For many of us, things get a little slow around this time of year, and yet the boss still expects us to come in and sit in front of a computer.

I'm not sure what folks did to look busy during the holidays in Ye Olden Times, say pre-1994, but these days, we have plenty of time-wasting Web sites to burn up the work hours.

For some of us, that means perusing various blogs, offering our own little bit of wisdom for others to ignore. But since typing in plain old words can get a little boring, a few sites offer means to spice up those missives.

Back in the pre-Web days of dial-up bulletin board discussions, folks were mastering the art of text graphics, essentially turning basic keyboard, or ASCII, characters into illustrations that one has to squint at to see.

Advancing this art form to the next level, the folks at Typorganism feature among its many odd tools the ASCII-O-Matic at www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic, which can turn any photo into a representation composed entirely of ASCII text.

Another site that offers users a few more options for photo-to-text conversion is Text-Image.com at www.text-image.com. The conversion tool will turn photos into color illustrations comprising whatever the users type in, be it phrases or random text.

Another form of this ASCII art is the Figlet, with which one can build giant words composed of basic characters in any number of fonts. One at www.schnoggo.com/figlet.html allows users to type in a message and convert it using a variety of adjustable attributes.

For other sites dedicated to this process, one can visit the ASCII Arts Web Ring at www.artcontext.org/ascii, and take a chance on the random links connection.

Of course, software designers didn't stop at using keyboard characters to make online art, as they ventured on to use the art itself to create new images.

People have been using small pieces of art to create larger representations for centuries, and they have been using small photos to create larger illustrations since the advent of film. Several sites have brought tools that do that work to the Web.

Some sites, including Picture Mosaics at www.picturemosaics.com, will do all the work for you, taking, for example, your old family photos and compiling them into one larger representative image for a reasonable fee.

If you want to create a photo mosaic on your own, a popular freeware application for doing it is at AndreaPlanet at www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic.

But my investigation on the subject ground to a complete stop when I found Vizog.com.

Among some other nifty tools is a picture mosaic feature that allows the user to upload a photo and then tell it to search the Web for a particular type of image with which to build the mosaic. So, for example, you can build your mom out of flowers, your dad out of golf clubs or that weird uncle no one talks to at parties out of … well, you get the picture.

Andrew Kleske is online editor for the North County Times. E-mail him at kleske@nctimes.com.