I have no idea which of us activated your account! But yeah, it's manual as some of the, erm, "creatively irrelevant" contributors we've had in the past have shown remarkable determination.
The default avatar is the ED logo (well, you no doubt know that already!) which materialises thanks to a particularly horrible fragment of SQL (horrible because I wrote it, and additionally horrible because it's SQL) that gets run periodically so that I can keep track of who's already been "dealt with".
