Cartoon #2 in our tragic series.
Just in case it's too small to easily read:
Panel #1 Caption: The council of unicorns meets to discuss Kiki's death threats against the new cat, Fudge.
Panel #2 Caption: Incredulous Unicorn speaks.
Incredulous Unicorn, transparently: I can't believe this is happening. That Kiki is a maniac. Some of the things I've heard her say just make me want to disappear. I'm allergic to cats.
Panel #3 Caption: Young Garrulous Unicorn voices his opinion.
Garrulous Unicorn, cutely: I just want our kitties to love each other.
Panel #4 (Virtual Unicorn in captivity) Caption: Will the hissing and yowling never end? Virtual Unicorn feels trapped.
Soon, the awful conclusion.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Thing #6: More Flickr Mashups
The Virtual Unicorn household implodes:
This is Bubblr, a tool that enables you to search for Flickr images, add speech bubbles or thought balloons, then assemble them into a comic strip.
For some reason, the speech balloons show up really teeny in the blog.
They're much larger and easier to read on the actual Bubblr site, which is located at www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/ Just click on the archive and search for Kiki and Fudge #1 by Virtual Unicorn.
In case you can't read the microscopic speech balloons here on the blog, this is what they say:
Panel #1. Kiki, eyes glowing: Death to the interloper.
Panel #2. Kiki, eyes glowing: Remove him, or I will gaze upon his with my laser beam eyes.
Panel #3. Fudge, forlornly: Don't hate me. I am nonviolent. I desire only peace and harmony.
Panel #4. Kiki, eyes narrowed: Clearly he is a menace that must be destroyed.
More comics on the way as the tragic saga of The New Cat at Our House unfolds.
This is Bubblr, a tool that enables you to search for Flickr images, add speech bubbles or thought balloons, then assemble them into a comic strip.
For some reason, the speech balloons show up really teeny in the blog.
They're much larger and easier to read on the actual Bubblr site, which is located at www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/ Just click on the archive and search for Kiki and Fudge #1 by Virtual Unicorn.
In case you can't read the microscopic speech balloons here on the blog, this is what they say:
Panel #1. Kiki, eyes glowing: Death to the interloper.
Panel #2. Kiki, eyes glowing: Remove him, or I will gaze upon his with my laser beam eyes.
Panel #3. Fudge, forlornly: Don't hate me. I am nonviolent. I desire only peace and harmony.
Panel #4. Kiki, eyes narrowed: Clearly he is a menace that must be destroyed.
More comics on the way as the tragic saga of The New Cat at Our House unfolds.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Thing 6: Flickr Mashups (a.k.a. The Ultimatum)
I awoke this morning to find this lying on my pillow, covered in cat hair:
"Remove the interloper and no one will get hurt."
This sordid little ultimatum obviously comes from Kiki, our resident cat, whose turf has been invaded by the newcomer. Clearly she is having a mental breakdown. That, or it's just her regular, run-of-the-mill demonic possession flaring up again. It's hard to say.
Here's how I think she did it:
After I went to bed last night, Kiki snuck into the front room, set up the laptop, and accessed the Internet. She went to the neflins23things blog and read about Flickr mashups.
Then she went to Erik Kastner's Spell with Flickr site and created her doom-filled message. In the old days she would have used scissors, magazine clippings, and paste instead of just resizing the window, taking a screenshot, and printing it out on the all-in-one machine.
I know she used our laptop to do it because I found her telltale screenshot floating ominously on the desktop when I logged on this morning.
I've uploaded it to my blog so that others can view the evidence for themselves. Things have gotten ugly around here. Pray for me. Pray for us all.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Thing 5 All Over Again: Flickr Redux
Okay, I now have a Flickr account. I took some photos of the cats. Here they are. Kiki is the glamorous green-eyed goddess. Fudge Swirl is the beauteous blue-eyed boy. Enjoy!
