Monday, July 30, 2007

Tag, you're what?

Betsyboop, you're fired!

I see that I have been "tagged" by Betsyboop. I looked this term up (online, of course) and found a number of definitions, none of which fit the situation. There was one I really liked, though: "the practice of shearing wool on udder and dock regions." Maybe I'd better be on the lookout for co-workers with shears? Aiiiii!
It seems that I now am to give the rules, list eight things about myself, and then tag eight other people. Sounds like digital chain letter to me...

THE RULES:
List 8 facts or habits about yourself. Post the rules of the game at the beginning before the facts are listed. At the end tag 8 people by posting their names and leave comments on their blogs.

EIGHT THINGS ABOUT ME:
I'm just not very digital.
The telephone in my kitchen is a rotary-dial one, nailed to the wall.
I still own opera records, but the turntable I have won't play them in stacks.
I can't play the 78 rpm "Six Songs for Democracy" at all.
But I have it on CD now, too (so why do I still have the records?)
I own a few books in languages I'll never be able to read (Tabasaran, for one).
I have a complete set of collectible BCPL SRC t-shirts.

No, I just can't bring myself to tag eight people who might be total strangers! This is not really my idea of fun. But I'm tagging Bahama Mama, Jem and Scout (does that count as two?), Ready...Set...Tojo!, and Ruby's Experiment. Now back to work.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Pursuing extra credit...

Several posts ago I mentioned that my niece suggested that I try for extra credit in 23 Things - "maybe you could win bonus points by telling the referee that you beat your goddaughter onto facebook." In a comment, "the referee" suggested that this might be possible if I blogged about library uses for this social networking site, so I'll give it a try (especially since KQW is working here today and is wild about the idea - she belongs to several work- and library- related facebook groups already).

(This is not my niece in the picture, it's the uh, avatar I've used for my facebook account!)

Social networking sites are new to me. I understand that facebook was originally aimed at college students, but has since expanded to include others, including high school students. Among my small group of facebook friends, the ones who seems most active on the site are the youngest, still in or just out of college; so this kind of site does seem to be, as we have been told repeatedly, one of the ways younger people now communicate - and if it's the way they communicate, then it makes sense that libraries should use it to communicate with them.
Facebook has many more features than I have been able to figure out or even look at yet, but one major part seems to be groups - people with like interests. How about a facebook teen book group? Or teen advisory board group?
Or, for us age-enhanced library staff, a group of librarians exchanging ideas about programming (including managing book groups)? Photos seem to be big in facebook, too, so one could form a group to share ideas visually with pictures - merchandising ideas, Summer Reading Club or program decorating, ideal meeting room setups, office arrangements, a national comparison of mascots... ooops, seem to be getting silly; I've been in front of the computer a bit too long, I guess.
The thing is, there are other digital ways to accomplish all this, and I'm not yet sure which are best. One thing I certainly have found out is that there's a wide world beyond pine!
No extra credit points needed - the learning process is the reward!
(Now why the heck does this keep posting as a solid lump of text, without the spaces I type in?)




Monday, July 23, 2007

Woo hoo, I blogged from flickr!


mm 004
Originally uploaded by
gumushlu
So since library people are into cats, here's a picture of the one Toni Spagnolo forced on me several years ago at the Essex branch crab feast. Turned out to be a very satisfactory animal.

Thing 5 - Proof of success

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

Now I'll need to see if I can add a couple of the pictures I took with the branch digital camera and added to my flickr site just now.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Thing 10, or part thereof

While waiting for a Merlin password, I started looking at some generators... some funnier than others, some easier to use than others. To express a deeply held personal belief, I generated an image of a chocolate bar imprinted "Food of the Gods," which was quite satisfying as well as etomologically accurate; but then somehow it didn't show up correctly on this post. I'll try again later - it should be doable, and I should be able to figure out what went wrong.

And speaking of figuring out how to do things, I'm finding that the collective learning aspect of "23 Things" is not always ideal in my branch. Those of us who are participating in the program have different schedules, so it's hard to get together. Also, most of us are at quite basic levels of computer expertise and the computers we tend to use for the program are those in quieter corners of the workrooms - i.e., the oldest ones in the building, which have some of their own expertise issues from time to time. Still, most of us are bumbling onward!

Friday, July 6, 2007

Extra credit, perhaps?

At the urging of a (much) younger co-worker, I now have a Facebook account, and have communicated with several young friends and relatives via this, uh, thing. My youngest niece has offered to pilot me through the dangers (e.g., "intense poke wars" ... can't wait to find out what that is all about), and another has suggested that I might get extra credit in "23 Things" for beating her onto Facebook (she had been too academically focused to take part before her elderly relatives started hopping onto the cy-bandwagon, I guess). So how about it, Ellen and Jim? Maybe I could be like that slow kid in your third-grade class who always got "tries hard" on report cards (effort expended in all the wrong directions)?

Week 4, Thing 8

Whoa, I've just managed to open yet another account - with Bloglines - and selected a couple of RSS feeds. First I chose New Urban Legends and BBC News, but must have messed up on the second one (probably didn't go down and hit that second "subscribe"), since it didn't appear. Then, realizing that the urban legends one just duplicated stories that I feel I read often enough on Snopes.com, I figured out how to delete it.

This looks like a valuable tool for those whose computers are on all day, and who check a number of blogs regularly. However, for one who goes to a computer only for a specific task once in a while, maybe it's not so necessary (I realize that the latter type of person is becoming less and less common in my socioeconomic class). Nifty to know about, at any rate.

I thought I'd start with a news feed - maybe the Guardian, since those cheapskates at the Stornoway Gazette - WAIT! - I did add the Stornoway Gazette! Wow! However, the Oban Times still requires that you pay money for a subscription, so forget them!

Then I added a kitchen column from NPR - I can see how entertaining and addictive this might get! - and a couple of fellow-BCPL-blogs, and to make this more librarian-y, some library-type feeds. Done. Whew. I tried to add a list of my feeds to this, but I guess it's just too late in the day for me to be able to work it out, and there's not a colleague free right now to help me out. I'll try again later.