Thing #23~ Wrap-Up

Well, looking back on this program, I'm glad I did it, even thought it was kind of a challenge to get everything done in the time allotted to me in a part-time position. I got to further explore some technologies that I already knew about and I got to discover some neat sites and things I didn't know about. Being perfectly frank, the free MP3 player was my biggest motivator to do this but I got both that and this neat blog out of the deal. I joined a gym on October 1st and I'm still going (yay me!) and my player has come in quite handy for workout music! I will keep this blog up for folks to peruse and to occasionally add stuff to it. I thought about, since I'm in Interlibrary Loan, adding my oddest request or biggest challenge of the week or something of that nature to my blog. I'm eagerly awaiting whatever Jaye's cooking up for us next in the way of new stuff to learn and even more so if it comes with a shiny prize!

Thing #22~ downloadable audiobooks

I have to admit to being a kind of Luddite when it comes to audiobooks. I like the plain simple books on CD. I don't have a CD player in my room anymore but my DVD players play them so it works. I can't figure out how to put audiobooks on my iPod without the tracks being mixed in with the songs on shuffle and my new MP3 player I got for doing this blog project is pretty much full already but I poked around NetLibrary and Overdrive anyway, became thoroughly confused, and then checked out Project Gutenberg's audios and that seemed like something I'd be interested in checking out again down the line.

I do have a question for the community at large or whoever's reading this-- if an author has the ability to record audiobooks on CD, what does it take for them to be able to break into digital audiobooks and make an audiobook they can sell through iTunes, audible.com, etc and is doing such a thing more cost-effective than doing a book on CD? An author friend of mine, Grace Chetwin, whose name you may recognize, now publishes her own books and I thought for small presses digital audiobooks may work better than CDs, but maybe not.

Thing #21~ Podcasts

I do love my iPod, but I've not really gotten into podcasts that much. I have a geriatric computer at home and I need to use my Dad's machine to sync my iPod and add music which pretty much limits the time I can spend exploring for things like Podcasts and since I do that maybe once a week if I happen to have new CDs to add which means I can't really keep up with podcasts. But I'll poke around a little with them for this exercise. I checked out the Podcast listing sites (Podcast.net and PodcastAlley.com were much more useful than the Yahoo one) and I really didn't find anything terribly interesting in terms of libraries. Lots of the library podcasts were for specific libraries, or they hadn't been updated in awhile. I found a lot of people across a lot of subjects started a podcast, posted an episode or two and then gave up on it. I did however find some podcasts related to my other interests. I found a really cool food podcast and The Signal, a super Firefly/Serenity podcast. Added them both to Bloglines which makes them show up on my blogroll.

Thing #20~ ITube,YouTube, we all Tube!

Well, I'm quite familiar with YouTube already before this exercise as are most folks my age. YouTube is pretty much as ubiquitous as MySpace. I added two videos to my blog to illustrate the different ways in which people use YouTube. The first is the amazing Loreena McKennnitt performing her beautiful song "Dante's Prayer" live at the Alhambra Palace in Spain, and the second is a "Farscape" music video that some friends of mine created using the song. Oh yeah, and I got to see Loreena twice this year live-- first time from the second row, second time from the first row. It was amazing :-)

Thing #19~ Web 2.0 Awards

For this Thing I chose to check out a couple of the sites on the list. I noted that I've already explored a lot of the sites on the list as part of other Things-- like Google Docs, Rollyo, Flickr, YouTube, and de.li.cious are all there.

CocktailBuilder.com is truly awesome. Not only are there drink recipes, which can be found a million places on the web, but you can work backwards too. You enter which kinds of liquors and mixers you have on hand and the site keeps narrowing the list of drinks down until it shows all the drinks you can make with these ingredients. You can view the drink recipe right there on the screen too without losing what you've entered. You can even make a bar menu, too!

Pandora.com is very awesome. A commercial-free, adaptive, Internet radio! I love it! I made "stations" for several of my favorite artists and I must say they are pretty spot-on in their recommendations. Very easy to use too. I could sit there all day and do this :-)

Of course neither of these would seem very useful in a library setting, although I'd imagine patrons sometimes ask for bartending manuals and CocktailBuilder is an online alternative. Also, recommending Pandora to customers could definitely boost circulation of music CDs as people discover new music.

Thing #18~ online productivity tools

Well, I tried out Google Docs and I found it to be pretty cool that I can access a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation program anywhere, anytime, when I've got an Internet connection. I don't personally have a whole lot of need for such a thing but I can see the many uses including library customers. Here in Howard County we now have OpenOffice on all our PACs, but in the old days you had to sign up for a time slot on one of the computers that had a word processor on it if you needed to type a paper or something. Web-based software is making this more and more obsolete. Google Docs and such services are also good for shared files, moving shared drives and folders and things toward obsolescence as well.

