Windows 7 has changing desktop backgrounds – so do Ubuntu and OSX and even, ugh, Vista I bet – so I’m thinking, why not have a conversation play out through them?

I recently made a background which is just “Wyatt, go back to work. also, 42/13.37 ~= PI” – and just now it’s occurring to me that I could make more. A response such as “I am working. We are home. Shut up.” could shift in, in the same style – images, snippets of text, and various still media could be interwoven at random to create some kind of interesting ongoing tale of woe, joy, and humour in the background of my day.

I’ll have to do that sometime when I don’t have a midterm in 6 hours, a philosophy paper nearly 2 weeks overdue, another philosophy paper to write by 5pm tomorrow, a good blog post to do by midnight, another midterm at 9:00 AM the following morning (on the same topic as that overdue philosophy paper), grading software to write, and a major programming competition to prepare for. And a business idea to bring to fruition, which is taking a backseat to things it really should not have to.

tangent: that blog post will probably be on the founding of the Free Software Foundation and the dawn of software copyright; I remember reading stuff about that a few years ago and it was pretty cool. Back in the day (I think, 1976 was when it changed. 197x for sure), UNIX wasn’t shipped as binaries, it came as source. You bought the source and compiled it. If you wanted to make changes, see how it was written, copy it and change it, that was cool. Then machines became a bit more standardised and it made sense to ship binaries. Software as a business became feasible. Stallman and his MIT chums cried, and William H. Gates III did too – but in joy.

Okay so probably more like Stallman and them stroked their computer-science beards and Gates nodded approvingly and wrote a letter.