Captain’s log, stardate 100107: These are the voyages of the Starship Method. Our mission: to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Feel free to start humming the Star Trek theme song now. No, not this one.

Learning 2.0 has a sequel–Learning 2. 1 (check it out here)–so I’ve been working my way through the lessons and thought I’d give a short recap of where I am so far.

First off, a big thumbs up for #24 Zamzar. This application rocks! If you have a file on your hard drive or on another website and you need to have it converted to a different format, you simply upload the file (or type in the URL), indicate what you want it converted to, and input your e-mail address. Zamzar converts the file on its site. They then e-mail you and voila! you can download your reformated file. I converted YouTube video into mpg (a format you can play in PowerPoint) and it works like charm.

Thumbs down for the following:

#25 Letterpop. This site allows users to create full-color newsletters and announcements on-line. To print out any of your creations and get the benefit of the colorful layouts, you would need to have a color printer. If you were going to send the newsletter or announcement as an attachment, then that wouldn’t be a problem. “Why do this when you could just send an e-mail, plain and simple?” was the question that went through my head when I was looking at this site.

#26 YourMinis: To be fair, this isn’t a bad site. It’s just that after looking through all the widgets in their galleries, I still couldn’t find one I thought would be worthwhile to download.

#27 Photobucket: Not as impressive as Flickr.

#28 Magazine cover fun: More magazine cover image generators. If you played with the one at Big Huge Labs, you know how they work. Again, no bad sites. It’s just that I’ve already done this.

Skipping ahead a lesson, you should be able to tell by now how much I like #30 LOLCats.

I have also discovered that there are other, much smaller sites dedicated to themed captioned photos such as LOLBuffy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel):

And one for librarians. [Note: there is some use of the f-word on this site]:

I was impressed by LOLTrek which is less of a collection of captioned Star Trek pictures and more of a photo story. If you liked “Trouble with Tribbles” (the original series episode and Deep Space Nine’s homage to it), you’ll enjoy this bit of comedy from fan and physicist Stephen Granade. Stephen, by the way, aptly describes LOLCat pictures as “‘Hang in there, baby’ posters gone feral”.

James T. Kirk really says it best, though:

It’s official. I have had way too much fun with the FD Flickr Tools mashup. It’s great! In addition to the above librarian trading card, I also created the following:

A motivational poster. “Dreeing your weird” is a little shout-out to Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series. It means “to face your fate”.

A movie poster. The next big box office hit, I’m telling you.

Captioned photo.

A magazine cover. Very popular on Federation worlds.

And last, but not least, I designed and uploaded my own custom blog header which you can see above. As long as your blog template allows you to insert photos into the header, you can customize your header with any photo that you happen to have. This is the original photo:

It’s an unusual, but very cool, tribal-style belly dance costume that was being offered for sale on E-bay. I like the way the maker used buttons as a decoration for the bra cups. Funky, but colorful and reads well on stage.

The great Methodini will now attempt to post a picture to this blog:

Success! Susan Oliver struts her green-skinned stuff as Vina in the classic Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”. In this sequence, Vina is dressed as an Orion slave girl and does a fairly credible dance–right up until she attempts to shimmy. Not a pretty sight, friends. I suspect that is the sight o’ that shimmy that breaks the spell for Captain Pike, but that’s just me.

Here’s a link to a clip from the program that shows Vina dancing. Unfortunately–or perhaps fortunately–it omits the shimmy portion of the dance.