S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 239

One Last Wordle

I hope everyone out there is having a great holiday. At the moment I'm trying out my guy's top secret Christmas gift to me, a brand new office chair, which is a thousand times better than what I had, and so comfortable it's almost indecent (this is also a wildly romantic gift for reasons that, well, I'm not going to tell you, just trust me, it is.)

As I've been putting together the last week of posts for this year, I'm finding some old links I haven't visited in a while, like Wordle. Here's ...

Wishing You

Elves at Work

We're having a stay-at-home open house Christmas this year, and with all the friends who have been stopping in I think it's going to be one of the best ever. The girls decided to paint elf masks yesterday, and I couldn't resist taking a shot of teenagers playing like little ones:



I should have gotten pictures of the boys versus the girls chocolate chip cookie bake-off, but I was too busy juggling mixers (and alas, the boys won -- but only because my guy judged. I still think the girls' mi...

For 2010

If you're looking for a personal info manager and a virtual calendar to use for next year, I thought I'd put in a personal good word for this freeware by Martin Bresson:

Chaos Manager 2.25 is a "little simple and compact organizer which features an appointment/to-do manager (appointments will pop-up), a calendar, contacts (phone/address-book), a notebook which supports multiple topics, sync via internet, email forwarding of appointments, print/import/export and much more. All is password prote...

Holiday Ten

Ten Things to do During the Holidays

221B is an advergame to promote the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Looks like it might be fun, although it seems you have to be on Facebook to play it so I couldn't try it out.

Want to learn how to write a movie script treatment the easy way? Try Bill Myer's Automatic Movie Script Treatment Generator.

ArchteypeWriting.com has a trio of story-starter generators to play with: Character Generator, an Everyday Problems Generator, and a Plot Scenario Generator.

Play...

Save 'em Ten

Ten Things to Save Your Screen

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Decorate your own virtual Christmas tree then display it as your screensaver with ScreenSavers.com's free Animated Christmas Tree (OS: Win 9x/ME/2K/NT/XP)

For those who like to look at something more heavenly, check out RGGWare's Astronomy Screensaver (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP)

Set your desktop ablaze with LaconicSoftware.com's Free...

Holiday Flash

Make your own animated holiday card for your blog here

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Make your own animated Christmas card for your blog here


Make your own animated Christmas chick card for your blog here

Last Minute Writer Gift Ideas

I always think writers are the easiest people to shop for (one book store gift card and you're done) but my family assures me that we're not. I've collected complaints from the rest of the clan, and they cite the following:

1. You can't buy writers actual books because you don't know what we already own (true, but my shelves are not hidden, and neither is my LibraryThing account, which is searchable. Plus I always have a running shopping list on the bulletin board in the office.)

2. Readi...

Yes, Another Online Toy

This is another thing that is too cool not to share -- Infinite Comic is an online genator that takes "a random image from Flickr superimposed with some random text off of Twitter based on keywords of your choosing" and creates a three-panel comic strip from them.

I tried it and got these generated (click on images to see larger versions):



Lynn Viehl - This has to be some pics from one of my LB&LI winners over the summer. :)



StarDoc - Not sure whose bookcases these are, but love the toys.



Charlen...

IAB Goes Overseas

I love German publishers; they always give my novels such fantasic cover art.



For my readers over there, this German translation edition of If Angels Burn will be released in April 2010.