Cleaner Life

I’ve changed the theme of this blog, the old one was beautiful, but did not work very well.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve also replaced my Avatar, not just here, but on every forum/social media site I belong to. If you still see one of my old Avatars around, then it’s some place I don’t visit often, and I’ll change it the next time I log in there.

So here’s the old image of this tree found in the woods behind my house, I’ve been using it, or variations of it as my Avatar for a while now.

With tips I got from GIMP Tutorial Series Guide - Free Coloring Pages and How To Make - Mosaic - Filmstrip Feature and Cutting Image Backgrounds for better eBay Pictures | Gimp I was able to take this version:

Which is the same tree from a different angle, and merged it with a shot of my real face to get this:

My inspiration while doing this was the album cover for Styx’s seventh album, “The Grand Illusion“:

I had it on vinyl!

(so if you think your life is complete confusion

’cause your neighbor’s got it made

just remember that it’s a grand illusion

and deep inside we’re all the same)

In other news, I’ve manged to publish three new Lenses this week. Rock N’ Roll Holidays | Celebrate The Holidays With Rock Music is my first holiday themed Lens. Here I thought I was getting a head start on the coming holidays, but after publishing I found that these two directories were already off to a running start for the Holiday season: Christmas Directory of Lenses and Squidoo Home for The Holidays. I added my Lens to both!

Also, I was amazed that this Lens came out of WIP within an hour of being published! I published it, then went to eat, and when I came back I was suprised to find it out of WIP already. I spent the next three hours working on a problem I found in the way I was using the new Amazon MP3 modules (if you come across a problem working with them, drop me a line, maybe I can help - you can find me on twitter: as CleanerLife).

The next one was an experiment with MagicBuilder, or maybe you can tell from the title: Testing MagicBuilder! Special thanks to Rock_The_Ice for feedback on this and the Rock N’ Roll Holidays Lens. Also thanks to a_willow for encouraging me to keep the experiment. She said I should make it into a tutorial, but I decided to turn it into a review instead.

The third Lens is my first attempt at a food & cooking Lens, Ants On A Log | Heathy Snacks For Kids Of All Ages, which was pretty simple and fun to do. Believe it or not, I was making Ants On a Log as a snack for myself, when I decided to make a Lens about it!

And I had a short celebration on Friday because two of my Lenses reached the 1st tier at the same time. The celebrating sort of died down when the lensrank update came through on Saturday because while The Love Of Dragons: Dragons In Books And On Video continued to rise in rank, DIY Auto Backup Camera: How To Install A Backup Camera On Your Car, Truck, SUV, Or RV dropped back to the 2nd tier. Still that’s pretty good since the How To Install a Backup Camera Lens is just over 2 weeks old, and it’s had 66 hits from Google, now it is starting to get hits from MSN, too. I still haven’t been actively trying to build backlinks for it, either.

17 Lenses published, 4 in progress — I should try to have them, and like 31 - 34 more done by the December deadline for becoming a Giant Squid, think I can do it?