Avatar Fun!

I had so much fun with Avatar. I found this to be very easy and a lot of fun. I think I'm going to make one for my husband. I just wish they had a boxer dog as one of the pet options, but a bulldog is halfway there.

I think this is a great tool - especially for teens. This allows for many possibilities of self-expression. There are a wide variety of accessories, clothing options, facial options, etc. ( I only wish you were able to select your own shoes!)

As soon as I was done creating my image, I tried to figure out how to load it onto my blog. On the yahoo site, I couldn't find info on how to do that. I clicked on a given option to see more questions asked by other avatar users, and from these answers, it seemed that avatars can only be used through yahoo based tools and services. I then went over to Meez.com to try to create a similar image there, but I did not like the clothing options or facial options as much.

I was saving my yahoo avatar and by pure luck I saw the info on how to "export" it. I'm glad I did because I really like that I could include a dog in the picture with me:)

At long last...

Bloglines

Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Adding feeds is an addictive (yet very fun!) thing to do. I just experimented with Bloglines and before I knew it, I had subscribed to 25 feeds! I think what did it is the listing given when you register, that gives you the opportunity to sign up for a bundle of feeds based on your interests. Shopping? Sure! Dogs? Why not? Bookworms? That's me. And before I knew it, my first step when activating my Bloglines account was to clean out and trash some of the feeds. I wonder if this sheds any insight into why I find myself constantly waging an uphill battle against the clutter in my house... :)

As I sorted through some of these pre-bundled feeds, I realized that while this service may be convenient, upon further inspection, the feeds weren't exactly what I thought they would be. I appreciate efforts to make life easier by making these suggestions, but it may have been more helpful to include annotations of some kind with the feeds in the pre-bundled packages. At first, I also stumbled when trying to link the feeds that had the little orange box icon to Bloglines. I knew I needed to link them to my blog, and that I didn't want to organize them in the default Microsoft folder from my browser. It took me a few tries to figure this out, but now I am more confident and I'm gearing up to become a feed-subscribing fiend :)

Anyways, here is the link to my Bloglines account ( I hope this works!):
http://www.bloglines.com/public/mesnyder

My Digital Camera

I love my digital camera. My affinity is not just related to the tools provided by the Internet and technology, such as Flickr or Picasa. While these tools are great to share pictures taken, I love that a digital camera allows you to take essentially an unlimited amount of pictures. Of course there is the issue of running out of memory, but with a digital camera you can erase and re-take pictures. It gives you a lot of freedom, and it allows you to take pictures of things you may have passed on photographing before because of the capacity limitations of regular photo film. Digital cameras have not only made it easy to use Flickr and other tools, but they have encouraged people to take pictures of anything -even the most ordinary scenes, settings, and subjects-, and these ordinary subjects then have the potential to become some of the most thought-provoking objects of discussion as well.

Flickr's Retrievr

I experimented with the third party application entitled "retrievr". This application allows you to draw / sketch an image of what you are looking for, and as you add to the sketch, images that seem similar to your sketch are pulled up for you to view. I, apparently, am not a very skilled artist. I tried a couple of times to draw a dog, but the images that were pulled up were of birds, and even some completely weird cartoon alien-type image: Picasso, I am not :) Finally, my efforts did result in a few dog images (though again, they were also mostly cartoon-like in nature). I had a lot of fun experimenting with this. I think it would be helpful for finding images that have very basic shapes and forms, because I found the drawing utensils to not be especially strong in terms of their precision and ability to represent details.

Model Covered Bridge

Covered model bridge
Originally uploaded by MelissaS4282

This was an interesting process. I felt like I had to go through the Google/Flickr blog set-up process about 3 times before I actually got this to post. The instructions for how to set up everything were really easy to follow, and though the process was repetitive, I understood why I needed to go through all of the steps to get it set up. I love that I can post to my blog directly from Flickr. I think that is very encouraging for people who want to blog about photos.