What animals among your desktop icons?

There will always be icons on a desktop, i.e. if you are a normal user. Some people go ahead and do stuff without any icons on their desktop, quick launch or start menu. These are the geeks. It is sad that they , in their pursuit of being efficient remove all signs of desktop icons.

These icons are not a random bunch of images just put in to the program. These icons create a brand image for that program. This is part of what I wanted to talk about here. I wanted to know what animals live among your icons on desktop or where ever you store your icons.

I have my RocketDock configured with my most used icons. And from among them are the following programs that use animals.

Firefox – Fox

Pidgin – Pigeon

GIMP – a Fox with a paintbrush in its mouth (or is it a dog?)

IrfanView – A red splattering of what looks like a cat.

These are the programs I am currently using more. But there are some very famous programs that have an animal in them. Specially in case of Open Source programs like Thunderbird, Songbird and definitely worth the mention is LINUX, whose mascot is a Penguin and many linux distributions have animals in their brand like SuSe which has a chameleon. BSD has the Devil, which cannot be said to be an animal.

Microsoft has few of the most boring icons; these as a rule try to depict what the program will do.

These are the icons I remember for now, will update this post once I find more. I will look stupid if I have missed some real important ones, but I leave it up to you guys to mention them here, with a link to the image.

As a departing thought, I consider Songbird to have one of the cutest icons ever!

Update: A few of my friends pointed out that MySQL has a Dolphin in its icon. Another says that all Mozilla S*** has animals in their icons. I agree.

Am I Old?

"Everyday, more than three billion minutes are spent by computer users on Facebook" says once email forward, listing the 10 things that changed our lives. It listed Social Networking as one among them.

It has been true for a long time that the younger generation are quick on the uptake of new technologies. They use these things like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and other similar technologies day in and day out.

Among the few technologies of my time were Personal websites, blogs, web search and email. We were champions of anything to do with these technologies. But, now I see myself stepping away from the Facebooks and Twitters. I just can't find the time. Maybe once in a month is too much time spent.

This begs the question, "Have I become old?" or rather "Have I grown out of the "younger generation?""

Maybe, maybe not.

A recent discovery by a BBC survey puts the onset of old age at 27 where as the peak being at 22. Scientifically, I am getting old.

On the other hand, One is as old as he thinks he is. I can do a lot of things that people of my age seldom do. This makes me feel younger too.

Old age is without a cure and an inevitable reality for most human beings. So I will go ahead and slow down my pace and catch up with the wisdom of my 28 years of life.