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
photographer: Virtual Unicorn
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Thing 5: Flickr
What do bengal cats look like? I went to Flickr to look for some photos to show you. I searched through "Everybody's uploads" using the search term bengal cats.
Given the popularity of this new breed, it was no surprise that lots of results popped up. Constraining the search to "tags only" helped narrow the results.
Some photos were for bengal tigers rather than for domestic housecats, but for the most part, I found just what I was looking for.
Not every shot I came across would allow me to download it. Clearly some photographers wanted only to display their work without allowing viewers to have copies.
However, quite a few photographers were willing to allow downloads. Here are a few of the images I came across:
Okay. So what are we looking at? Quick course: Bengals 101.
Some bengals have small, round, solid spots like cheetahs. Just look at the gorgeous kitty below.
photographer: Watchcaddy
Many bengals, however, have actual rosettas that resemble those of jaguars. Look down.
See how this cat's markings are made up of groupings of spots with an open area in the middle that is lighter in color than the spots, but darker than the surrounding field? Pretty cool.
photographer: Watchcaddy
And there's another spotting pattern that's quite a bit rarer.
The spots are larger with less space between them. They more closely resemble the broad, patch-like spotting of the clouded leopard.
The coat of the kitty below is tending more toward the clouded pattern than that of the jaguar.
photographer: Knein
Then there are the marbled bengals. Their coat pattern is not spotted at all, but swirled, almost like that of an ocelot. They can be quite stunning, like the young cat pictured below.
photographer: Junglelure
I have just described the possible patterns of the bengal coat. But don't forget to think about color in addition to pattern.
Most bengals, like the one pictured here, have brown coloration. Their coats consist of various shades of black, dark brown, rust brown, and buff.
photographer: alexanderino
Less common, but much in demand, are silver bengals. Their color range includes mostly black, charcoal, medium gray, and silvery gray. Below is a lovely silver marbled bengal.
photographer: p.smithson
Finally, there are the snow bengals. This is the newest color variation. These bengals are being bred to resemble snow leopards.
They are very pale in color. Like Siamese cats, they are born pure white. Their color develops as they mature.
Another point of similarity between snow bengals and their Siamese cousins is that many snow bengals have beautiful blue eyes.
photographer: barkerja
So what do the two cats at my house look like?
One is a classic brown tabby, beautiful enough to be a bengal--she even has ear tufts!--although she almost certainly is not. (She is a rescue kitty, obtained from a shelter.)
She does a great bengal impersonation, however, and looks almost exactly like the marbled brown bengal below whose photo I found on Flickr. It's hard to imagine how someone could have abandoned this gorgeous cat.
photographer: ramsescity2003
As for our newest addition, he is an eight-month-old snow bengal, specifically a chocolate lynx-point marble. He looks like some sort of delicious ice cream treat made with fudge ripple.
He, too, is a rescue kitty, whose breeder was unable to keep her bengal cattery going in the face of sudden overwhelming medical bills.
He had a couple of health problems as a kitten and could not immediately be sold. A friend of the breeder nursed him back to health and then adopted him out for a song. We can't believe how lucky we are to have him!
Here's a marbled snow bengal from Flickr with a similar look.
photographer: gribb0
I am now officially exhausted. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to do this blogpost!
Finding the photos was easy enough. However, I was unable to download them directly to Blogger. I had to download them to my computer first, then upload them to the blog.
Nor could I cut-and-paste the URL to the Flickr image! I had to create every backlink by hand. Twice.
Type it into the blog, then type it into the link field. Double-check the spelling both places by referring back to the Flickr window. Major pain.
Plus, once I got the photos uploaded to the blog, I could not move them around. They stayed put at the top of the blogpost. No way to insert them where I wanted them in the text.
This meant I had to find the photos, write the blog, figure out the order in which the photos needed to appear, upload them in reverse order, then rewrite the text around the photos.
Do you know how crazed I am at this point?
