I'm bored, but because it's library related it's ok, right?

bored bored bored...and crazy?

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?

Today I had to actually yell at an old man who couldn't hear me tell him when his books were due. He kept turning his hearing aid up and I kept shouting louder. I finally just handed him the receipt, pointed to the due date, and gave a thumbs up.

kooky kommercials

I consider commercials to be a great waste of time and money only because so rarely are they effective in generating more business. Most people who like Coke will drink Coke, a cool Pepsi ad isn't going to make them suddenly change their mind. Watching a woman train for a marathon in Nike shoes doesn't make me want Nike shoes, but I'll notice how thirsty she is and think gee I'm thirsty I think I'll get a Coke.
That said, I've noticed a recent trend in the last few years to bizarro commercials. These commercials advertise their product, but really random. They are usually weird, often very weird, yet I feel as if someone crawled inside my brain and created a commercial specifically for me.
Although JetBlue has been in the crapper lately and I've never even been on a freakin plane, I can't help but stop whatever I'm doing to watch its ad:



Ok, not so weird, as it is retro-pleasant with it's nod to 8-bit, but whatever.
Also, there is ad for Domino's new dessert Oreo Pizza which I think sounds disgusting and I hate Domino's pizza anyway, but the commercial interests me in the way that I try to imagine a board meeting where they've been at it all night when one guy goes, "I've got it, beards made of cookies!" and the other people patting him on the back and saying, "Jenkins, you're a genius!" I also like to imagine the commercial appearing on television in the past, say the 1950's and how people would've been like, "The hell is that?!" Granted, there are much weirder commercials overseas, but maybe we'll catch up?

More commercial weirdness:
Domino's Oreo Pizza
Skittle's Rabbit
Quizno's Rat Things
Snicker's Panda

I also enjoy very low quality local commercials.

finish line

I think the whole Learning 2.0 experience has been a positive one and I’m glad that LCPL set this up for the staff. I was already familiar with many of sites and applications we were sent out to discover, but I previously didn’t think of them in relation to a library setting.
My favorite new “things” were probably librarything and flickr. Prior to learning about flickr, I had just been hosting some of my photos on photobucket but wasn’t satisfied with the set up, etc. Flickr has not only made it really easy to share photos, but I’ve joined all sorts of photo groups which linked me to different online communities ranging from MOMA fans to alternative home décor.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to update my blog here since I have a main one elsewhere and since I don’t know if anyone is actually reading this one (according to technorati my blog is ranked 2,996,932), but perhaps I’ll keep this one alive for a little while and see what comes of it.
I don’t know if the goals in Learning 2.0 necessarily coincided with any of my specific lifelong learning goals, but I believe that any learning is a good thing. One thing I am actually interested in learning is Spanish, or at least brushing up on my unused skills from college. This area is certainly one area where knowing a second language comes in handy, especially working in place centered on the public and information. Perhaps the county could offer language classes or at least tuition reimbursement to employees who took classes on their own ;)
I think one way a program like Learning 2.0 could be improved would be to take away the deadline and post all the things at once so that people could not feel stressed and pick and choose when they want to attempt certain lessons. People less familiar with these tools could then start small before tackling more imposing things. If LCPL offered another program like this in the future I would definitely give it a go.

#22 Audiobooks

I browsed around on Netlibrary for awhile and looked at some titles although I don’t know if I’ll be downloading and listening to them anytime soon. Other than having my parents read stories to me as a kid I can’t think of any other time when I’ve enjoyed being read to. Even as a child I had those play along records and I’d be so excited to read the story for myself I would never wait for the appropriate chime telling me to turn the page. Some of my friends are really into audiobooks either for their commutes or on long car trips, but usually when I’m driving I like to relax and listen to music or zone out and just drive. I also seem to have the attention span of a fly so even when I am listening to some of the podcasts for Learning 2.0 my mind will wander for a second and then I’ll come back and be like wait, what?
My one friend really recommends listening to the Harry Potter series since the reader is supposed to be excellent, which I might consider doing since I’m trying to read them all before the new book comes out this summer and I just started book three. I also love books by David Sedaris and his audiobooks where he reads himself are supposed to be great too.

#21 podcasting

I've been aware of podcasting for awhile since some of the online journals I frequent have their own feeds, but I've never been all that excited to listen to them. I don't listen to the radio all that much and when I'm in my car or relaxing at home I'll put on cd's or records so that I can listen to music that I actually want to hear. But in the spirit of trying something new I went ahead and subscribed to NPR's story of the day podcast and added the RSS feed to my bloglines account.

