I have some winners!!! The M randomizers picked:

#9: Patty

Patty posted the following on April 21, 2008 at 1:02 pm. - Edit

This is actually the first time I’ve visited your blog. I’ve never stamped before, but am interested in getting started, so I’ve been blog browsing and got linked to yours from somewhere!

Patty, please email me your address. You can click on the Contact Me link on the top right and use the form or email me at stampin (at) scrapbit (dot) com. I also need you to tell me which stamp set you’d like to receive.

For The Digi Chick winner, M picked the following:

#14: Zakirah.

Zakirah posted the following on April 21, 2008 at 12:37 pm. - Edit

Lucky you!! Totally deserve it ~ congrats!! I saw you gallery at DST and your work is amazing. Wishing you a happy and fun time making projects with the awesome stuff by the TDC designers!!

Zakirah, I have your email address but please contact me so that I can confirm it with you and I’ll email the gift certificate code to that email address. I’ll make the purchase after I hear back from you.

Thanks everybody for playing!! Congrats to the winner.

I get distracted easily, especially if there’s a new application. I got this info from one of my Tweet buddy and the app is called Animoto. What is it? Check it out yourself, BUT, if you are in education and if your classroom is interested in using this, you can get the extended service for a year free. Kind of like some other photo slide shows (e.g. Photobucket) but I think it’s a bit more funky with how the music effects the images. Ok, maybe I’m just a bit cheezy {::SMILES}.

What I like about Animoto is that you can grab photos from different locations (Flickr, Facebook, etc.). To test this out, I just grabbed some photos from my Flickr folder. I should have done one with my cards or pages with some jazz, huh? It was so fun and easy. I remember doing a video for my multimedia class years ago (I blew up Idaho’s capital building, ha!). It took me a few days to do something like this (too bad I can’t find the tape - yes, tape!).

Ok, if you’re not into web stuff but want to create a photo slideshow manually and not have to upload anything online, check out Microsoft’s free Photo Story. In education, this can be used to create a digital storybook. One student who’s teaching actually had her students (3rd graders) create the digital story that I assigned as homework. They all had a blast. It’s super easy to do and you can send your file via email. Let your kids have fun and send grandma some cool photo stories.

As a note, I’d like to use more (hip) music in my tuts too but I don’t want to go through the copyright process or pay. There are free music but I have no time to go through them. Maybe one day.

I used Pencil Line sketch to help me with this LO. This was March’s sketch. Here’s the story behind the title… When M was a baby, up to two years I think, she was not the most generous kid in terms of smiles. She’s even tougher when it came time to take studio photos. We’d do everything and we’d just get a stare and she she did smile, either the camera person wasn’t ready or she blinked. So these are a few photos that we got from Sears. There’s one good smiling photo and the rest looked like she didn’t care to be there… of course there’s got to be one where she either has something, her hand/thumb usually, in or in front of her mouth.

Now she’s a totally different person. Quite friendly although there have been days where she’s just not camera friendly or will not smile for people she doesn’t know well. Her excuse… “Emma’s grumpy.”

Now, does any of you have a Ning account? Ning is a social networking account. Once you have one, you can create a group of your own or join another group. It’s like Yahoo group but with a better interface. I’ve used my Ning account to join educational groups… so work only… but recently I just joined two scrapbooking groups: Pink Paislee and Scrapbook Dimensions Magazine. If you’re not socialed out yet, check Ning out and the two groups. You might like it. In my field, I find the groups I’m in very informational.

Are you subscribe to Prima’s blog? If not, check out their Friday giveaway. So many goodies!!!

My presentation went well except that I had no Internet access. It went down right before I clicked on the first link. Then it just went in and out but everytime I needed it, it was down. URGH!!! I had screen shots but a few things I needed to do just had to have Internet. Oh well. People said they got some good info, so that’s good.  I talked about the following:

For my online class I use: Meebo chat for virtual chat sessions/off hours, del.icio.us for my bookmarks, and YouTube for tutorials
For my  work/networking I use: Twitter and subscribed to different groups using my Ning account on top of the blog subscriptions that I follow using Google Reader
Previous items or things I use with my students: Flickr group and Flickr map (check out this map if you haven’t!)
My browser: Flock and Firefox

You can Google if you’re interested in finding out more or visit my work blog for more info. We haven’t had time to start a decent blog but planning on it soon. I have my next session this afternoon. Hopefully I have service then.

