OK, OK, it’s only a graphic, but I think it looks quite nice! Get yours at ImageChef It’s free of course!

I nabbed this graphic off a-stat-a-day
Did you know we have a ning site of our very own? So if you visited it before these stats were compiled, your visits were included in these stats. And if not, it’s not too late to join it!

he web is my platform; I shall never lack.
She maketh me to surf abundant (though often vapid) content;
She leadeth me to streaming media; she restoreth my cache.
She guideth me in the path of abiding by the TOS for my conscience’s sake.
Yea, though I tread a fine line of legality I will fear no lawsuits for my poverty and my five wits are with me.
Thy large redundant data warehouses and distributed availability comfort me.
Thou preparest a bounty of digital goodies for me in the presence of corporate lawyers.
Thou annointest my blog with widgets; but my hard drive stayeth small.
Surely twitters and readers shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell with Scoble in the house of the rich bloggers forever.

I was intrigued by this depiction at a meeting I attended yesterday. I’m told the original purpose
was to illustrate “How a woman’s brain works” but that statement is not verifiable. You can go gaga looking at the little blue balls moving around. Not sure how well blogger handles Iframes’ either.

I was just surfing around the startupalooza website for who’s coming to Portland and I ran across the toonlet site. I remember writing a Mr. Potato head stack in Hypercard many years ago and it was a lot of fun. I’d seen others as well, desktop toys for Windoze and Mac, all along the same line. Well, toonlet lets you give them moods and write captions and publish them for posterity, which is a step further. So I got into toonlet and created Calendargeek, an alterego for myself.

I don’t really have dreadlocks but it was the coolest hairdo that fit the face. Some avatars are what people WISH they looked like, not what they really look like. I built Calendargeek to be expressive, not necessarily to look like me, or look like I wish I looked, and certainly not to be a glamour queen. However, I’m glad I don’t look like Calendargeek. As far as I can tell, toonlet only allows one character to talk per frame. And it doesn’t seem to let you edit the strips once they’re “published.” So given that, and since an awful lot of the time I feel like I’m doing a monologue anyway, Calendargeek is talking to herself and not to any other character, but you can listen in. Unfortunately in this blog layout it cuts off the punchline, and there’s not much I can do about it. However if you click the strip you can see it in all its glory in its own home. Anyway, thanks for your indulgence. Toonlet is a lot of fun. Not sure quite what their revenue model is, but I’ll stay tooned. Groan… sorry, just could not resist that one!

Amazingly enough, it’s not Flash! It’s put forth as javascript, but we all know (OK you probably didn’t know but I did) that what lurks in javascript tags may or may not actually be javascript. However it appears if you “Use the source Luke” on the toonlet website it’s all accomplished with css and dojo.

Another widget you can make very easily! Go ahead, vote! it’s easy.

My ex-business partner Deb Weitzman was of the opinion that I needed a flashier image, since both front and back operations for Tix•R•Us are now me. And what woman doesn’t want to look her best? Given our commitment to shop local wherever we can, we selected some new shoes, a couple of tops, and some really excellent jeans from Shoetini’s in Corvallis. The people there are friendly and great and they will even hem your pants for you, a service which I nearly always need. As an aside, they are also e-tailing neighbors (see my etailing neighbors post.) I also really like their website. They are very smart powering it with OSCommerce, and they did a great job customizing it. OSCommerce is free ecommerce software, so you know you’re not paying high markup for some overpriced website that spins and flashes but is otherwise useless. Argh…. it’s very easy for me to digress onto business or webby stuff, but this post is supposed to be about my makeover.

OK, back on track… We continued by updating a few wardrobe basics — a classy trenchcoat will take care of most Oregon chill just fine; a black cowl-neck sweater that fits well is just pure understated elegance, and the black and white short jacket is just right. We were surprisingly unsuccessful at locating any suitable khaki slacks but that will just give me an excuse to go shopping again. I got my first ever eyebrow waxing and it wasn’t nearly as painful as they portrayed it on The 40-year old Virgin. Georgia Kahl at Studio 953 in Albany completed the makeover with a haircut to die for. Obviously this salon is highly thought of when they don’t even need to create a website. Their customers rave about them in review sites all over the web and that’s better marketing than they could ever do themselves. They are not cheap, but a good hairdo is like good quality clothing — worth every penny. Just google Studio 953 and you’ll see what I mean. The link I provided was just a link to their location.

Find more music like this on Tix•R•Us Presenters Network

I built this widget on the T.P.N and then exported it to the blog. This is an MP3 version of our Christmas Download. You can REALLY tell the difference between .mp3 and .wav in classical music. The clarinet does not have the trueness and depth of tone and the piano sounds kind of flat and dingly, especially when doing mathematically complex intervals like minor seconds. But anyway, I thought I’d spread it to the blog.

This is the proof of concept calendar widget provided by yourminis.com that I made on The Tix•R•Us Presenters’ Network. This is several shades of geeky cool. For one thing it is powered by the calendar Feed from little old Tix•R•Us / Wazzup Local. What does that mean? It means you can create the quirkiest, fine-tuned, custom search imaginable of the Tix•R•Us / Wazzup Local events database. If you like only Punk or Gospel outdoor events on Thursdays within a 6 mile radius of your farmhouse in Shedd, Oregon that cost less than $10, you can create that search filter. In essence, it creates a custom calendar feed just for you. You then take that URL and feed it to the calendar widget. You can have the calendar in any color you like, so you can stop complaining about my icky orange color scheme. Then you can suck out the calendar code and paste it anywhere there’s Flash. Here’s another minor coolness: you can post the widget to your Blogger blog or a number of other well-known blogs right from inside the widget. I didn’t even have to copy/paste to get this calendar in here. How cool and Web 2.0 is that? I am having altogether too much fun. This is the web as it should be. OK, to WORK.

Tix•R•Us wishes to wish you a happy holiday in a very personal way. Colleen Dick and son Connor Dick’s recording of Debussy’s Primier Rhapsody for clarinet and piano is yours for the downloading. It’s not schlocky holiday music. We figured you probably have enough of that. The online Free Dictionary defines the musical rhapsody form as an irregular form incorporating improvisation. Debussy’s Rhapsody certainly fills the bill–it moves from typical Debussy soft and dreamy to playful stacatto with a little game of tag between the clarinet and piano. Connor is a 22 year old clarinet performance major at the University of Oregon, and Colleen has logged years as an accompanist since seventh grade. (We aren’t even going to say how many years that is.) Thanks for letting us share our own music with you. Enjoy it at the holidays or any time.