In memory of Gina

Today I'm writing to honor my tatting friend Gina, who died earlier this week. Gina and I became friends via the Internet and her Yahoo Groups list, Tatting Goddess Updates. I'm not at all a prolific blogger but a lot of tatters and lacemakers are. After we heard about Gina's passing, a suggestion was made to blog today about Gina and what she meant to us.

I never met Gina in person but it didn't matter. She made you feel like you knew her. She was supportive and encouraging about all lace things. When she traveled she tried to connect with lacemakers wherever she was, and as many people have said, they just knew if they'd met her, they would've been good friends. She had that effect.

Shortly after I joined her Yahoo Group, a Christmas exchange was taking place. People on the list wrote teasingly about the gifts they planned to share, the lace they were including in the gift, when they sent it, and when they received a package that must've been sent somewhere else first. That was all in an attempt to keep the partner anonymous. Rules stated one could not open the package until Christmas! And nobody did. While I was so envious that I'd missed out on the fun, I didn't think my lace making was of good enough quality to share with some of these really good lacermakers. Gina took me as a partner once after I shared my hesitance but partnered me up with people all around the world afterwards. And oh, were those exchanges fun!

Gina posted often about the things she was doing beyond lacemaking: her family, finds she got in antique shops, tea-for-one pots and cups she found, her work, and meeting with friends. When she became a Great Grandmother, she posted in a way that if one wasn't paying close attention to what she said, you'd have thought she had another grandchild. Someone pointed out that it was her child who had a grandchild, not her! I know grandchildren are a blessing, as are children, but great grandchildren? Wow!

Early on after developing a blog-reading list, Gina's was one of two blogs I read religiously. I'll miss not being able to email her with a question, or just to chat. I'll miss reading about her lace life on her blog. Maybe I'll blog a little more often. I know when I tat, I'll think fondly of her. Today, it's about a post to honor someone I admired and will always wish I'd met. Today I'll tat, think of Gina, and have a cuppa tea. Just for her. RIP, dear Gina.

Thing 37-photos and fun

In the earlier version of this exercise I set up a Flickr account. Having seen a lot of libraries use photo rolls, I can see using this or tools like these for promotional purposes, especially for a lot of children's activities, i.e., storytimes, summer reading programs, special programs, and events. Because I have some great photos at home to play with, I plan to use pictures on a home computer to do more of this exercise.

DD discovered there is a great piece of software built into newer Windows machines that times and displays selected photos and applies music. She did one for her cousin's Hawaii wedding this past February, and it will be played on their DVD player at their wedding celebration and open house in the next week or so. It turned out nicely, what with the software knowing how long the song is, being able to time the bleeding of the pictures and melding into the next, and it was free. It seems the sites in this thing either wanted registration or one would be using someone else's pictures, neither of which I want to do. The first one was of a darling bride and groom at their wedding, and she found it on YouTube, but the music was removed from someone at YouTube because it was a copywritten song.

Thing 36 - Comic Relief

I used the conversion to .pdf tool. This is the productivity tool I've been waiting for. Granted, it's probably been around a while but I didn't seek it out. What I converted was an application for interning at my library. Someone took the application to volunteer and converted it to put it on the library's website and now this one can be placed there in a similar format too.

The next fun thing I did was a fake newspaper headline commemorating the birth of my grandson. Because I murdalized names, I'm not going to post it anywhere visible and plan to delete it once I've chuckled over it one more time.

I made a tinytag but man, was it tiny! You know those ads for enhancement? This tag could use a vitamin V! lol I know they're for embedding and viewing on a computer screen but this wasn't the best use of my time in the end. I really don't foresee libraries (at least not here) generating their own comic strips or even cartoons. There is an unwritten code saying we don't make fun of patrons or books. We should listen to this one -- it's sage advice!

Thing 35 - books 2.0

I'm not interested in organizing or cataloging my books either in-house or electronically. On my FB account I have used the Visual Bookshelf but don't care enough about it to keep it updated. Sadly I don't find as much time as I had to read so spare time is used rather to read than to blog-and-share it. I am a tangible person -- I like the feel, the touch of paper, the smell of ink, and the holding of the book. I've listened to an audiobook on my iPod and enjoyed the narrator. Since then I've picked up a hardcover of a different title and enjoy imagining hearing the narrator's voice. I plan to download a number of items to listen to on my summer trip because we'll be spending a lot of time in the car. I hope they're just as enjoyable as my first iPod title was. Wish me luck.

Thing 34 - not a competition

Asked to read articles on whether librarians compete with AskA services, my thoughts are mostly in the No camp. I know some questions can be answered quickly there, but do I want someone seemingly untrained to answer questions that are *very* important to me? No. I want an answer that comes at me from all directions. I want responses to an important question answered from authoritative resources -- known, credible, and answered from someone who cares that I get the right answer. This being said, I understand how easy it is for someone to rely on an AskA service, get a quick-and-dirty response to something they've pondered. There are times and places when Google answers questions, but not always.

