One of the things I've been fiddling with lately is LibraryThing. It's kind of painstaking to enter in all the books in our vast library, yet oddly satisfying. Feel free to take a look at my library (just keep in mind it's a work in progress).
I've been such a slacker this month. But now it's back to the blogging!
Been reading a lot, so I might get to babbling about all the new trashy romance I've been plowing through. Also, we painted the living room last week - so now I'm on this home improvement jag. (The Home Depot gift card from my folks is feeding that.) Painting is great fun - it's the taping I could do without.
Tis the season for gift-giving and whatnot, so Recalls.gov is handy for checking out the toys and other gear for safety. It's a government web site that gives you all the dirt on which products have been recalled by the manufacturer.
Brought to mind by: Inter Alia
"Chuck Norris' calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd; no one fools Chuck Norris."
"The grass is always greener on the other side, unless Chuck Norris has been there. In that case the grass is most likely soaked in blood and tears. "
Find these and other exciting Chuck Norris facts using the Chuck Norris Random Fact Generator!
Thanks to: The Generator Blog
Pandora generates custom online radio stations, playing music specifically tailored to your tastes. Basically, you tell it what artists or songs you like and it makes a radio station for you to listen to that will play songs kind of like the ones you entered.
It's the child of the Music Genome Project, which apparently has a crack team of "music analysts" who delve into the guts of each individual song and then compare it to other songs, with an eye for compatibility. From their About page:
"Each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners."
Interesting theory, but I'll have to try it out. I've been using LastFM for some time now, with fair results, so we'll see...
Phixr is a FREE photo editor that let's you resize, recolor, crop, overlay another photo, and pretty much do anything else you can think of to photos you upload. It even has red-eye reduction! It's easy to use AAAAAAAAAAAAND you don't have to download anything. You can do it all from the web.
In addition, when you're finished tinkering, you can upload your newly-doctored creation directly to your flickr account. (it also supports upload to photobucket, livejournal, & a few others)
The only real drawback is that it requires registration (annoying), but it's still probably the best free editor I've seen that doesn't require download (like Irfanview).
Brush up on your typing skills with Word Shoot. It's a typing game where little beasties show up on the screen and you have to correctly type the words next to them before they get you. It's pretty fun - wish I could've had it instead of Mr. West's 7th Grade Typing class...
I love The Office. As my friend chitto says, it's the funniest 30 minutes of the entire week.
You can bring home a little joy this holiday season by giving the Office fan on your Christmas list the Dwight Schrute bobble-head doll!
As has been observed by an astute reader, I did NOT indeed shy away from the Urban Dead multiplayer online. It is one of my vices, I guess. What's not to love, though, really? Zombies eating brains, humans shooting zombies in the head... And it's free!
It's great fun, and even though I get tired of it periodically, and stop playing it for days at a time, I always seem to go back to it eventually.
So I switched over to the new version of Blogger in Beta over the weekend. Needless to say, the changeover hasn't gone perfectly smoothly, but I'm trying to roll with it. For example, apparently all of my previous posts were republished, so if you subscribe to the feed, your RSS reader probably got the whole shootin match all over again. The look of the blog has been tweaked a little and there's also a new "labeling" feature so you can now look for posts on a particular topic.
OK, yall have to try this:
The Automatic Flatterer
(p.s. - it's going to ask you for your name but it's ok - just give it your first name or whatever)
I have always shied away from online multiplayer games due to the addiction factor. However, Arden: The World of Shakespeare sounds right up my alley. It's not out yet, but I'll be watching for it.
According to this review on CNet, "players can expect to trot around in 17th century regalia, buying ale in Elizabethan taverns and joining guilds aimed at toppling dukes and earls." All in a massively multiplayer online game. It doesn't get much better than that!
Thanks to: Librarian in Black
I saw this and had to post it. Now you can play Fantasy Congress. It's like Fantasy Football for nerds!
From their site:
"As in other fantasy sports, you - the Citizen - draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team's successes. Join a league and compete against other Citizens, or form a league of your own! Play against your friends, family, bloggers, fellow politicos, or even a sitting U.S. Senator (one could be playing incognito, you never know!). On weekends, move Members of Congress into your active line-up or off your team to strategize for the upcoming week of legislation!"
wheeeeeeee!!!
Thanks to: Robert Ambrogi's Law Sites blog
Here's another free image hosting site: thumbq.
I like this one because it lets you host multiple images on one URL. Also, the site's a good deal less cluttery.
Thanks to: Library Stuff blog
Use Image Shack to host your images on the web (for free of course). This is handy for generating a quick URL to an image. You just browse to your image and click "Host It." No passwords or email invitations required to share your picture!
This one was so cool, I put it into the latest issue of my Law Library's newsletter.
Thanks to: My pal Frank!
Conduit offers a way to make your own toolbar for searching the web, a particular site, whatever. It's pretty nifty, although (like so many other downloadable toolbars) it looks like you may end up with some toolbar buttons and programs you may not necessarily want. Still, it's kind of a neat way to make your own toolbar and share it with others.
Thanks to: DALLNET blog
I've used Irfanview for a number of years to resize, crop, and edit images. It's a free download and offers a lot of functionality for working with your photos.
I came across ResizR on another blog this morning and thought it looked pretty handy. You don't have to download anything; just browse to the image on your computer and use the little slider to change the size. It also lets you rotate the image. This could come in handy if you have an image you want to resize and say, you're not on your own computer.
Thanks to: http://www.inter-alia.net
So I'm superjazzed about the new Marie Antoinette movie. Big hair. Big dresses. Fans. Pretty Pretty Pretty! And a killer soundtrack!
Official Site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/marieantoinette/index.html
IMDB Site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422720/
I hear they based it on this biography written by Antonia Fraser. Think I'll try to read it before I go see the movie...
