Is there a type of program you can download that allows you to make your own avitar?

Open any picture. I use Irfanview. It's free, small, and serves most of my purposes in editing my photography. Crop it down to only what you want. Using my Avatar as an example I took a photo at the Louvre in the Tuilleries (sp?) where my mom and I had stopped to rest after a long day walking around Paris. I shot a photo of the Louvre looking across a fountain pond where children play with toy boats. The photo was something like 1200 x 1600, but all I wanted was the toy boat. I cropped it by clicking and dragging to select what I wanted, then using the "crop" feature to delete everything except what I selected. Finally I resized what was left to 60x60, saved it, the used the information here in this tutorial to upload it to the site. Voila!

Thanks!