Wednesday, June 18, 2008

All over Avatar!! Updated 6/25/08

I couldn't even wait for the assignment to actually be due for this one. This is the most awesome internet tool ever! I'd seen a couple of these animated folks and always wondered where folks got them from. So as soon as I saw that they were next week's assignment I had to do it right away! Very fun.
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I am totally a clothes freak and a shopaholic, so the very idea that I could shop for an animated character, (not only clothing, but hair style, etc.) was simply intoxicating for me!
I went with Meez and was totally overwhelmed by all the choices. Although I was a little disappointed that the really cool stuff (like a background of a mansion, a yacht or a penthouse) were just a little too "expensive" for me right off the bat. But, I'm already saving "coinz" for 'em! LOL!!

I checked out the other Avatars a little bit, and for what I'm using my Avatar for, I much prefer Meez. From what I saw the different options for body, hair, eyes, etc. weren't nearly as good as what Meez offered. And I didn't even look at any of their clothing. I have no doubt that Meez offers far more clothing for the gal who wants to stay current with her outfits and gives a fashion crazy gal like myself more than enough clothing options to keep me up at night filling my Meez-gal's closet! And the backgrounds...wow! This girl will get to see places that I only dream of.

I saw that much like Second Life, Meez offers an online community, but that's just a bit too much for me. I already find myself crunched for time in the real world. How much worse would I make it if I started to spend time in a virtual one? Yikes. My closets and cupboards at home seriously need to be gone through! I'll keep the Avatar World of online communities in mind for retirement. ;-)

I also checked out Ms. Dewey. She's great! I totally love her attitude!

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Online docs.

While interesting, I'm not sure that I'd use this much in my job, or elsewhere. It definitely doesn't seem to be as powerful as Excel, from what little I saw...And since we all have Microsoft Office, and can attach docs to e-mails without second thought, I don't see much need for this personally. Although it is nice to know that this type of stuff is available free online. I was able to upload an Excel document from my desktop to Google docs. However, I wasn't able to upload any of my Excel stuff to Zoho. I was told "Importing of .xls file is currently unsupported". Oh well. I tried. I did import a picture however.

I can really see these applications being used for those e-mails that people forward and fly around the internet but that so many folks can't open because they don't have the correct software to do so.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen start your Engines

I'm so used to using Google anymore that it was kind of fun to try something else. I didn't get a whole lot of different major hits on any of the metasearchers vs. Google. Although I noticed that Google is the only one that pulled up any articles that have appeared in newspapers in recent days pertaining to the subject that I searched on. And I remember from past searches with Google that I've often seen links to recent newspaper articles and I really like that. I enjoy staying current with certain subjects, so I guess I'll continue to use Google on a regular basis.

I also ended up trying out a clever search engine Searchme not mentioned in this assignment, but is linked at the Techies Page of our web site (found because it was mentioned in the June 10th "What's Up on the Web" report). Very cool to see your search results visually layed out like pages you can scroll through! I highly recommend trying that out at least once. :-)

Monday, June 9, 2008

Poddcasts

I just seemed to stumble from one weird podcast to another. I signed-up for an account with Mevio and searched the topic of library. I found some podcasts done by Emory Libraries entitled "Woodruff Library Survival Guide". Once I got past the shock of having only audio, no video, I tried to listen to one about the myths of libraries and librarians. Unfortunately the audio was too low on the production and no amount of turning up the volume could bring it up to where I could comfortably listen. My next word search for library brought up something called "Dr. Pus presents Library of the Living Dead". With the subtitle Zombies can't read. Hopefully you can. Now with a title like that one knows going in it's bound to be strange, but sometimes one's curiosity (or mine at any rate)tends to overtake one's common sense...so I listened. No way for me to describe the song I heard here, but suffice it to say Dr. Pus seems to have many voices in his head. Maybe he has them filed by dewey decimal number? because I couldn't find any reference to a real library there at all.

Next I figured I'd just peruse the site to see what I could find, and this time I searched the Video ones only. I found an interesting video podcast on getting applications for your iPhone (which would have been more helpful if I had one!), and lastly looked at a rather humerous one called "If Britney was my Mom". Funny song and video that is!!

Much like YouTube, I can definitely see how podcasting can be a very powerful teaching tool. More people can be reached using this method, because everyone is free to watch whenever they can fit it into their schedule. No having to be somewhere at a certain time. And it's conceivably saved for all time and eternity. Fun to imagine people in the future watching and learning about history as it unfolded from those who actually lived it.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Image generators

Whew! I think I got this one accomplished finally. Last week the only thing I was able to generate was a whole lot of anger with it. The first attempt I made to put a picture on a magazine cover went awry when I tried to stretch it to fit. I ended up with all the wording on it doubled and overlapping. And not precisely either. Yuck! So I tried to start over with another picture and a different magazine cover. It kept putting the original picture I'd downloaded in there with the wording from the previous magazine overlapping the wording from the second choice (grrr....) no matter how many time I downloaded the new one. I finally gave up in exasperation. Today it was pretty seamless. However, after last weeks fiasco I didn't even attempt to stretch it to fit and just left everything alone. What follows should be a picture of my cat on MEOW magazine.

Make your own free clipart like this @ www.TXT2PIC.com with free web based tools (hundreds of image generators that run through a web broswer, no software to buy or install).
Made with free image tools @ TXT2PIC.com