Thursday, January 24, 2008

Thing 1

Every time I say to myself the name of this course "23 Things on a Stick" it makes me think of Thing on the old Addams Family tv show. I get this wildly amusing visual of a disembodied hand scurrying across the floor.





At any rate, I have finished with Thing 1 of 23. Here it is, my blog, Lumi's Lantern. Sorry the name doesn't have the 23 Things on a Stick incorporated, but it just didn't work, between the light symbology and my chuckling to myself over the hand scurrying over the floor, the fingernails clicking on the linoleum floor. :-)

My Avatar depicts one of my favorite time periods, and doesn't look much like me (yet), except for the hair, and mine is not quite that red, just auburn.

This was really fun to do. I have used a blog before (LiveJournal), but I keep that pretty tightly confined to just a few friends. This is my first attempt at a public blog. I did enjoy looking at the templates, and decided to change mine after the initial creation. The "harbor" choice with the lighthouse type of light seemed appropriate and I really like the colors. A few font changes here and there, and some playing with where things appear on the page, and this is pretty much it. I am really impressed with how easy it is to change things, even if a bit time consuming (I have to preview frequently to see how I like it). I didn't play with the formatting much on LiveJournal, though now I want to go back and do more.

For me, creating the Avatar was really a lot of fun. I will probably even use my Avatar as a user icon on LJ as well. I may make more to express the variety of feelings the facial expressions can do, and of course, to represent some of my other favorite time periods and places (like Stonehenge and the Pyramids). I see I may have to create my own Egyptian "costume" though, for one of them to wear. I didn't see anything like that on the Yahoo site. One would want the appropriate headgear as well--a nemyss, perhaps, and the royal crowns of a pharaoh and his queen. Overall, it was just an entertaining experience.

I almost used the Simpsonized character I created a while ago as my Avatar. Now that's a fun site. Try it out for yourself, but beware, it takes a while so make sure you have a fast connection! Try to make it as close to what you look like as you can. It's a hoot, especially when you do it for friends and relatives and people see them and know instantly who they are!

http://www.simpsonizeme.com/

Here's mine!

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Welcome to Lumi's Lantern!

Lumi is short for my favorite nickname, Luminesce. I created this blog for the Minnesota 23 Things On A Stick project. It's a library project to help people like me learn even more about Web 2.0 technology. I'll be sharing what I learn here. I hope it helps you, too!

The one, the only, accept-no-substitutes Luminesce (a.k.a. Mary)