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!

Twittering away

http://www.twitter.com/hhcmeg

Half of the libraries are closed today because of the power outages. The other half are open, and I know that here, at least, none of us are very happy about being here. But what do you do?

I was trying to get Twitter to consecutively post with, say, Blogger or my Livejournal, but it wasn't working. As far as I could figure out, you can only have it download tweets in lump sums at a set time during the day from LoudTwitter. Not really what I wanted. But I'm pretty sure some of my flist can get it to work on LJ, so I'm not sure what I'm missing. I'm sure I'll keep playing around with it and will probably figure it out, but that on top of my terrible horrible no good very bad day already today, I'm not very positively inclined towards Twitter right now.

LibraryThing

Clearly I'm using today to catch up on my Learn & Play tasks, haha. Although I was lucky on this one: I already had a LibraryThing account. I didn't do much on it for like a year, but today I logged back in again and added a few more books. Take a look: http://www.librarything.com/profile/tahmthelame

Photo Phun

I kind of hate myself for using that "ph as f" thing in the post title. Oh well.

I love messing around with images, so I really enjoyed this challenge for the Learn & Play.

I messed around with making a picture cube from Big Huge Labs: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/cube.php. I still have to cut it out and put the tabs together, but it's a little bit of awesome. And it was nice because it could link right up with my Flickr account.

And because it's fun, I also messed around with Cool Text (http://www.cooltext.com/) and embossed my name.

Library RSS feeds

Here are some interesting library-related RSS feed sites I found:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/learnrss (A whole list from Library Journal - all look pretty good!)

http://www.ala.org/apps/xml/alonline.xml (American Libraries Online RSS top stories feed)

http://www.loc.gov/rss/ (A bunch of RSS feeds from the Library of Congress)

RSS feeds

I've never really dealt much with RSS feeds. They're a little bit intimidating, since people like professional online comics stars and famous authors have them. But, since that's the newest task for CML Learn & Play, I've given it a try.

And I kind of like it...

It looks like it might be a neat way to keep all my most-visited websites together, which I suspect is probably one of the points of the whole thing. It was also kind of a winnowing exercise deciding what to put on my feed and what to leave off. Sort of a "I go here often but is it really THAT often?" discussion in my head.

ETA: FINALLY got my bloglines website thing to show. You can find my blogroll here: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/barigrl. (A note about the name "barigrl:" While it is often misread as BAR girl, it is actually BARI girl. In high school, I had the distinction of being the only girl in the whole county who played bari sax in marching band. Obviously I'm reaching far back to pull out very old usernames for this projects, haha.)

Technology Frustrations

Today we're supposed to blog about something technology-related, so I'm going to tell you how annoying Blogger is being right now. Amanda and I are trying to put pictures behind our headers, and it's just not working. Mostly the problem is that the picture has to be a certain length and width, but nowhere on Blogger does it tell us what those measurements are. So we've ended up with several pictures that are too short, not wide enough, not even the right format, etc.

I guess this is the LEARN part of the Learn & Play thing, though. So far I've pretty much just been able to jog through these things without too much problem, but this picture has me stymied. It has been kind of neat to be able to work with several coworkers on the problem, though. That's one thing I like about the initiative: everyone is excited, and everyone is sharing tips and hints for the different tasks.

Hopefully I'll be able to update soon with a working picture, but for now I'm going to go search the Internet for "long horizontal sunset picture."

Thomas Kincade on Endor

Thomas Kincade on Endor
Originally uploaded by Ethan Hein

I was looking around at mashups on Flickr for one of the Learn & Play @ CML projects, and this one definitely caught my eye. My mother-in-law *loves* Thomas Kincade: I can generally take or leave him. But Thomas Kincade + an Ewok? Yes!!!

Paddington check his old Haunts

Paddington check his old Haunts
Originally uploaded by BenSpark

I was browsing around Flickr for pictures about London and I found this one. Last year my husband and I went to London for our honeymoon. Our little (and I mean little!) hotel was literally right down the street from Paddington Station. I bought a tiny little Paddington Bear. The ones this size were waaay too expensive, haha.

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.