Naming and blaming PCs
After going through the much longer than I thought, even after accounting for how evil Windows installs can be, PC reinstallation for the PC in the library, the best and I decided (after the sixth or so reboot) that we'd name the machine Pete, after the irregular flamingo in the boot For Pete's Sake! (written by Ellen Stoll Walsh, ISBN 0-439-08327-3.) After renaming it, we decided that it would only be proper to make up an appropriate background image:
I [heart] photoshop. After scanning the picture in, I realized that I had not gotten around to reinstalling the Gimp, so I didn't have anything to process it with on that machine. So I copied it over to my workstation, and fired up photoshop to do the deed. Photoshop has a magic wand tool, which selects along edges, so the process of cutting out the image from the background became the horrible difficult [open]->[magic wand x2] -> [save as]. It took me longer to go back in with Irfanview and hand-select a transparent color than it did for me to trim the picture (I'm sure I could have done this last step with photoshop, but I don't know how to do that yet, and it would take me longer to look through the manual than it takes to fire up irfanview, which gives you some idea of just how difficult this task was.)