Final thoughts

I'm sure that no one's surprised that none of this was particularly new to me. :D Overall, it was fun to introduce people to these nifty new toys. I think the blogs and podcasts might be of most immediate use to the library, and perhaps this summer we can finish getting them set up. :)

Oh - and here's a blog meme I made. :D There's a husband version, too.

13 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

Thing 22

Another Thing that I did the writeup for. :) I'm currently a podcast addict - I download them through iTunes, slap 'em on my iPod, and listen to them in the car, while I'm cleaning house, or when I'm doing art.

Some of my favorites are:

NPR: Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me
NPR: This American Life
NPR Car Talk
WNYC's RadioLab
The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

There's a lot more that I listen to off and on, but I get these in every time they come out. Well, not so much Car Talk. I love it, but in small doses. XD And RadioLab makes six episodes a year, so it's not too hard to stay caught up on it.

Thing 20

View Larger Map

I was sort of hoping I could post a zoomed-in version, but I suppose not. the street view is a little more fun. I was using it to check out the area of various addresses of apartments and houses for rent on Craiglist and the TCU Announce thing a while back.

Thing 19

I've used Google Docs extensively in recent months. My writer (remember my LibraryThing post?) emails me scripts in Word and as I don't have Word on my laptop, I upload them to Google Docs to make notes on and send back to her. We've also just finished editing an anthology of fiction set in the world of one of the comics. We ran out of time to get the sequel to the comic drawn and printed before this year's A-Kon, so instead we put together a small illustrated chapbook containing five stories to tide over all the people who keep stopping by our A-Kon table and asking for a sequel. XD

Anyway, each of us who contributed a story shared it on GoogleDocs for editing by someone else. You can insert notes into a file with different colors and name/timestamps as you edit, and you can make new versions of the files as you rewrite. And when all the edits were done, my writer formatted them all to be consistent, and I grabbed them from Google Docs and created the book's layout. (Which took me all Sunday and Monday, and I had a migraine during the whole process, which is why I'm extra-cranky today. :P)

Thing 18

Added my own page to the Catch23 wiki, as requested in the writeup for Thing 18.

Thing 15

I have a Technorati account*, but I only use it to see who links to my site of random generators and what they say about it. :)

I created my own blog meme last year from one of the random generators, which was wildly popular for a couple of weeks among bloggers who watch the anime Bleach. It won't actually mean a thing to you if you don't watch the anime or read the manga, though.

Telophase's Zanpakutō: Lightning Singer deflects all blows aimed at the wielder and resembles a heavy eku wrapped in colorful ribbons after it is unsealed. Telophase invokes shikai with the command "Unbind, Lightning Singer!" What's Your Zanpakutō?

And then I created a silly version:

Telophase's Zanpakutō: (Fourth Division Irregulars) At the command "Wind Me Up!" your zanpakuto Water-Resistant Bottle Brush, a hilarious, cheap sword-breaker, invades France. What's Your Zanpakutō?

* Which I'm not linking to, because it would make finding the comics I challenged you to find in the LibraryThing post too easy as the website we sell the comics from is tracked by Technorati. XD

Thing 14

I've been using Del.icio.us for some time. If you look over to the right of the page, where my tag group "Library2.0Presentation" is, you can find some links on Web 2.0 stuff being used in or talked about in relation to libraries.

LibraryThing

I've had a LibraryThing account for a long time, but haven't done much with it due to the tedium of entering in all the books. I played around more with it today, and ran smack into a serious problem they have - there's no good way of indicating when a book has more than one author so that you can search on either author's name and get the book. There's an Other Authors section hidden in the Details link for the book, but those names don't get indexed with the Author name, and thus don't get searched in an Author or Works search.

And why this really torques me off is that the comics my writer and I self-published are in Library Thing, thanks to people who bought copies entering them, but you can't find them by searching on my name. You have to know her name or the title to get them.*

The LT database has been bootstrapped and jury-rigged from its beginnings, and it's rather obvious that the originators didn't think about books with more than one author (what about anthologies, too? wouldn't you like to search for stories by an author that have been anthologized?). And as I created a minimal library catalog in a programming class that had the capability for more than one author in it, I have NO SYMPATHY.

ETA: Thing 16


* I'm not telling you which ones they are. You'll have to exercise your Library Ingenuity to find them. If you really desperately want them I'll give a free copy to any of my co-workers who find them on LT, but keep in mind that you probably don't want to read them. :) One's rated R and one's rated PG-13 and they are BOTH very much NOT FOR KIDS.

A slight hint that probably won't really help you is that my writer is an Actual Professional Published Writer Person whose memoirs are also in LibraryThing.

Flickr mashup!

One last meme!

I'm posting this one separately because the graphic is so big. But I bet a lot of you will find it highly amusing. It's a celebrity look-alike meme from MyHeritage.com that uses facial recognition technology to work out what celebrities you look most like. The results are ... amusing, more than accurate. :D (Two haircuts ago it told me I looked like Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Huh?)



To do your own, first find a picture of yourself (or someone else!) that's got a reasonably clear shot of your face, facing forward. Then click on the above graphic. Once you get to the site, look for the tab marked "Face recognition" and click on it.

Choose which of the three things you want to do (the above is "celebrity collage"). Then click "Celebrity collage". (I don't know why they make you click through yet another page, but they do.)