#20 Youtube and the almighty $

Youtube is a very dangerous site. If you are not careful, you can get sucked in and spend way too much time looking at old commercials. On several occasions I have meant to only briefly visit youtube to look at some video someone has emailed me about and suddenly I realize that an hour has magically vaporated. Since this learning 2.0 project started youtube has been having some legal problems and just wednesday was sued by Viacom for a billion dollars. Can youtube get control of its copyright issues with so many anonymous posters? I think probably not and this will be the beginning of the end for youtube, unfortunately. If it wasn't for the amazing news footage clips, the most talked about moment of a hot tv show, or nostalgic commercials (all posted by fans who don't own the material) would anyone stick around to watch lame video diaries all day? I don't think so.
Already several clips I had placed in my favorites folder have been deleted by youtube. The hardest part is that technology is faster than the laws used to govern these things so now that youtube is a hit everyone wants to get paid. It makes sense in the way the music industry put an end to Napster because of all the illegal file sharing, (except instead of music it's the latest slap fight from an episode of the Real World) but it kinda ruins it for everyone else.

Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I browsed the list of winners from Web 2.0 and was surprised to see several sites I already frequent were listed on there. I decided to check out one I was not familiar with and played around on wists which is like a social shopping list with pictures. It's a cool idea - now when I make a wish list for xmas I can include photos so I can make sure I get the exact item I want. I used to sell my crafts off of my website, but perhaps I could list an item on wists and get more hits.
I tried to think how some of these sites could be used in a library setting. I suppose reference could use some of them to direct patrons using the internet to different sites depending on what they are searching for. I thought some of the mapping sites were helpful if you were new in town and needed to look up information from local haunts to four star dining.

Web-based Apps

So I tried out Zoho writer which could've been really useful a few months ago when my husband upgraded my computer and I freaked because it didn't have Word on it. Eventually I got my hands on a copy of MS Office, but for those who can't or don't want to shell out for an updated version of Office, Zoho could do the trick. I imagine it would be helpful to store frequently used documents there too: your resume could always be just an internet conection away or you could back up important documents if your computer were to die and burst into flames taking all your back up discs and thumb drives with it.
My only concern is how secure this information would be. Last summer I had to deal with someone stealing my credit card number over the internet, if I loaded my resume on Zoho or Google docs would I have to worry about someone having access to that very personal information too?
There's lots more exploring I'll have to do.

playing with wiki

I'll have to play around with wiki more later when I don't have so much to do, but for the most part it seemed fairly easy. I added my blog to the favorites section and although I followed the wiki style guide but still couldn't get my link to look "pretty." Oh well, maybe later.

wikis

I often click over to wikipedia every now and then for a quick answer, but all the while understanding that anyone posted that info and it is entirely possible for any or the whole part to be incorrect. I think today too many people believe 100% of what they read and see on the Internet – and I know I’ve read stuff on wikipedia that I knew was wrong, but then other people will go on to quote this wrong info.
Anyways, back to wikis, I liked the one library’s reading page and I think that something like that here could be a great resource for patrons. With summer reading coming up I think this is something the branches should look into.

#15 Library 2.0

I think there has definitely been both physical and mindset changes in the library and I think the perfect example is this Learning 2.0 project. Technology has revolutionized the world and there’s no way around it: you either have to be in on these changes or consider yourself obsolete. Over the years I have worked with some people who just think the Internet is a place to read your email and while these people are secure in their positions or near retirement, this unawareness would not fly in society today if they were applying for their job. This isn’t a fad, it isn’t going to go away. I grew up with the pc and even I feel behind sometimes – the computer class I took in high school focused entirely on typing and a little time was spent on basic internet research. When my brother took the same class four years later he was learning basic coding and flash programming. The tedious typing speed and accuracy tests were long gone – everyone now assumes you know how to type.
Today’s librarians seem to be at least keeping up with technology. I believe that being a good librarian is about providing good, knowledgable, friendly, useful service to people who want information – whether it’s a rare book, a best-seller, or a research article on the internet.

#14

Since I have been blogging for awhile I am aware of how big the blogosphere is, but I use my personal blog as more of a journal or diary and I don't know how comfortable I am with complete strangers reading it. At one point I was curious and Googled my blog's title just to see if it came up with anything and I was surprised at how many people outside of my circle had linked to or posted about it. It was kinda neat, but weird in the way that why would someone I've never met in California be interested in my journal? Since then I've made most of my posts private.
So while I'm not ready to claim my personal blog on Technorati yet, for the purposes of Learning 2.0 I will claim my little work blog, although I would be even more surprised if anyone outside of LCPL read this one!
[L2LCPL]

#13 Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us seems like a handy site and while I haven't signed up for an account I can't promise that I won't in the future. Recently my computer running Windows 98 died and I lost all of my bookmarked sites which was annoying, but to be honest half were saved from college that I had filed away and probably hadn't looked at in years. Perhaps if I was doing a lot of research I could justify using it but at this point it's not necessity.
Also, maybe I'm nit-picky, but I'm not sold on tagging, especially after some of the things I came across in Flickr. In theory I think it's a good idea - in theory, but there doesn't seem to be any real guidelines although I will say del.icio.us seemed better about it than Flickr. What about all the people out there tagging things who can't spell or aren't using commas? Or are just plain mislabeling things? And why do I want to know what other pages these people have saved?

