YouTube

I'm not going to talk long about YouTube. I've been on to YouTube since college - lots of fun videos for bored college kids to enjoy, and when we entertain our friends now we mostly end up just sitting around watching YouTube videos all night - and my husband and I also have our own account where we post videos of our youth group kids (http://www.youtube.com/user/engelhardtlm1) so I consider myself *very* comfortable with YouTube and the way it works.

And that was an incredibly long sentence.

That said, here is a fun music video by the French group Dionysos. They do good stuff:




May I also recommend Hulu (www.hulu.org) for TV shows and movies online, and Animoto (www.animoto.org) for a place where you can make your own short films to share your photos online. Both great video sharing sites.

WOW

Holy crap, I just found my new favorite waste of time. I was on the CML toolbox looking through the different links we have. Most of them I'm already hip to, either using every day several times a day (Google, Firefox, etc) or having tried them out through Learn & Play (delicious, LibraryThing, and so on.) I decided to try out Stumble because I had never even heard of it before.

This site is absolutely amazing.

Stumble (at least the way I tried it out) works as a toolbar added on to your browser. Even though I know it won't stay once the computer is rebooted, I decided to download the toolbar anyway and play around with it. When you sign up for Stumble, you select your interests. Then it adds a button to your toolbar (well, a few buttons, actually, but one main one) and when you hit it, it takes you to a random site based on the interests you selected. You can then click on thumbs up or thumbs down, depending on whether you liked the site or not, and those ratings will affect the next sites you get.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have found my new time waster.

One of the other buttons added to your toolbar is deceptive, because it says "Favorites" but what it really means is "List of things you liked." When you click on that button, it takes you to a blog that basically is just a list of the sites you said you liked. That way, when you "stumble" on that awesome site, it's not lost forever. You can also share sites with people if you know their email address. My friends and I are always sending sites back and forth, so this is a really handy way to quickly send it without having to sign into my email or onto my blog and post it that way. Click a button, type in their address, and it's done.

I know this toolbar will go away when the computer restarts, but as soon as I get home tonight I'm putting it on my own browser (Firefox) and will probably promptly spend hours just clicking through, looking at all the awesome things. I love the internets, and I love the things people put on the internets, and this is just one more fabulous way of finding them. Thanks, CML, for linking to it! :)

Yummy

Checked out Delicious today and set up some bookmarks. With a lot of these learn & play activities, it seems like they would be very useful on my home PC but not so much at work for various reasons. With Delicious, I think the problem is that our work PCs reset every time we restart them. Since I don't have a dedicated user PC, all that stuff about putting a tab button in the toolbar etc doesn't work for me. So if I want to bookmark stuff, I still have to copy the URL, head to Delicious, sign in, and then set up a bookmark for it. I guess it is handier than having to search for the website every time, though.

I do like how they show you how many people also have the website bookmarked. This "social" part of social bookmarking makes it kind of neat to check out those people's bookmarks and see what else you might have in common.

Anyway, here are my bookmarks: http://www.delicious.com/hhcmeg

Speaking of play, we get to go bowling next week! Yay!

Challenges

I've been looking at the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners, and I'd have to say that the habit that is hardest for me is looking at problems as challenges. I like to feel sorry for myself sometimes, and even though I get through the problem I don't really enjoy it. I think this habit is also hard for me because I don't enjoy challenges all the time. I'm the girl who cheats on video games: when I had a ROM emulator on my laptop at college, I was hitting the instant save button every two seconds to make sure I didn't have to go all the way through the big boss fights again. I have to work on adjusting my attitude towards challenges and come to enjoy them instead of just suffer through them.

Probably the easiest habit for me is playing. I think "playing" is how my generation and those younger than us have learned so much about technology. If there's a new program or product or website that looks cool, we just play around with it until we know how it works and all the little tricks and tips to make it work better or faster or more awesome. I love playing with new things, especially web-based things. It's intuitive and it's fun for me.