If a good reference librarian cannot find an answer, they'll readily recommend a department, an agency, an expert, a place, or a person who, even if they too cannot answer a query, can lead me in another direction to find the right one.

It scares me to think of all the K-12 librarians and media specialists who have been cut from schools. If someone does not give proper direction and instruction to these budding minds, will they become a generation of "google does it all?" I sincerely hope not. College and University libraries should not be the only place to have properly and adequately trained librarians working with students and those being educated. Even the college and university librarians are being re-purposed.

It may sound like I'm trying to protect my own job. Granted, I don't want to lose my job, and I do realize evolution is happening whether or not we want it to. I'm happy to learn how to do things differently and to learn new things. One of the things that makes me happiest about being a reference librarian is that I learn from people who ask me to find answers for them. It's sort of like stealing, but the information was there to be found, I just didn't know the question to ask!

Thing 33

With the prevalence of Wifi and the ease of carrying a laptop or Wifi-connectable device, the links on this travel 2.0 exercise would come in handy for a lot of people. I'm planning a driving trip this summer and have taken note of the url to search for hotspots along the way. We'll be staying in some chain hotels and probably some non-chain hotels but we're looking at this time away from work as a sereindipitous excursion. Maybe we'll want to blog on hotel experiences and maybe we'll walk away without wanting to mention details. There are a lot of travel ideas in this Thing. I'll come back to this one when our departure gets closer.

Thing 32

Do the Mashed Potato . . . Do the Twist . . . yes I like it like this!

Although I couldn't get the map with directions into the body of the blog, check out the map on the sidebar -- it's the route to get to our temporary library. Since we'll be here until summer of 2010, I'm pleased I was able to get this here. There seemed to be a significant problem getting the map into the main page. Adding the HTML to the sidebar, however, was easier. To find the directions they recommend, click on the button that says View Larger Map

This is a sweet application, and one I will suggest to DD whose planning a November wedding that will have a lot of out of town guests. If we can simplify travel for them I know they'd appreciate it.

Thing 31

In honor of my ignoring Twitter, I wrote a haiku:

Tweeting's not my style

Do you not understand this?

Twitter's not my thing.

Thing 30

I use RSS and would hesitate to winnow it down through the use of the tools suggested in this thing. If all I subscribe to would be things I want to read, why would I deliberately minimize what I get? Google Reader is my choice to manage RSS feeds to which I subscribe, and the way I've managed it is to remove those blogs or feeds that had either no action or ended up not being what I want to read.

I have faithfully read and kept current on all blogs and websites I've followed. They're the folks I enjoy reading about, their trials and travails, conquests and commitments. It's enough. Sometimes there's such a thing as information overload, and if I limit myself to these few folks, it's plenty for me!

I don't share a lot of bookmarks and don't care to tag them, and should I want to share a website with someone, I can't think of a more finicky way to do it than through Delicious. So if I'm happy with my RSS feeds, why would I want to sign up to follow Delicious? Is it the same thing, or different enough that I should check further? Hmm. Well, not today anyway.

Thing 29

Google manages to nail almost everything I use on a computer. Google News is one of my widgets (culled from other news sources, but it comes in through GNews), productivity-wise, I've used GMail and GCalendar for a couple of years, and I've recently blogged about the Desktop and Toolbar, which are part of my iGoogle setup (well, that's when I set them up).

Must say tho', Google Health, only 2 words for this: no way. I want nobody tracking what I'm looking for. It's way too Big Brotherish for my tastes!

Thing 28

I love iGoogle. Correction. I love iGoogle when my computer isn't busy. There are multiple widgets set up on my home desktop, and among these is my favorite: a clock! Trying to be a good steward of time, I keep my eye on this clock (it's a face clock, not the digital one on the bottom of the window's screen) in order to keep track of when I should be changing what I'm doing. The next favorite thing on here is a widget for weather. Although it's not always right, I can glance and see what weather my sister is having.

The photo roll isn't as enticing because instead of going only through my current personal pictures, it also includes those of blogs I follow. I don't want to see all those photos -- I want to see my favorites. If I were able to limit it to what pictures I wanted to see, I'd be much happier. The news snips ~ eh. They're not necessarily new. It's become like the newspaper has, old news, news I've already heard about, or so removed from what I care about that it's not really news then, is it?

Thing 27

Twitter. Another account (I have too many already). To answer the question"What am I doing?" I'm going to go under the premise that nobody cares, or if they did care, there'd be many other places and priorities to contact me through, so I'm not going to
a) create another account
b) worry about who might be missing me
c) worry about who I might be missing

I have one child who's on Twitter, supposedly to follow celebrities. She was disappointed to find out that whoever's Twittering or tweeting for said celebrity, is a fake.

Thing 26

I'd joined Ning as one of the first 23 things but didn't stay active. To complete this Thing I posted a picture of my cat to the Ning and tried posting the Ning badge to my blog, but somehow the code was corrupt or unevenly tagged. Since it's a matter of posting code which I've previously done, I won't try to figure out which code is unbalanced. Because it's another quasi-social networking site, if I were looking for someone in the field, I may look there, but I didn't join any groups or even pursue beginning one.