I will now post and check the links. They'd better work, or I swear I will gnaw through the restraints and rampage through Tokyo devouring skyscrapers.
If--and this is a big if--I'm not required to do any major bad-link triage, I'll consider breaking out my digital camera and photographing my actual cats so you can see them.
If I succeed, I'll sign up for a Flickr account and upload the photos. Stay tuned!
Thing 4: RSS Feeds and NewsReaders
My readers' indulgence is requested. I had to get my previous (ranting / whining) post off my chest before I could turn my thoughts back to addressing Thing 4.
The good news is I had a lot of fun with RSS feeds and think that they are a wonderful idea--basically an updating of the magazine subscription concept for print media.
You know how you can go out to look for the magazines you want and buy them at the store? That's like visiting your favorite blogsites periodically, checking for new posts. Your other option is to subscribe to magazines and have them snail-mailed to you. That's like an RSS feed.
It makes good sense. It's also addicting. If I had infinite amounts of leisure time, I'd subscribe to a lot of magazines. Unfortunately, my leisure time is extremely limited, so I confine myself to reading magazines while waiting for my appointment at the doctor's office.
So I told myself going into this exploration of RSS feeds that I should only sign up for a handful of feeds, and they had to be ones I really, really wanted. I also vowed to keep my selections weighted more toward the professional (library-related) end of the spectrum than toward the pop-culture or purely personal-interest ends.
(You realize, of course, that this means my spectrum must be triangular rather than linear. This is intentional, I assure you. No, really.)
So, after doing the background reading / viewing, I signed up for a Bloglines account.
Bloglines, by the way, has in addition to its primary site, a new beta site which had some interesting features. Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the difference between the two sites at first and got very confused.
I'd log on. Things would look different. I wouldn't be able to find a feature I'd previously used. . . . Once I finally got that figured out, I regrouped and chose 7 feeds in addition to the default Bloglines / News feed.
They are:
Dilbert Daily Strip and Get Fuzzy, two cartoons I enjoy but have read only sporadically since I don't subscribe to a newspaper at home. (Newsflash: RSS feeds replace print as Virtual Unicorn's syndicated comic strip delivery medium of choice. Western civilization falls. Film at 11 p.m.)
Get Fuzzy is about your average guy, Rob, and his two pets: an easy-going dog and a hyper-intense cat. Pets are personal, and so is my Get Fuzzy feed. Dilbert, on the other hand, is about a motley crew of engineers struggling to realize poorly defined goals under ridiculous working conditions. I consider Dilbert extraordinarily work-related.
I also signed up for the Publishers Weekly--Children's Books News and Jacksonville Public's Library Storytime feeds. I guess that makes my area of interest within library service pretty obvious. (Can anyone guess which department of the Alachua County Library District I work in?) So these two feeds are work-related, too.
Also work-related--see how on-task I am?--are Helene Blowers's LibraryBytes and NEFLIN's Blah Blah Blah Blog. I want you to know right now that these two choices were not a suck-up to the 23 Things @ NEFLIN prize-awarding committee. I have been intending to subscribe to them all along. I just didn't know how.
See? 23 Things @ NEFLIN has addressed my needs and taught me useful skills already. Thank you, NEFLIN, and Ms. Blowers. I intend to follow both blogs religiously. (This paragraph is the suck-up. Do I get a prize now? If so, I want a subscription to Bengals Illustrated. In hardcopy. Snail-mailed to me.)
Okay, almost there. The last RSS feed I subscribed to was Rotten Tomatoes: Movies. It's a compendium of movie reviews with a rating assigned according to how many film critics found a particular movie "fresh" (that is, recommended it) versus how many found it "rotten" (advised against seeing it).
It's customizable so that you can look at an amalgam of all reviewers' opinions, just those of the "top" (nationally famous) reviewers, or just those of the reviewers of your choice. A thoroughly nifty idea, and I've used it for years, mostly by clicking on review links found at IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database).