Web-based software is all well and good, but what happens if your Internet is down and you can't get to the web? With a regular application such as OpenOffice or MS Office, you can continue to work, but if your office depends on something like GoogleDocs, you're up the creek till the net is fixed, but I don't see many institutions wholly dependent on such things, at least not yet.

Thing #15~ Library 2.0

To me, Library 2.0 means a step forward in terms of technology but staying firmly rooted in our original role as a place for the public to learn and explore. The terminology of "2.0", "2.1" and such is borrowed from software developers who give each version of a piece of software a number to denote the improvements in each version, even if those improvements are invisible to the end user but help the software run more reliably or faster. Library 2.0 is a lot like that in that it is not only a concept that is helping us improve on the outside and making the library a more interactive place for the customer with all kinds of new features, but it's also helping us shore up our original structure and repair or replace some ideas and concepts on the back end that have needed fixing for awhile.

That's my $.02 on 2.0 :-)

Thing #16~ wikis

Wikis are a great method of collaborative learning and cooperative efforts. I particularly liked the Subject Guides one and how it ties in with that library's catalog and highlights parts of the collection customers might be interested in in a different way. Perhaps because I'm so ADD I love all of these different types of information about the same subject all in one place. I'm a fan of wikipedia too, although I wasn't in school when it became all the rage to use it as the only resource for one's work. I can imagine it must be the bane of some teachers' existence ;-) I think it's a great jumping off point, sort of like how Cliffs Notes are good to use as a supplement to the original work of literature. Plus wiki is fun to say. WIKI! Although I never knew what it stood for until I heard it explained one time, it means What I Know Is :-) What I know is, wikis are neat!

Thing #17~ Sticki Wikis

I added an entry to the Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki. Check it out!

Thing #14~ Technorati

Well I've always been an organization type of person, hence why I like libraries. I find tagging to be very simple and useful. Mostly what I got out of exploring Technorati was just a bunch of neat websites that I'd never really explored and some that I visit all the time and apparently a lot of other people do as well. For example, I could probably spend all day bouncing around BoingBoing and a lot of my favorites like ICANHASCHEEZBURGER and PostSecret are amongst the top blogs on Technorati. There's also some really strange stuff like the Fake Steve Jobs blog. I found Helene Blowers' blog when I searched on Learning 2.0 and that was cool to read. Overall it was really interesting. It also put a bug in my ear about maybe taking up paid blogging for some extra money. Does anyone reading this have any experience with such things?

Thing #13~ De.li.cious

Being a big organizer, I'm big on tagging, as you can see from my tags on this blog. I found de.li.cious interesting but I guess I'm kind of just used to sending URLs around via email, blog, IM or some other means and I don't really see a huge need for social bookmarking. It may be a useful research tool for customers who are doing research on different topics to look at premade lists of bookmarks that other people interested in that subject found useful. As Jaye said, some of the "things" will really excite us, others won't really, and de.li.cious was one of the latter for me. Oh well, on to the next thing!

Thing #12~ Rollyo!

So I created a Rollyo for perfume which is basically like a mini search engine that you build yourself. I added a whole bunch of my favorite places to buy perfume and favorite blogs about fragrances and perfumes. The function of this Rollyo is to punch in the name of a perfume, or a note (such as vanilla or frankincense), or a concept or mood or theme of a perfume (i.e. Halloween, faeries) and come up with something to buy or something to check out. It doesn't work QUITE as well as I'd like because some of the sites it searches are so loaded with meta data that I get a bajillion hits from one site and it takes forever to get through them. Also all the ads are annoying but it's an interesting concept I'm glad I came across and learned about.

Select...Find-A-PerfumeSearch The Web

Thing #11~ Library Thing

So I added 25 random books to my LibraryThing and I put the covers on my blog too ::: points to the shinies :::: LibraryThing is really cool, I think I'll play with it some more when I have some time.

Just for fun.... another widget

Stolen from Beth T's blog :-)

Thing #10~ Image Generators

Meez is so juvenile it's actually fun :-)



And here I am as princess M&M


Fun timewasters/de-stressers :-)

widgets!!!!

Yay for widgets, and Heroes!

Get this widget!

Click in the middle and use the arrow keys to draw :-)

Get this widget!

