This blog would have come sooner, but I was busy. I was busy with my new case of WinPsoriasis.

I've been clawing and scratching layers of skin off of my windows GUI only to replace it with other layers, and....I can't seem to stop. Right now I am sporting "Colony" created by Mike Bryant; a lovely skin with an old west flair, but a techno edge. It reminds me very much of Stephen King's series "The Dark Tower" in flavor. Like Clint Eastwood meets the Terminator. But I digress...

Yesterday it was "Indemnity" and tomorrow? Who knows. I bet it won't be Colony though, no slight to Mr. Bryant at all. Just because I know me. I will first enter a kind of quest where I will expect to find the "perfect" skin, and even if such a thing exists and can be determined, I'll pass it right by because that might not be it. It might REALLY be the next one and I just THINK this one is it.

I'll do that for a while, and then I'll take a fancy to creating my own.

I'll search the net for tools - shareware ones, or freeware if I'm lucky, and tutorials. And I'll add little bits of trivial knowledge to my already cluttered brain in the way of words like "glyph transparency"

I'll become fairly versatile with the new knowledge, and will be able to "speak" in it with some confidence, and I will have at this point pulled apart the works of others several times and will have examined and marvelled at each little cell and folicle of their Graphic User Interdermises.

I'll ponder for hours, because with all those skins, I want mine to be a really unique one! One that has never been thought of before! (See my blog on The Great Feces Machine).

Yes. Yes! YES BY GOD I'LL MAKE A GREAT SKIN!!!!

Then I'll remember I can't draw a straight line with Photoshop's line tool, and that even though I'm a fairly creative musician, when it comes to the visual arts, coloring outside the lines in a coloring book isn't some sort of philosophical statement about nonconformity... it's just the best I can do.

So I'll return to perusing the wonderful skins already created by some of the world's most famous skin guys...
the Rock Stars of Skinning...
LINNARD SKINN...

Nah, I can't say it.

And finally, I'll settle on one for a while.

Probably Colony.

Ockham's Razor
Keeping it simple since 1962