I have Internet, yeah! It’s $9.95/day but I really needed it. I got what I need to do for tomorrow done, learned lots in the process of it, and even helped out with some work website issues. Now I just need to go to bed.

Ok, what to share this…  If you’ve been following the ColourLovers tutorials, I have something here for you… what happens when you click on the “Create a pattern with this palette” button? Try it out. It’s pretty cool! Select a palette first and you should get to this window.

M… poor thing, her stomach is upset or something. She threw up at the restaurant. Nice huh? Earlier she said her tummy hurts. She took a nap and after she woke up she said she’s hungry. We went to the restaurant and she wouldn’t eat and when she did take a bite of the salmon… everything came out. Thankfully, the husband is here with me. But, soon after we got back to the hotel, she was fine. Hubby, who got puked on (literally all over — M was standing on the chair right next to him and hubby was extending his arms out to pick her up) got cleaned up and decided that after all that (picking salmon out of his favorite hat and cell phone besides rinsing everything else) he needed a drink (or more). So he went to the bar and joined my co-worker for some male bonding. What an evening!

I also have a card to share. It’s an old one that I did. Thought you might like it for inspiration if you have this Big Bloom retired SU set. I think this was one of my first card where I cut a lot. I use to not like doing it but now I find the need to always cut something. This was also the first card that I created that I really like. Again, I am hard on myself.

Well, good night. Got to grab breakfast at 7 a.m.  tomorrow. The great thing about today was that the front desk knew I was bringing my M today and so our room is right next to the back door of the room they’re using for the meals, YES! My sessions are also just around the corner. NICE!!

Ok, leaving for my conference in a little bit. I will not have anything new, project wise, to share until this weekend. I had plans on getting stuff ready and just automatically post for me but I never got to it. I did a few that I posted already and besides that, I’ve just been working late prepping for my presentations. Hubby said I’m going to have to much info but hey, I rather have too much and cut back as needed than the other way around. So for today, I just want to share one little item… I found out about this from my Twit buddies last week or so.

What I want to share is a new online photo editing place. If you don’t have any photo editing application on your computer or you just need to do something quick and not too overly complicated Adobe has a new online application, it’s called Photoshop Express. You can check it out and play around with it. Opening an account is free and you have a few megs to mess with. Now, if you’re a Picnik user (Flickr uses Picnik too), PE is similar. For a comparison, check out what Steve Dembo has to say. He’s quite known in my field, technology in education.

Alright, got to finish packing. I’ll check back in later if I have Internet in my room. M’s so excited to go. She’s been packed since last night and dragging her big back pack around all morning. She looks super cute too (she ALWAYS pick out her own outfit) and I should get some pics.  If anybody out there are ed. techs or in IT, let me know, I’d be happy to share my work on: Actual use of Web 2.0 Technology (beyond blogs and wikis) and using Joomla and WordPress (MU) for faculty or organization sites (they’re both geared towards higher ed but can be applied to K-12). Bye!

This is the other page that I did for the Scrap Artist challenge. I thought I was suppose to do two pages from whatever kit and not one from my own kit and one from the freebie kit. Last night at midnight was the cut-off date and time. I’m just waiting to see what the results are. You can see the submissions in their gallery. Quite a bit, huh? Not hoping much, but we’ll see. Like I said, I had fun, got some LOs done, AND got a free kit. What else can I ask, right?

The Internet is a BAAAAD thing for me. Especially now that I’m so into challenges and contests AND blog candies. I’ve never gotten anything from the last but it was still always fun to participate in all and hope that maybe one day I can get some cool freebie. I can’t do them all but I’m trying to do something from the different ones that I love. Prima has a new monthly sketch contest now. It’s called Prima’s Build-a-Page. You get prizes. Just don’t forget to submit your layout by the 25th. I love the sketch and I have the perfect photos — just found them last night {::SMILES}.