Thing #9~ More on Bloglines and RSS

Thing #9 challenged us to find more sites to add to the bloglines reading account and the blogroll should we choose to have one. Frankly, I didn't find many of the search tools they suggested very useful. I merely visited a bunch of my favorite websites and looked to see if they had RSS feeds available and then I snatched them up. I found everything from Leaky Cauldron (one of the Net's biggest Harry Potter news sites) to the ever-LOL-inducing ICanHasCheezburger.com to a really cool children's and YA SF/fantasy blog called Wands and Worlds to Merlin, of course, so yes, while I do see the use for the search tools, I didn't have to really rely heavily on them this time. So check out my new and improved and longer blogroll :-)

Thing #8 ~ Bloglines, RSS, etc.

::Points to the right:::

Look at my shiny blogroll!!! I'm so proud of it!

Bloglines is definitely a good way to make your blog a one stop shopping destination for everything you might want to read about. The blogs and sites I selected reflect my wide range of interests from sci-fi to music to cooking to libraries, of course, and a few laughs thrown in, too, with Dilbert and Unshelved. I love that I can always add or take away feeds and add just about any syndicated site. I even added a few feeds from our very own catalog and a horoscope too. If you're so inclined you an add your Yahoo or Google groups to Bloglines, too, if you don't want your inbox crowded with list mail. Very cool.

I also have my labels, or tags like the rest of the world calls them, listed and clickable on my blog now. I wanted a tag cloud but couldn't find any easy way to make one. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thing #7 ~ Anything tech related!

Well as anyone who knows me knows, I enjoy shopping. I really enjoy shopping online because you can find such really unique things. It amazes me that nowadays anyone can have their own online store to sell pretty much anything they want. Of course there's eBay which now has stores but it's also so easy to build your own website with PayPal and a shopping cart. Those things used to be very expensive and hard to come by. One site I can browse for hours on end is Etsy, which is a huge site where people can hang out their shingle and sell just about any kind of homemade items from jewelry to soaps to clothing. I also enjoy immensely the perfumes of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab which is an almost exclusively Internet-based business. I don't know what exactly I spent my money on before the web :-) but I see my wide range of places to go broke as yet another example of the great things the net can bring us, and another way it's bringing us closer together.

Thing #6~ Flickr Fun Part Deux, Mashups, etc.

So I loved Flickr Color Pickr a lot, I could play with it all day.

I also liked the Warholizer and I Warholized some of those kitties from before. Neat, huh?:

Thing #5 ~ Flickr Fun!

I happen to love orange tabby cats so I poked around Flickr and found some!!! Cuteness warning!!

Thing #2 - On Lifelong Learning

Well, I've always been a lifelong learner.

1. Begin With an End in Mind~ this is hard for me because I usually have a problem choosing an end. I am one of those people that starts lots of books and projects at a time. But choosing an end is good because you have a goal and you have to set a reasonable goal and keep in mind that it can be changed. For example, if I set out to learn to cook and I master macaroni and cheese, I can always change my goal to mastering lasagna and so forth.

2. Accept responsibility for your own learning~ not usually very hard. I was always one of those annoying students who read ahead or read the whole text if it captured my attention. Think Hermione Granger.

3. View problems as challenges~ this is also hard for me because I've always been a person who's good at everything. A very fast learner. So when there's a problem I tend to think I've hit the wall and I get frustrated instead of being proactive.

4. Have confidence in yourself~ this is pretty easy for me generally but I do have pitfalls sometimes like everyone

5. Create your own toolbox~ This is quite easy for me. I can find books or websites about almost anything and I have a large "brain trust" of people of different occupations, ages, and backgrounds, I can ask about things.

6. Use technology to your advantage~ this is quite easy for me. I was using computers when I was 5 making animals on a monochrome Apple IIc. I had my first exposure to the Internet when I was 10. I am not a technophobe by any grasp of the imagination.

7. Teach and mentor others~ Well, I am not the most patient teacher in the world, that's for sure, so that's something I should work on. As long as the person is showing a genuine willingness to learn and is not merely asking me to do their job for them because they're afraid of learning something new though, I'm cool.

7.5 PLAY! I reealllly have no problem PLAYING :-)

Thing #3 - Hello World!

Well, hello out there!!! I've signed up to do 23 Things and this is my blog!!! It's pink! I stole part of my title from an awesome three-CD boxed set by Pat Benatar but the ideas in the blog are all mine, although I don't think anyone else would want to own up to them anyway :-).

I work in the InterLibrary Services department of the Howard County Library and my job often requires making use of the Net's resources so I thought this would help me even more in finding the oddest of things that customers ask for.

Here we go a'23 Things-ing! :-)