Make Flickr Funr

Ah, the internet. Home of a seemingly infinite number of amazing toys, most of them free. The toy I’ve been playing with lately is Multicolr Search Lab. You MUST go there – go, go now. Pick a favorite color (or two, or more) and watch the results flow in. This probably has some practical applications, but I just enjoy mesmerizing myself as I play with all the pretty colors…

Basically, Multicolr takes the Big Huge Lab’s Palette Generator concept and turns it upside down. Speaking of which, BHL is always fun to play with. Aside from the aforementioned Palette Generator, they offer a ton of ways to have more fun with your (or my) photos.

Speaking of fun twists on flickr, you haven’t seen my photostream until you’ve seen it hanging on the walls in Castle Wolfenstein. No – really. Wolfenflickr is yet another amazing internet plaything. Go check it out. Enter (e.g.) “dan rochman” (make sure there’s a space between “dan” and “rochman”) in the “Flickr username:” box, then click the Go button. Then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to wander around the castle, looking at my recent photos. If you want to see a higher-resolution version of a photo, walk up to it and press the CTRL key. Pressing CTRL again zooms back out. Yes, this is an extremely silly way to look at photos. But something that combines my love of all things flickr with my nostalgia for fragging virtual Nazis in the original Castle Wolfenstein, way back when I was just a wee nerd? Priceless.

If there isn’t enough here for you to waste a few minutes with, you can always go peruse what may be the most comprehensive list of flickr tools out there.

I think I’m flickr-preoccupied today because my new point-and-shoot digital camera is on its way here as I write this. UPS should be delivering it any. minute. now. Emphasis on NOW. It’s a Canon PowerShot SD 880 IS, to replace my somewhat outdated Canon PowerShot A520. Note that I’m still obviously a huge Canon/PowerShot fan.

In other news, Microsoft rolled out a major update to the Xbox LIVE network/dashboard back on November 19th. For me, there were two particularly interesting changes. The first is that my Xbox 360 now has native support for streaming Netflix video-on-demand titles. I’m the kind of nerd for whom simply connecting my laptop to my TV was already pretty simple, but it’s still really nice to have my Netflix Watch Now queue integrated right into my Xbox dashboard. The second change is that I can now have a custom avatar associated with my Xbox LIVE user profile. The last time I created an avatar for myself, it was on my nephew’s Wii (where the avatar is, of course, called a “Mii”), and it was actually pretty strange just how closely the stupid thing resembled my own stupid self. To the point where people who came by later and saw it on the screen were given to spontaneously exclaim how much it looked like me. Or me like it. Whatever. So, now that I had a second shot, I felt compelled to give it another go. Here’s the result – if you know what I look like in person, I’ll let you be the judge. [Note that Em has promised to make me a t-shirt that looks just like the one in this photo - once it's done, I'll post a picture of myself wearing it, and you can really do a side-by-side comparison!]