I’ve created a desktop for my computer for Valentine’s Day 2005. The year before last I made the 2003 version available here, so this is considered my third annual Valentine’s Day desktop available for download.

Here is this years:

• Click here to download the 2005 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 1280x1024px.
• Click here to download the 2005 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 1024x768px.
• Click here to download the 2005 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 800x600px.

Please leave a note under this post to let me know if you downloaded one of the above versions of this desktop. Email addresses are not displayed on this site when you post a comment.

Found through: Tulip Girl and Karen: Life with 4 Kids and a Dog and Donna: Quiet Life.

I have a digital camera, but my “desk” setup is chaos right now. I have my geriatric laptop stuck on the same shelf of our older entertainment armoire as my two of my sound system components. It’s a cramped spot. Done since the cold of Winter chased me from the kitchen as I’d been setup on a table, to the dining area where I am now, which is next to the fireplace. The cold relented, but I’ve stayed.

I don’t have a real desk. I have a smaller kitchen table that I had been using. I had been using a larger one than that, but DH took THAT table for HIS desk when he started working out of the house, and so I was stuck with the smaller one, and it doesn’t house my stuff well. It gets junked up FAST so it was a relief to move to the dining rooms cramped spot.

In any case, it’s howI work. I move my stuff around all the time, if I can. Keeps me happier to re-orient, not really re-organizing

If my laptop was NOT geriactric I would be anywhere with IT. But in July, a year and a half go, dear children 2 and 3 tried to kill it with a Coke. They did well killing the keyboard and more, so I’m now using it with a “wireless keyboard and mouse” and it’s opened, and on lifesupport all the time therefore. It works alright, just is a glorified laptop, really a slim desktop now.

So there is NO picture of the spot I have been sitting at the last several days … too small and crunched in there to get a nice picture of my messyness.

For those without a digital camera, you can do this too. Just put on your monitor what you want to be shown, and press the “PrtScn” button [Print Screen].

This puts the image on the copy clipboard. Open an imaging program, such as Photoshop Elements, or whatever it is you have on your computer, and do what you need to do to paste the image.

For instance, in Photoshop Elements, or Photoshop: Open the program, then click the “New” button for a new image, or press CTRL+N on your keyboard for the same thing, or else go to “FILE, New …”

The new image layer options will be there, they should have the correct size of your desktop resolution, click OK. Then go to “Edit, Paste”. The image should paste into the empty image layer which you started.

To save for the web, change the resolution to 72ppi, and save it to a smaller size to display on your webpage.

I use the “Save for web …” feature in Photoshop Elements for it’s ease.

Just click that and choose the settings. Medium quality is alright for a photo, and I use 600px wide. Make sure to save your file as a JPG or JPGE.

Name your file, save it, and then upload to your site the normal way you upload files and photos.

If you don’t have an “easy to web” setup, just play with your image program until you can get the file small enough for your web page.

The photo was taken sometime in late Summer 2003, I am guessing (this past year our photo developing has been very backlogged).

I extended the blue sky portion a bit, to get the full width of the cloud scene on my 1280×1024 monitor. (digital photo editing is great stuff!)

Download this desktop:

• Click here to download the Clouds – Georgia 2003 Desktop for 1280x1024px.
• Click here to download the Clouds – Georgia 2003 Desktop for 1024x768px.
• Click here to download the Clouds – Georgia 2003 Desktop for 800x600px.

Please leave a note under this post to let me know if you downloaded one of the above versions of this desktop. Email addresses are not displayed on this site when you post a comment.

I then “saved for web” and re-sized it in that utility as a bigger file, the pixel width of my screen resolution: 1280px.

The “save for web” utility allows for a nice graphic, even when blowing it up. It’s really nifty. The original file I made is 584px wide. The picture isn’t the full height of my monitor, just 769px and my monitor is 1024px. So I chose the graphic in my desktop properties, chose “black” as the background color, and “center” for the graphic. Voila, lovely desktop. I could add black to the actual picture file to make it larger–my full desktop size, but why? It works fine to add the black via desktop properties, saving byte size.

• Click here for a copy of it for yourself, if you like. If you want it narrower in width, just shrink it by choosing “stretch” in your desktop properties.

capture of 1280×1024 16.1-inch LCD monitor (Mobility Radeon 7500C)

Here is this years:

• Click here to download the 2004 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 1280x1024px.
• Click here to download the 2004 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 1024x768px.
• Click here to download the 2004 Valentine’s Day Desktop for 800x600px.

Please leave a note under this post to let me know if you downloaded one of the above versions of this desktop. Email addresses are not displayed on this site when you post a comment.

I went out back to one spot and took overlapping pictures to come up with a panoramic shot.

It’s a cheap camera, and the exposure for each wasn’t very alike [I have no control over it, and it's hard to fix each photo to match afterwards also, cheap!], so guess how difficult it was to piece these together and fix the “sky”. Ugh. Anyhow, this is what it looks like as my desktop. I think it’s pretty cool, and I’ll work on a better version of it with my film camera sometime.

I’ll create a page with this picture on it some day soon. The house closest, the one in the middle that’s bigger looking, is ours, the blue roof is the top of the “Jungle”[a Cedar Works of Maine climbing/swinging structure]. You can’t see a whole lot in this version of the photo, since it’s the “desktop” copy. In a bigger photo you might be able to better make out the fence line. Our grass is long and short in different places. You see the weeds right where I was standing, the tall stuff –dying Thistle, can you say “Roundup”? And the white are natural wild daisies that come up in the back of the yard every Spring.

And yes, Frank, you have this same desktop, at a smaller resolution. It looks nicer on mine though, as I have an LCD 16.1″ view-able large screen, and you only have a 15″ CRT monitor from 1995. Sad, but true.

Win XP 1280x1024resolution. Taskbar auto-hide [that is why you might see a tiny blue line at the bottom of the picture if you look close enough]

This is one of the Peony pictures from my Photo Log.

Here’s what my desktop looks like today. A mess, but a nice background! Click on the picture to see a pop-up full-size version of this Sepia-colored recent photo of Russell, Victoria, and Asa!

Win XP 1280x1024resolution. Taskbar auto-hide [that is why you might see a tiny blue line at the bottom of the picture if you look close enough]

Who’s the picture of? Any guesses?