Arbitrary Character Judgments

Just how messy is your dashboard?

For any Windoze users out there, the dashboard is a silly little thing on Macs that was developed so you could bring up a see-through screen that overlays your desktop and gives you useful information, such as weather forecasts, traffic reports, news feeds, stock prices, etc.
But Mac users aren't interested in all that crap; we want useless information. We want Jared, the singing smiley ("Luna Gardena …"), stupid fishtanks and bouncing rubber monkeys and interactive Klingon dictionaries and so a whole new industry was born: creating utterly and wonderfully pointless dashboard widgets.

I hadn't realised just what a teenager's floordrobe of a mess my dashboard has become until yesterday, when Amanda the new girl at the office came over to say "Woah! Cool! A dancing Jesus!"

Anyhoo.
Here's my current home dashboard.
Just like judging a person by their bookshelves, we can get a pretty good idea of how dorky somebody is by the crap cluttering up their dashboard.
The thing on the top left is a feed from various telescopes around the world. For folk living under England's Tupperware skies - it is nice to see what good old Sol is up to.

My dashboard has a set of Blogville Clocks, showing me which one of you reprobates is awake or asleep and the weather in London and Ohio (Robyn) … for some strange reason you can only have two weather forecasts up at the same time, so I flick mine around Blogville to see who's suffering; in this case, our Robyn.
Plus my nifty realtime earthquake reporter, so I can see how shook up poor Jules is getting in Rabaul (serves you right for living in paradise!). Click on an earthquake and it takes you to the readouts and details. Cool, if you're geeky like me.
And many thanks to Robyn for pointing me at the Etch-A-Sketch. My own miniature version of the world's first and best laptop. You actually shake it to erase the image, just like the real thing. Hee hee hee. No points for guessing the quote …

You can have any amount of comics feeds (or news feeds if you're boring). These are my defaults: Peanuts, Dilbert and Doonesbury.

I have a nifty (yet hilariously crap) Japanese translator to fuck up my homework and a wise daily saying from Family Guy.

Best of all, I have my pong clock and my hula girl.
The Pong clock shows the current time as the score, but click on it and you can play fullscreen retro Pong action! Woohoo! There are any amount of stupid games you can play: Pacman, pinball, all the usuals, and they're all free, of course and one click makes the whole lot disappear and brings back your desktop for when the boss is about.
As for the hula girl (a man's GOTTA have a hula girl! She reminds me of Joe vs. The Volcano and teases me with the - admittedly remote - possibility that a young Meg Ryan might walk in and carry me off to a desert island … sigh), leave the cursor in the corner of her window and she shimmies 'til the cows come home. You can get a Hula Jesus, too, and there ain't nobody shimmies like the risen Jesus.
Old Dive is seldom happier than when all around me the office is running about like headless chickens and I'm leaning back against my lumbar support and sipping green tea, whilst my cute li'l hula girl is shimmying just for me.

At the office, I have webcams from Venice and Norwich (the American ones are dark when I'm in London), but at home it's NYC and San Francisco, looking across the bridge to Sausalito, which is somewhere I'd like to live if they could only stop those pesky earthquakes.
I also have the inevitable fishtank, a dancing Jesus and one of those plastic monkeys whose limbs are held together with string and you press the bottom and he dances and jiggles around. Anyone alive in the sixties will know what I mean.

Basically, good, old-fashioned retro childish fun for anyone who never wants to grow up.

So. What's on your dashboard? Screengrab it, post it and let's make arbitrary judgments about your character.