If your picture is uploaded somewhere, you can put the direct URL of the image in the box on the next page. If it's on Photobucket, you can click the little "Photobucket" button above "Image URL" and enter the Photobucket URL there. If the picture is on your computer, click "My Files", and then browse for it on your computer, then click "Run Face Recognition".

The application steps you through it after that. You can choose what type of collage you want. If you don't want your picture showing up on the final collage, click the silhouette labeled "Private". Pick which of the celebrities it gives you to include. Preview your collage, then click on it to go back to the "Preview/Save" options, and click Save.

It will then give you a box with an option of where to post your collage. On the list on the left side of the box, click "Other." This will give you a box with a bunch of scary-looking HTML code in it. Click in the box with the code. Then type Ctrl-a to select the code, and Ctrl-c to copy it. Then go to your Blogger blog (or wherever you have your blog), and click Ctrl-v to paste the code into a post. Then publish your post, and we can all see who you look like!

Meme time!

This came up in the Catch23 coaching session today, so I thought I'd post about it here. Now, a meme is an idea that spreads like a virus does. A blog meme is something, like a quiz or a small set of instructions to post something, that spreads via people's blogs: readers see it, do it for themselves, and post the results in their blogs, and their readers do the same, and it spreads that way.

A few example memes. You may have seen some of these sent round via email.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 19 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I'm not posting my results from the What Book Are You? quiz, as the book cover is very large and would make you scroll a lot. (But I'll tell you that I'm The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.)

There's also What Punctuation Mark Are You? (I'm a semicolon).

My blog is worth $25,968.84.
How much is your blog worth?

Here's an example of a meme that's a set of instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I
know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

'I must tell you,' said Tripitaka, 'that I was admitted to the Order almost as soon as I left my mother's womb, and have never in my life indulged in meats of this kind.' The hunter thought for a while. 'My family,' he said at last, 'has on the contrary for generations past been accustomed to eat meat.' - From Arthur Whaley's translation of Journey to the West, titled Monkey.

(Any of you who wants to do the above meme, consider yourself tagged!)


And a meme to find out Your Spammer Name. (I'm Salutation J. Rivalry)

My first foray into posting on YouTube

I just got a new camera and was testing out its video capability. One of my blog readers asked for video of my cat, so I took a short video of her. I hope it was everything he wanted and more.

Right, let's get some of these out of the way...

...so I don't have to remember to update each week.

Things 5 & 6: My ginormous Bloglines blogroll shows I'm pretty familiar with RSS feeds. Note to everyone who's flabbergasted by that: I read very few of these on a daily basis. I certainly don't read everything that goes by. I started using Bloglines about 3 years back when the sites I hit on a regular basis got too unwieldy to visit every day and check for new content. With an RSS feedreader/aggregator, the new content came to me. I tried a feedreader that you download and run on your desktop, but that meant that I could only read them at work, and when a good portion of the things I was putting into the aggregator weren't work-related, that was useless. So I switched to Bloglines, since I could access it from work and home.


Things 7 & 8: I've got a Facebook page, which I use almost entirely for playing Scrabble. My online social networking is pretty permanently fixed over at my personal blog, and I don't like to spread out too much, otherwise it feels like a hassle, instead of fun, to go visit sites.

I also don't IM too much. I have AD/HD and IMs serve as too much of an interruption. I can't do any work, whether it's job-related work or my art-related work, on the computer if there's someone IMing me. Phone calls, emails, and people dropping by without warning are already problem enough; I don't need more interruptions throwing me out of focus when it takes me 20 minutes to be able to start concentrating on what I was distracted from.


Things 9 & 10: I wrote these sections. :) The library aggregator is an interesting idea, but I won't be giving up my Bloglines account or adding another feedreader. I also scaled way back on the number of library feeds I read when I noticed that 75% of the posts on the feeds I was reading were just linking to other feeds that I was also reading. and I got tired of the relentless OMG YOU MUST HAVE RSS FEEDS/BLOGS/WIKIS/WIDGETS/WHATEVER OR YOU'RE NOT SERVING YOUR PATRONS that the more enthusiastic members of the library blogging community screamed in text all the time.

As far as Digg goes, I don't particularly care for it. I read the BBC news site and whatever my friends post on their blogs - they're all tech-savvy enough and news-conscious enough that anything that's the least bit important will get posted somewhere.


More later.

Thing 2

Having now watched the 7 1/2 Habits powerpoint video, I am, I'm afraid, on the side of the "lame" people, because nothing was particularly new to me, and the narration drove me nuts.



However, speaking of Habit #6, using technology to your advantage, here's a link to one of the best new ideas in education out there: MIT's Open Courseware site. This site hosts the contents of 1800 MIT courses, from math to social sciences to art to languages and beyond, at both graduate and undergraduate levels. This is an amazing new idea and wonderful resource.

MIT took the idea of the UK's Open University one step farther. The OU is a distance-learning college set up to cater to those who for whatever reason can't or don't do regular university-type learning, one step farther, and for those who may not have a background that enables them to be accepted at regular universities. Almost all of the courses have no pre-qualifications necessary except that you have to be 18 or older to study. It costs money and grants you a degree, unlike MIT, but of course with the OU your tuition gets you the support of an instructor and fellow classmates. However, MIT is good for those who are highly self-motivated or who just want to dabble.

Catch 23

Having not used this blog in a dog's age, I shall now put it to use to chronicle me Catch 23 experience.