As an added bonus, since I get asked fairly regularly at work about movie content--which films are suitable for children, which are too "adult" for teens, etc.--my subscription to this feed, too, is actually work related as well.
So that's the saga of my Bloglines RSS feeds. I'm still shocked that I can't find exactly the kind of blog I want dedicated to bengal cats. I felt sure somebody would be doing one just like what I've been envisioning by now. I guess not.
Why am I so desperate for such a blog? Guess who just adopted a young, rescued bengal? Yours truly. Yesterday. He's gorgeous but very disoriented and distressed. He's been crying piteously since we brought him home.
The cat we already have (the new bengal is supposed to become her playmate) is in a towering snit. She hopes a meteor will crash from the sky, obliterating him and if possible, me along with him. There is now a 100% chance that my existing cat is plotting to kill me.
So if no one is already blogging about bengals in the way I'd like to see, perhaps I should start such a blog myself. After I finish 23 Things @ NEFLIN. In my copious spare time. Provided I live that long.
Tortured by Doubts
I can't believe how far behind I am already! Thing 9 has already been posted, and I'm only just now finishing up Thing 4.
I think a lot about how I can spend less time doing 23 Things @ NEFLIN and still get the benefit of learning the new technology--and the only thing I can come up with is cutting down on the blogging.
I can't really cut the exploration time. I try to keep it as concise, focussed, and task-oriented as possible: no tangents, no goofing around--but it still takes hours. I have to read enough of the background material to understand what I'm doing, and I have to explore enough to be able to see how things works and have something to report.
I feel if I pare it down any further, I'll just be pretending. And I seem to remember reading in the rules somewhere that perfunctory participation would not be counted.
So it looks like its the blogtime that's got to be reduced. I'm going to have to try to make my blogposts shorter. Again, the problem is, I don't know how to do that. I want to report on what I've learned. I'm already crystalizing to the very essence.
I guess my dilemma is that I'm afraid I'll actually expend more time by trying to shorten things even further. When writing a report of any kind, I rarely find myself intentionally padding. Just the opposite in fact. I usually trim my rough drafts so that the finished product winds up shorter than the original draft.
I think this is probably a different writing pattern from the one others use. I'm guessing here, but I think most writers start short and go long; that is, they start from an outline and then fill it in. I, on the other hand, start long and go short: amassing a huge wealth of disorganized details, grouping them, then throwing away whatever's redundant or unnecessary.
Sometimes, if I'm really pressed for space, I'll have to throw out important stuff, too. But I never know which details fall into which category (essential, sacrificial, or unimportant) until I do the sorting. Sorting is the way I process.
Perhaps others process in a different way. (Mulling this, I find myself toying with despair.)
One last observation before I abandon this angst-riddled and totally off-topic post: I looked through some of my fellow 23 Things participants' blogposts--as we have all been urged to do--and found some of them almost unimaginably brief.
Did people really have so little reaction to their explorations? Might they already be so familiar with the Things that it's so old hat that there's nothing much left to say? (Egad, does that make me feel like a dinosaur!)
Or are posts that compressed exactly what the 23 Things organizers want? A few parameters would help me to better know what's expected of me. Perhaps I should impose my own parameters. I could set myself a goal of spending no more than 2 hours per Thing and confine my blogposts to 500 words or less.
The difficulty is that I think such restrictions--self-imposed or otherwise--would be deeply, deeply unsatisfying to me. Like buying a 500-page book and finding that it contains only one word per page. That's all? I spent all that money for a book, and 500 words is all I get?
Translate that as: I participated in 23 Things and that's all I got out of it?
I guess my real problem is that I want to truly get something out of this experience. Something meaningful. Something real. I want to actually learn something. (More accurately, a lot of things.) And that is just going to take some time.
So I guess my best plan is to carry on, avail myself of every time-saving practice that I can, sample rather than savor, blog fast, and hope that after a while, I'll get familiar enough with the process to get into a rhythm and become a little more efficient. We live in hope.
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