youtube

No offense taken at the library YouTube videos; they were fun to watch. The video here is funny. Well, at least it would be amusing to just about any parent, I think. Check out "Charlie Bit Me."


http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charlie+bit+me&search_type=&aq=f

Podcasts

Yep, it worked. Found World News Tonight w/Charlie Gibson (a personal favorite) podcast and successfully added it to my bloglines account. But, no sound is currently coming through, even though there was sound when I played it in podcasts.com. So, trying to figure that out. Maybe when I check it next, there'll be sound--like magic. Sometimes this stuff works like that. Let me share that my daughter is a user of podcasts. In her former life as a college student, she subscribed to Good Morning America and Anderson Cooper 360 podcasts, downloaded them to her Ipod and listened to them on her way to class on campus. I think that's way admirable; she thinks it makes her sound like a geek--but in a good way, I tell her.

4b More Flickr

Once again, don't have any pictures I wanted to play with that I could get to within Citrix. So, instead, I used our home pc's internet access to get to Flickr Toys--Wallpaper and created a calendar with the background of a photo I'd taken at Christmas time of our handmade nativity set. And then, just because Flickr Toys said I could, I emailed that photo to my state email account (within Citrix), and, lo and behold! the photo was there in the email. Eureka! If I understand correctly, the photo will go away in a few days unless I save it to the computer--trying that. Cool tool. :)

Flickr Flashes

Okay, so the Flickr account was pretty easy to set up (perhaps should wait until tomorrow to say that, in case I can't find my way back to it again). But it did seem to work and, with children and other family members all located long distances away, this would be a fun way to share pictures. The photo editing tool in Flickr is cool and--again--easy to use. I was able pretty quickly to edit out most of the back side of an unknown-to-us gentleman in ML's graduation picture. The big events in our lives from the past year were, of course, Winter of 08/09, and the daughter's university graduation--preceded by a job offer and acceptance. Yaaaay! So, the pictures linked here represent each event.

The blizzard aftermath photo is from the first blizzard of the season; there was no visible improvement until late in April. In fact, that particular scene actually got worse before it got better. The graduation picture speaks for itself. As parents, we have good days and not-so-good days: this was a very, very good day.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/l_c1/3740540290/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/l_c1/3739712573/

Flickr

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

After having spent the better part of the day with this, I'm not sure I like anything about RSS right now; no doubt time and distance will change my perspective. I added some blogs from this summer's Library 2.0 challenge, two blogs of colleagues and one of an area school librarian. Those should be fun to follow. The bloglines account was easy to set up, pretty easy to add blogs and feeds to once setup was completed. A couple other feeds that could be fun, found using the bloglines guide that appeared after I set up the account, were "about cats"--gotta be something of interest in there for a cat lover--and "rotten tomatoes," which appears to review movies. The husband and I are big movie fans, but I like to know a little something about a movie before we buy admission tickets. Added CNN and Reuters news feeds. Those could be good for people living in this area, where we rely on the US mail delivery service for the RC Journal, which is always a day late, i.e., on Wednesday we receive Tuesday's paper, Wednesday's arrives on Thursday, and so it goes for the whole week. No mail service on Sunday means two newspapers in the mail on Monday; those Saturday headlines are pretty old by Monday afternoon.
Several colleagues have praised "librarian in black" so I set up a feed for that site and am eager to discover and enjoy. Checking these blogs, feeds, could be fun.

Twitter? Maybe?

Watching the 2 quick Twitter videos was interesting. No wonder twittering has become a national passtime--it's easy, quick, and accessible. I don't really see a useful purpose for it within my working environment right now, but perhaps someone will point one out. It could be a terrific hobby, though. My 23-year-old, just-graduated-from-college daughter does not Twitter; that surprised me. She and her friends text each other constantly, but none of them is into Twittering yet. They Facebook a lot, and she thinks that's much the same. Yes? No?

7 1/2 Habits

The easiest habit for me is finding a way to use technology to my advantage. When we first started with automation in the school library, over 20 years ago now, we started by becoming remote users of SDLN--a huge boon for a place like Bison with no easy access to a large public library. We anticipated that SDLN's new remote service would work for us, but had no idea what enthusiasm was created, first from students doing term paper research, next from staff members who realized they could get materials they were interested personally and professionally, and, finally, from the public wanting to satisfy their research/recreational reading needs more easily than had ever been possible before. That first foray into library technology was a huge advantage. Our little school/community borrowed about 750 books during the second year we had SDLN remote-users access, probably 4-5 times as many as we'd ever borrowed before.
Most difficult habit? Easy answer here: playing with the technology. I tend to think if I'm playing, I'm wasting time, and don't allow myself to do that casually. Thus, exploring/playing often takes a backseat to more immediate demands.

Lesson 2

Here is my second try at a blog. Looking forward to hearing from colleagues through this blog and learning/sharing what works, doesn't work, for them and for me.