Amusement for Cats

This video makes me miss Miss Kitty & want to get both a cat & and IPad.

Photo Collages

I've always enjoyed making collages and remember making them for an art class. My grandmother had lots of pictures of family and places that collected in boxes and discovered the fun of making collages by cutting them up and putting them together for family members as gifts (much to the horror of my genealogy buff cousin Andy who viewed it as desecration of valuable historical evidence for family history).

There's a certain pleasure in taking the photos, sharing them, and keeping them around you. You're surrounded by pleasant memories in a more physical sense.

I've bumped into a free software download that uses your photos as collages on your desktop allowing you to select your choice of photos you want to include on your Windows desktop. It's called Photojoy, a very apt name for the application, because that's what you feel as your desktop loads and changes your selection of photographs. There are a variety of desktop styles to download and you can choose what folders you'd like Photojoy to look in with contents to include in your collage. You can also include photostreams from Flickr.

Photojoy advertises:

Wallpaper Collages – The perfect way to relive your favorite moments
3D Screensavers – Make your photos look spectacular
PhotoToy Widgets – Display your photos in fun ways
Professional photos – 1000’s of them
So much fun and so easy to use

And it really is fun and easy to use. I showed it to my assistant Pam who likes to have photos of her loved ones around her and she immediately was entranced by it. Visitors to our office have noticed it and its use seems to be spreading like a virus in the building. So it obviously hits upon something that is an attraction to many. Photojoy is a joy!

Here's a screenshot of my current desktop selection from Photojoy:



Enjoy those digital pictures you've taken by downloading Photojoy and adding them to your desktop environment where they'll give you pleasure each time the display changes.

Another Snowglobe by Chance

Now if this snowglobe creation application would work as it should, that would be fun. However, despite the choice of three pre-made versions and the supposed opportunity to make one with a picture of your choice, the only code produced is for the silly reindeer. I did manage to create one with my picture, but the code is not produced up front so unless you visit my page on the Pyzam site, you could not see it. Another visit to Pyzam after clicking the verification link sent via e-mail and creating a profile (minimal)then creating the snowglobe and clicking get this toy finally saved the toy to my profile. After it is saved, you can go to the my toys section,see the toys you've created (but only the ones made after you set up the profile),and get the code for each toy you've created. I can't tell you how frustrating this process was until I stumbled on it by chance. It was not intuitive for me, anyway. But I finally did have success. This snowglobe has the drifting snow, and you can click on it to shake it like you would a real snowglobe.



Snow Globe Toy & MySpace Layouts at pYzam.com

Snowglobes

Remember the fascination of snowglobes when you were a child? I do. My grandmother had one we loved to shake and watch the flakes drift gently down. It always seemed to finish too fast.

I bumped into a web site that allows you to make a snow globe with your own photo so that I'd try it with that favorite picture of my grandson.



It's missing the drifting snowflakes, but it brings back the memory of that childhood fascination.

Me as the Dewey Decimal System ?

It was just too fortuitous that I bumped into this little quiz which purports to show you as the Dewey Decimal System. Your name is converted to a class in the Dewey Decimal System; That's right... somewhere between 000 (Generalities) and 999 (Extraterrestrial worlds) you have a place, and through the magic of internet this quiz can find it through random arbitrary letter decoding. Plus this gives a chance to mention how wonderful libraries are... don't forget to go read something, yes?

So I just had to take the test and find out where I'd be classified on the shelf by Dewey. The beauty of this quiz is that it gives you three choices and you can take your pick of the one that you like best.

Where do I Dewey? Here's the first result the quiz gave me;

Linda Wadman's Dewey Decimal Section:

864 Spanish essays

Linda Wadman = 29441314314 = 294+413+143+14 = 864


Class:
800 Literature


Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.



What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Or I kind of liked this third selection:

Linda Wadman's Dewey Decimal Section:

638 Insect culture


Class:
600 Technology


Contains:
Health, agriculture, management, public relations, buildings.



What it says about you:
You are creative and inspired to make the world a better place. You can work hard on something when it catches your interest. Your friends have unique interests in common with you.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Do You Think You Know Web2.0?

Powered By ProProfs Quiz School - Try the quiz and get your own certificate

Pam has The Book of Answers!

NCLC's administrative assistant, Pam, checks out The Book of Answers by Carol Bolt, borrowed from Jennifer, to find the answer to any question.

The idea was such fun that I thought I'd blog about it and in the process found the Original Book of Answers website where you can find out the answers to your burning questions too.

The book or any of its successors would make a fun gift for any hard to buy for person or any librarian you know. (We all know librarians know where to find all the answers.)

This is my life!

Just bumped into a nifty app, Wordle, which creates a cloud based on text you put into it. Just for grins I put in my del.icio.us username and got the result below. How does this thing know that this is MY LIFE most recently?



Or here's a link to it in the Wordle Gallery.

Image Play - Embossing

I took a poster made in Flickr Toys in Thing 8 and used another free application to create the image above. I want to go back and change the color, but that will wait for another day. The sun's out and it's time to get outside after a very long winter and cold spring. Today one might believe that summer will actually arrive and I intend to get out and enjoy the sun while it's still shining.

More Image Play With My Favorite Photograph

(Click on the picture for a better, bigger view of the textorize effect in the photo.)

I bumped into an application called Textorize while looking for more "things" for the more 23 things project being planned by the multitype directors. It looked intriguing (reminded me of a graphics project we had to do in a business class in high school that involved a lot of counting and typewriters) and I thought I wanted to try it out. Textorizer is a tool that transforms a picture into another picture made up of chosen words.

There are actually two versions of Textorize. I used the web version of Textorize II to create this effect of a favorite picture of my grandson reading. I got the image link (the second box with the url from Flickr when you look at the photo and select size) from my Flickr photostream. I pasted that url into the appropriate box in Textorize II, and added the text I wanted used: DJ reading picturebook fun Flotsam by David Wiesner. I adjusted one setting (how many lines of text to use) to increase it, and hit the button at the bottom of the page. Shortly afterwards the image you see, but larger and in a svg format appeared on my Firefox browser screen. The tricky part was trying to grab the image, save it in an image format usable for my blog, and sharable. I spent way too much time last night fiddling around with that, and not very successfully. However, I finally found that I could print the image in a large size and did so. Then I scanned it to a jpg file and saved it that way, then resized it. I know, cheating, but I just couldn't get the screen capture add on to Firefox to work for me, wasn't satisfied with printscreen in Windows. I'll go back to it later to resolve at another time when the frustration has faded. In the meantime I have yet another version of the photo that warms my heart every time that I see it, this time composed of letters and words, rather appropriate for a photograph of a child reading.