Do you know that PaperTrey has a blog hop contest each month on the 25th? I just found out today but I might try it for next month. I love their stuff. If you have a blog and either have or will be getting some PTI stuff, watch our for April’s hop. Should be fun. I should put it in my calendar, huh? {::SMILES}

Ok, have a great day. We just did our taxes yesterday and I feel so good (although both our muscles were tense during the process). I hate tax time. It was also nice too that we didn’t have to pay. I think the tax people made a mistake but whatever, they did check two-three times. I’ll let you know if we go to prison, ha! It might not be bad… more time to scrapbook and make cards… ha ha ha… I wonder if I’d be able to blog too… ok… enough of that… laters…

My partner in crime from Tara Sroka, the great and talented Gabi Butcher, has some neat freebies. Check them out. Be sweet and leave a comment if you download — or if you are there. She’d love it. Pair her freebies with the tuts that I have here:

Texture Overlay - this is for her texture download
Alter your Elements/Alphas - this is for her shapes download

So if you want to use her shapes, you just select the white space around the circles, inverse, and use the outline to outline your paper — just like the video.

Tags: freebies

Before I forget… have you visited Shabby Princess lately? They have a new freebie kit. Check it out, very nice!! Also, Weeds and Wildflowers are having their 1st year anniversary celebration. On their blog they have a mini kit freebie (very nice looking) and it’s only going to be up for 24 hrs. There will be a new giveaway until Sunday, so bookmark them, add them to your rss or subscribe via email. Whatever… but W&W is one of my favorite stores. I’d love to be Gina’s CT/guest {::SMILES}.

Last week I posted some Kuler info and also a one liner on ColourLovers.com. Well, I got to exploring ColourLovers a bit and it’s a really cool place. I found out that it was created way before Kuler and even though Kuler is very nice, CL has a better community and also this thing called patterns. YES, FREE patterns!! This isn’t great new just for digi scrappers, but those who has Photoshop (Elements included), you can create your own background/pattern paper with premade AND free patterns. Once you have your pattern paper, you can either go digital or print it out and use it for your cards, layouts, altered, and more — do whatever you do with pattern paper.

CL isn’t the only place to get patterns. There are many other free ones but this is my newest find and I want to share it with you. Watch the video and see how easy it is to create your own pattern paper from a sample pattern. Keep in mind that if you want bigger patterns, you need a higher ppi pattern sample or in other word a bigger sample. We’ll get to that later. For now, enjoy this.

Ok, so this isn’t stamping or scrapbooking BUT, if you at least blog, use Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Picasa, Gmail, del.icio.us, or whatever, you got to check this browser out. Here’s a Flock How-To for more info.

Flock’s backend is powered by Mozilla (and you know how awesome Firefox is) but with added features. Now that I installed flock, I don’t have to go to my blog site, login, and type my blog. I can just click on the little icon on my Flock browser and start writing. When I’m done, I just push publish. There are limitations, I don’t have all the advanced features that are available through WordPress, for example the time stamp (in case I want to post-date the publishing time). But, for just general blog updating like right now, this is great.

I use Flickr a lot. I have the Flickr uploaded but with Flock, I don’t need it anymore. I can just use the built-in uploaded from Flock. The cool thing about Flock and Flickr is that now I can see all my contacts on the left side of my browser or what they call People in the Browser. If I want to see work by one of my favorite “friend” I can just click on the media icon next to that person and on the top of my browser, I see little thumbnails of my friend’s photos. Of course I can click to enlarge. This is the same with YouTube. All my favorite videos will be listed right there on the top.

Now I have my GMail account and del.icio.us bookmark set up in Flock. It took me a while to figure it out. I didn’t see this yellow instruction line on top, right underneath where my Flickr photos are.

Here it is, my Flock browser with all my accounts. I hardly use my Facebook account, maybe this will help. But, just having the blogging, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube feature, plus del.icio.us, is good enough for me. This will help me blog and upload photos more efficiently, use my GMail, keep in touch with friends and coworker, AND help me keep up to date with my professional stuff through Twitter. I still have my Google for my homepage but Flock is an awesome addition. You should try it out, especially if you blog and upload photos.

Ok, this is my first post with Flock… let me see how it goes…

EDIT: The last image was a picture on my desktop. I dragged the picture to my Flock blog editor and soon after a window opened asking me where I want to upload the photo to. I chose Picasa just because I’ve never uploaded anything to it before but I also had the option to upload to Flickr. I added the tag, changed a few settings, and pushed the publish/send (I can’t remember) button. The image was then inserted and I continued typing the rest of my blog posting. It was nice.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: links