rollyo

Roll out with my rollyo.
Since I recently posted my home pictures, I decided to create my own search using my bookmarked design sites – not that I really “trust” all of these, but I was having a hard time coming up with enough to really make a good search list. I can see where this could be very useful – awhile back when we were going to get a new digital camera we spent quite awhile searching on the internet, reading different reviews, comparing prices, etc. I think at the time it really would’ve been helpful to put all those technology sites we did trust together and search instead of going through each one individually – it certainly would’ve saved time.

library thing

Perhaps I was meant to work in a library because sometimes I just like cataloging things. I use a database on one website to catalog all my vinyl collection and have kept a book log of everything I've read in the last couple years. I had a lot of fun playing around with LibraryThing and decided to input my book log into my library. I find this to be a more resourceful to look at what I've been reading, tag books subjects, and compare them to others with similar reading interests.
The only thing I didn't like about LibraryThing was that the little widget sidebar I created will only display random books from my library when I'd much rather have it display my favorites. It's not fun to see a book I really disliked or am embarrassed I read pop up on my blog as if I endorse it. I guess I will have to trust people to go to my library page and read my actual ratings and reviews of those books!

image generator

I had fun playing around with the image generators. Back in early '01, there was a little net phenom know as "AYB" that featured a flash animation with the phrase "All your base are belong to us" featured on everything from Bush campaign posters, signs in Times Square, to OJ's mugshot photo. Many people mistook these forged photographs to be real instead of recognizing them as photoshop projects, but with today's image generators anyone can make their favorite slogan appear on any photo they want, which is fun but makes the internet an even more unreliable place.
Since I work in a library, I decided to play with the Catalog Card Generator:

lookie lookie

Awhile back I received an email from a style reporter from the Washington Post Express thanks to my submission in Apartment Therapy's Fall Color Contest, that wanted to feature my home in WPE's section called "My Rad Pad" (yeah, I'm not crazy over the name either) and it finally came out yesterday!
Unfortunately, due to restrictions on the size of the article, only two pictures are featured out of the tons of cool shots they took (not including the adorable ones of Miss Molly!).


edited to add:
Turns out WPE decided to put the article online afterall! Here's the direct link and there's even more pictures.

more rss

So I went exploring for more rss and added a few more feeds to my bloglines account. Out of the search tools recommended to start our search I found Feedster and Technorati came back with the most hits, some success with Topix, but I really didn't really like using Syndic8.com since my few searches came up completely empty, but maybe I was doing something wrong - I found it to not be as user friendly.

rss

I was part of the majority that had never heard of RSS, but after learning how to use it I think that it is a really handy tool. Instead of clicking on several different sites or searching you can have all the information you are looking for in one place. Some of the sites that I read regularly aren't set up for rss feeds yet so I guess they will have to wait, but the only other complaint I could think of is that there are no pictures. Sometimes a snappy graphic will catch my attention more than a headline and I'll read that story because of that. I suppose I really am a more visual person.
I only signed up for a few, but my rss stuff is here.

why do I love technology...

I suppose because I've grown up in a society so integrated with technology I don't often stop and think about it. I've come to expect and rely on technology to always be there so it can be a shock when you go somewhere and your cell phone won't get a signal or your precious wifi won't work. When I moved into my first apartment they offered dial-up internet connections and I remember being irritated with the cable company for not offering service in our area. Dial up?! I suppose I could just hook that up to my Timex Sinclair 1000...

However, in comparision to other countries we are still behind in the technology rage. My uncle just got back from Japan not long ago and was telling us about the cell phones that everyone had that had keypads for texting, could take pictures, and you could flip out the screen and watch tv. And everyone has them - from business class to school kids. Everyone made a big fuss about the new iPhone being released yesterday but it's funny to think even this hot new device is old news in different parts of the world.

even more fun with flickr

Since I previously created a trading card featuring my dog, I decided to play around more with Mappr this time. I had some old photos I had taken while I was at school at JMU and I loaded them into mappr and tagged them appropriately so that they'll show up for a search for Harrisonburg. They haven't been added to Mappr yet, but they can be found here and here.

more flickr

Ok, so I guess I was jumping the gun before because I decided to skip ahead on the exercises from here but I guess we are not doing the same things (I created the Molly trading card on flickr last time). Sooo this time I decided to browse around and decided to look for any photos that had been tagged with "Rust Library" just to see if anything came up, but the photos were of items associated with libraries or libraries themselves that were rusty. Here's a rusty card catalog.