Playing around with Things

My next appointed task was to play around with some photos on http://www.picnik.com/ -- so I did.


While clearing out my mother's house, I found some negatives of pictures taken with an old Kodak Box Brownie of the Siamese kitten my father bought me for my ninth birthday. I scanned them, and used Adobe Photoshop to "negative" them into positives. It wasn't a very sophisticated camera! --here is one shot I thought would benefit from "sharpening" in picnik:

... and the result:

Hmm ... well, she looks a bit sharper, but she's gone stripey! I suspect it's the fault of the photo rather than picnik, though. I'll try it with a more conventionally-produced image (taken with a digital camera):

and here is the sharpened result. Doesn't look a lot different -- that'll teach me to be more careful about focussing!


Another option is to brighten up the exposure -- that shows up the roses in the background better:




And finally, as it's Valentine's Day tomorrow, I tried addding a "love flare":

(Does anyone else find it's a b****r trying to move images around in blogger?)

Not necessarily a good Thing

Hmmm ... I see flickr includes what sort of camera was used among the information it gives about photos. This is very interesting for camera geeks -- but, while I'm happy to share my pics with the rest of the world, I'm not sure I want everyone to know what sort of camera I've got!

I can see that flickr is an excellent way to share photos with family and friends, or even to look for pictures of your next holiday destination, and as back-up storage for personal photos. But I'm struggling to think of libray applications for it.

I could perhaps photograph the text of my copy of Mackie's Ethics, and then when readers come to complain that the confined copy has gone missing again give them the url -- and wait for the copyright police to come calling.

A Thing worth sharing

Possible alternative title: Blogging is Bad for you!

"Constant literary exertion weakened his brain, and he lost his reason."

From Biographical Preface to Voyages and Travels of Captain Basil Hall, R.N. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1895), p. 6

(I'm supposed to be cataloguing it on OLIS, but got sidetracked!)

Things get a bit depressing

I signed up to flickr about a month ago. Oh dear, yet another username and password to remember! And uploaded a few of the photos I took in Barmouth a couple of summers ago. Then I looked to see if other people had contributed photos of Barmouth -- up came some artistic and quite spectacular pics, which made me feel quite lowly!

Not all Things are blog-shaped

I've been looking at the blogs of my fellow 23 Thing-ers, and their views on blogs in general.

I think blogs are excellent for what they were originally conceived for -- as logs of day-by-day thoughts, events and reactions, with the latest thing being the first thing you see. For recording things which are, on the whole, ephemeral. This is a record of my ongoing reactions to the 23 Things programme, which I hope is entertaining my fellow particpants (and is certainly entertaining me!), but in six months' time I don't suppose anyone will give two hoots about it! But I don't think they should be used for anything and everything, just because it's so easy to sit down, dash off a few paragraphs and hit "Publish Post". That I find offensive to my sense of order. If you want to present information which has lasting currency, like useful links or contact information, set it out clearly on an old-fashioned website (are websites now old-fashioned?!). I find having the 23 Things Oxford programme set out in a blog very slightly irritating, in that, to find out what I'm supposed to be doing next, I have to read through a post, then scroll back up past it and through another one to get to the top of the next set of instructions. But I suppose setting it out as a blog is all part of exposing us to Web 2.0 applications, which is the purpose of the programme, so I'm not really complaining!

Things get distracting

Right, so I've added my prescribed 5 RSS feeds, in addition to one for the 23 Things programme blog. In an endeavour to be serious and work-related, the first two were for news from COPAC and CERL (the Consortium of European Research Libraries). Then I tried to find some related to Oxford libraries. I hoped there'd be one for news about the new ILS, but couldn't find one, so I added the two OULS news/notices ones on the Bodleian's home page. Need a fifth one -- perhaps something a little less worthy? How about the Environment Agency's flood warnings, since my house is on the edge of a flood-risk area? Nope, no feed for that. Blogs about books? How about Doreen Tovey, chronicler of the lighter side of living in the country with Siamese cats? Or blogs about, or even by Siamese cats? --some of those highly intelligent, talkative and imperious creatures are bound to be writing their own blogs on how to keep humans in their proper place, i.e. firmly under an elegant velvety paw. Siamese Supremacy, Wubert the Siamese, Meezers ... oh dear, who moved the hands of the clock round so far? I haven't even started studying my fellow 23 Thing-ers blogs yet, and it's time for tea!

Hordes of the Things

There are, if I've counted right, 104 participating bloggers on the 23 Things (what do I call it -- programme? exercise?). And mine, by an accident of sorting, is top of the list! I could spend a considerable amount of time nosing around to see what other people are saying ...