ehowton ◾ ◾ Oh avatar, oh avatar, you're metaphorically appealing...

Bogart'd from

swashbuckler332:

Look at your LJ userpics list. If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it's interesting to you, and what significance it has.

My default userpic. I'd bought a RAVE SPARC machine running a 440MHz SPARC-IIi chip and the first time I cracked it open I was amazed at how clean it was inside. This is a picture I took of the Sun branded chipset. I then hyper-saturated the image to bring out the green of the motherboard.

2.

The Magnolia Hotel is a 29-story, Beaux-Arts style, upscale hotel in the Main Street District of downtown Dallas, Texas that for many years was the tallest building in the state of Texas. It was originally the headquarters for the Magnolia Petroleum Company. In 1934, the building erected its trademark neon Pegasus on the building's roof. The rotating winged horse came to represent the city of Dallas and became one of its most recognizable and endearing landmarks.

3.

My RAVE SPARC rack-mounted in my Sun rack. Also shown, an HP9000/712 and a Sun Ultra 1.

4.

My buddies and I each took on a Star Wars persona on The Score Station chat, as we listened to soundtracks all day. One of my friends, a brilliant animator, stuf123 created this - myself, as a Sandtrooper.

5.

Herbert Von Karajan. This gentleman conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for thirty-five years. I was first introduced to him (and the Deutsche Grammophon label) in 1990. I had traveled to Germany with my first set of Beethoven's symphonies, on the Laserlight label. I made a friend who was a music lover. He saw my Laserlight collection and loaned me his Karajan set. I snapped all my discs in half. The Karajan box set was $100 in Germany. I couple of years later, in England, I joined a music club where I got the same box set for one Pound Sterling. When shopping for classical music, I usually default to the trifecta of Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic/DG.

6.

As a Warsaw Pact Naval-Order-Of-Battle enthusiast, I'd always admired the Soviet flagship, the Typhoon-class Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarine. Further romanticized in the movie The Hunt for Red October. I created this avatar to echo a line in the movie, one

photogoot and I used to quote back and forth everytime things got dicey, "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

7.

I like to grill. I enjoy smoking cigars. I like smoking cigars while grilling. Unbeknownst to you, dear reader, in my left hand is an 8x52 Dominican, and on the grill I have a skirt steak. This was on my acreage in Boyd, Texas. Yeah, that's me.

8.

I needed an Aliens icon, and was simultaneously in my sci-fi spaceship mode. I immediately pictured the UD-4L Cheyenne Drop Ship. Finding source material for this was difficult at best, and the best one I found was a straight on shot - not an easy identification. I tilted it 45-degrees to keep maximum size, and spent several hours coloring it, rendering shadows and colors and lighting effects. The background is Photoshop rendered clouds with a spotlight effect and a lens flare. By far one of my favorites.

Bah - that's enough.

All my userpics. See for yourself what a freak existance I etch out of this thing we call life.