Conference wallpapers
introduced the idea of conference backgrounds to me. It’s kind of funny, to setup a background image on your laptop that is entirely inoffensive (so noone can bring up a reason why you shouldn’t use it) but extremely distracting.
Not as good as his example background are some of these: optical illusions (I guess some people will think these are animated, or can at least explain why they find them distracting)
If you are giving a presentation, you should probably pick something else though… ;-) I can really recommend checking out Pixelgirlpresents, which contains many entirely inoffensive, but interesting and pretty backgrounds. In the featured section, check out the background “Batty”. That one is great (I didn’t find a way to “permalink” there, unfortunately)
Oh, and never forget that people will judge you by your desktop backgrounds (just like they do by the icon chaos you have there, if any) - putting some art there is generally a good thing. (And if it’s cute, chicks will dig it!)