The Empirical Manifesto

2005-2020



Back in the early days of LJ I'd created a BSD avatar for those few, painful times I ran FreeBSD. Wasn't really a fan, preferring instead the burgeoning liunx. One of the few ways to keep personalized avatars from resetting to the default in LJ is to keep the same name as the one it is replacing, then simply adding a comma deliminated keyword for search purposes. But I digress. My keyword-named "BSD" avatar was replaced with my O/S of choice back then of early ubuntu, and my avatar was a play on those ridiculous naked people gracing the wallpaper screen with the ubuntu logo prominently displayed somewhere on them. I wanted to make one better than the wallpapers, so turned to one of the nude models I was familiar with back in 06, and popped the logo the only place that made sense given both the logo, and the constraints of a 100x100 pixel avatar. Some time later, I thought it might look better as a tattoo, and updated it before using the same model when I switched operating systems to suse, then deciding several years later I'd done a slipshod job on the "tattoo" and made it more realistic, which is the one I use to this day.

Having gotten back into BSD, I decided I finally needed a BSD avatar to differentiate between the two given my rash of technical posts, especially since I already have one for Sun Microsystems, HP/UX, and SGI. I run a lot more OpenBSD these days than FreeBSD (though my SAN, FreeNAS is FreeBSD based), but "Puffy" the bloated OpenBSD logo is considerably less sexy than the new Anton K. Gural logo (not the Lasseter (of Pixar fame) daemon). Which I hued pink to match the hair of the new girl I found online and who's origin I cannot ascertain to give credit.

Admittedly, its been awhile since I've played with LJ avatars, but given two of my favorite subjects, still a hell of a lot of fun :)