glance a photo out of the corner of my eye, usually while doing something else, I stumble into some corner of nostalgia lane. This runs somewhere between Grant and State streets in West Lafayette, Indiana, and makes occasional stop-by's in Cabo San Lucas, the Michiana Dunes (where the picture above was taken), and various fandom conventions. Now, out in the post-college world, it is a good reminder of all the wonderful things and wonderful people I encountered at Purdue. When I look back at Purdue, I won't just think of the tough-as-nails exams, week-long coding death marches, and make-or-fail-out-of-college project deadlines. I remember the great Battle of Outer Muncie (fought with Nerf weapons), Ohayocon 2006, four straight (well, gayly aligned) years of MFM, sledding down Slater Hill, long nights of Smash-related fun, worshipping the Tesla statue at Niagara Falls, and many other incredibly fun slices of memory. It reminds me why I'm a photographer.

Thanks, everyone - and thanks, Purdue.

I'm gonna go star some more photos.