New Me?

Here is some of the fun I had on http://hairmixer.com.

The first photo on the left is me borrowing the hair of Bonita, a college friend of my daughter Cassie's.

On the far right is me in Dame Judi Dench's hair. I think I could go for that look. It seems to look pretty good on women "of a certain age." But I hope I wouldn't need the earrings to have the look-- too pinchy, I think.

This cool generator also gives you a magazine cover featuring you in your new hairdo. And a nice little email button so you can send the results to yourself (or to your daughter's friend...)

The Three Faces of Me

This was just too crazy not to share!

I've long been fascinated with that right-face/left-face concept, but before now all we could do was hold a piece of paper over one side of our face at a time. Now I can clearly see that half of me smiles better than the other half. (And how about that cowlick?)


Anyway, I really need a new hairstyle, so I'll be hunting down that generator for my next experiment in craziness.

P.S. Here's the website where you can do the face symmetry thing: http://www.pichacks.com/

Glut !

I wasn't going to add a new post today. I was just trying to read more info about how Bloglines worked.
And then this one sentence caught my eye: "Tell a friend how Bloglines has helped you manage Internet information glut!" Actually, it wasn't the whole sentence that caught my eye-- just that one word-- GLUT.
Isn't that a great word? Just the physical act of saying it out loud makes you feel like what the word means.
Anyway, glut pretty well describes how I feel about the whole Internet experience. Maybe even how I feel about the whole modern-day world that we live in. Just too much -- stuff, information, clothes in my closet, activity, you name it... Just too much!
In the next half of my life, I'm going to try to get rid of all the baggage that I've accumulated in the first half. "Less is more" will be my motto. (I'll probably start on this new philosophy right after I go shopping tomorrow.)

Montana Library Photos

Book Arch at Bicentennial Library, originally uploaded by lmcmullen.

Well, one thing I learned with this week's lesson is that Flickr is not spelled "flicker." New age spelling, I guess...
I pict a kool foto to put heer in my blog.

(Thanks to Lauren McMullen for lots of fun pictures of the many faces of Montana libraries! This one is from the Bicentennial Library, but I don't know where in Montana that is... Lauren?)

Library of Congress is Flickering

It seems amazing to me that I never even heard of Flicker last week, won't even learn about it until next week's lesson, but today when I got onto my bloglines site to see how my "feeds" were doing, I found out that the Library of Congress, that venerable old institution, is joining the modern age just like I am!

It seems that the LOC is going to make available on Flicker some 171,000 photo images that the general public can access, and people can even tag them (which I don't know what means at this point, but I figure if it's good enough for the Library of Congress, it's good enough for me.)

So I went out to the LOC's Flicker site:
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven

I clicked on the 30's-40's color collection, which had 1615 images in it. There are probably 20 or 30 little images per page for 27 pages, and you can run your cursor over the little images to find out where they were taken, and of course you can double-click on them if you want to see one up close and personal. I want you to know that I gave the quick-scan to all 27 pages, and was rewarded on page 25 with Butte, Montana. One shot taken looking over the city from the vantage point of the Big M, and then numerous shots of a junk/salvage yard in Butte. (Remember that this is war years, and metal recycling was doing one's part for the war effort.)

There are some Beaverhead County photos there, too, and a few others from various places in the state. Anyway, afterwards I thought about how long it had taken me to to look at those 1615 little images in haste, and then I tried to make the mental leap to 171,000 images. (I think that's what the Library of Congress was thinking, too, when they decided to throw it out to the public for help in identification, clarification, etc...)

Don't you just love technology???

Blogs + Libraries = Neat Stuff!

This RSS feeding is a totally new concept for me, but I set up my bloglines account, and started looking for interesting things to have "fed" to me.

I added a "Word of the Day" to keep my vocabulary up-to-snuff. I didn't add any news feeds, because I am old-fashioned about liking to read the news in a newspaper with my coffee in the morning (even though we in Butte often refer to our hometown newspaper as the Montana Substandard).

Then I started looking at some library-related sites, and with a click-click here and a click-click there, the next thing I knew I was reading this interesting article about how Public Libraries could make use of weblogs. About the middle of the article (in the section called Why Weblogs in Public Libraries?) the author lists some really neat possibilities for using this kind of technology. Here is the link for anybody else who is interested:
www.ala.org/ala/pla/plapubs/epublications/weblogs.cfm

It made me say Yeah! Cool! We could do this!

The Bane of my Existence...

I've decided that Lifelong Learning is the bane of my existence. It is the reason my house is so cluttered, that my schedule is so full, and that I never seem to get anything done.
The problem, I'm afraid, is that there's nothing that doesn't interest me. My energies are scattered around all the things I love doing.

So the habit I think will be the hardest for me is good old #1: Begin with the end in mind. The end, of course, isn't the final day of this class or the last lesson I complete. The end, rather, is what I hope to achieve by taking this challenge. Do I want to be blogging away for the rest of my life? I don't think so! But would I like to be able to create a classy website? Know how to share family info and photos better? Keep in touch with my tech-savvy kids? Yep, I sure would!

Habit that's the easiest for me? #4: I have incredible confidence in myself as a competent learner. (It's the bane of my existence.) I never want to hire an attorney, because I know I can figure out all that legalese myself. I never want to pay money for classy clothes, because I know I could figure out how to sew them myself. Plumbing? Electrical? Furniture refinishing? If there's a book about it in the library (and there always is), I figure I can teach myself just about anything.

I would like a few more hours in the day, and maybe an extra room or two in my house, and as long as I'm wishing, how about a housekeeper and a cook thrown in?

or maybe it's ... Lifelong Learning - Aha!

I'm not gonna lie to you-- this old brain spends a lot of time staring at the computer screen trying to remember things.
Like, for example "What exactly was the assignment? Am I supposed to be telling about my favorite habit, or was it my best habit, or was it the habit I most admire?"
I spend a lot of time minimizing the screen I'm on and going back to some previous page I saw somewhere.
Maybe it's because I'm trying to do this at bedtime. Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning, refreshed and full of creative insights, and say something inspiring.
Or not.
Stay tuned (if you can bear the suspense...)

Lifelong Learning -Hah!

Well, here I am, creating a blog!
I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I watch young people (my own and others) texting and blogging and facebooking away, and I honestly don't think the world is a better place because of it.

But there's that Bob Dylan song from my youth:
"Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,
Your old world is rapidly aging.
So get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand,
For the times they are a-changing."

So... I hope I don't live long enough to see the total demise of printed material. But while my brain still works at all, I feel I ought to try to understand (before I criticize) this new world, and maybe even to "lend a hand."