Sometimes sites are laid out compactly and manage to hide features from me. If a website or network's page changes significantly, I don't plan to invest enough time on them to make them readily updatable or find out where "that thing" went in order to update my information. If I focused on one website where activity was more my style, I'd make it more of a priority to find where "that thing" went to in order to keep it up to date.

Thing 25

While I understand the necessity of readability piece in a blog, when something is assignment-based, the practical application piece of 'readability' will be something I set aside until I need to personalize it. I try to know who my audience is and write things that may be of interest to them.

I must say that several of us have taken our Facebook accounts, Twitterized them (used our status like a Tweet), used mashups, photo manipulators, added links, videos, articles, and quizzes, many of which are in this Thing. We all seemed to recognize the "Twitterizing" of our FB status on the same day, and when we discussed it, we all agreed that it's a version of one-stop shopping. Dont'cha just love how we can verb things on the spot? ;-)

Thing 24

Although I haven't blogged a lot since completing the first 23 Things, I had changed my avatar, added a widget (quote of the day), read many other blogs (continued interest), added a few blogs that I do follow, and took a lot of time to digest details from those first 23. In my personal information, I added a picture of our library mascot, Booker instead of a picture of myself -- it was handiest.

What happened to October?

October blew right off the calendar! Now that it's November, we can await the birth of our first grandbaby. Webby's due date is today. We're grateful he or she wasn't born before today because DDIL's maternity leave is significantly better than it would've been yesterday. It's the one-year anniversary at her workplace today, which is the date the benefit gets higher.

DS got a digital movie camera for his birthday. We hope this will provide a few video clips for family who aren't nearby enough to see the baby and family often. Between birthdays, family gatherings, being really busy at work, re-roofing our house, the engagement of DD and her newly affianced, all I can say is "whew". The leaves are waiting today, so I'd better get out there and help. It's a deliciously bright and sunny day, even if it's a titch cold. Raking is not my thing so I hope I'll be able to use the leaf blower. I'm all for automation!

In a week, my library will partake in our annual In-Service day. One of our guest presenters will be the local director of our multi-type library system, Metronet. She will be talking about the successes of the first 23 Things on a Stick (Web 2.0/Library 2.0 technologies) and talk about the next Things we in libraryland will be encouraged to learn. I am thrilled to see how many of my colleagues completed 23 Things on a Stick.

Enough here. I'm stickin' the earphones in my ears and hitting the switch on that leaf blower. DH will think I've procrastinated enough! Remember to turn your clocks back tonight.

How time flies

I can't believe it's the end of September already (Happy Birthday, DA!). I haven't had much to post about lately, and I haven't really listened to the myPod either. Haven't been gardening, haven't had a lot of free time, and a few bouts with nasty cold germs have kept the family sharing them.

It's high editing season for j2 and I'm up to my eyeballs in alligators, as they say, keeping students happy (most of them are psychology students -- haha!). I'd like to get back to figuring out that myPod thingy. We didn't have the Internet at home for 2 weeks of this month either. Now that the Internet came back home (the modem-that-really-isn't-a-modem went walkabout), maybe I'll get to spend time with the machinery. Well, whatev ... what will be, will be.

Audiobook woes again!

This past weekend I had enough time to do some significant weeding in the flower beds. Had irises that needed trimming and culling, as well as getting rid of the weeds that threatened taking over. Even though I enjoy the fruits of nice flowerbeds, I have to work myself into pulling weeds. Did a few gentle stretches, downed a big glass of water and steeled myself into the work. Had myPod inserted in my ears, with the right buttons pressed and got down and dirty. About 45 minutes into the new story, it stopped! What? It's not supposed to stop.

After a brief break to get up, take off garden gloves and finding some shade, I advanced the myPod (by holding down the button -- my fancy vinyl clip was in the house) past the part where it stopped. The story continued and I went back to my weeding. Some 15 minutes later, it stopped again. By now this was wearing thin. I don't want to take the time to stop what I was doing and move the dumb player past its points where it stops (remember this is the player that always goes back to the VERY beginning each and every time). The third time it stopped I just quit on it and turned on music. myPod has an FM tuner too. I might've preferred listening to the Twins game on the radio but there are lots of things I'll listen to on the FM band. Guess I'll have to check into the licensing on the audiobook to see if it expired yet -- it was a compelling story, but with its idiosyncracies and abrupt stops, it's not the download I can count on. I do want to listen to the story (I think I do anyway) so I'll re-check the bits and bytes and hopefully will make it work. Will update on this later ... sigh. In the meantime, I have to heal the blister from cutting back plants with a poor scissor.

Came up with a workaround

I ended up not using the alligator clips because I found a vinyl covered clip sort of like a clothespin. It didn't scratch the player, advanced the time quicker than my sore finger would've, and with my timer set (5 minutes per hour), I advanced it. When the timer went off, I was close to where I remembered stopping. Voila! It worked. And I finished the e-audiobook.

Not sure how it got off myPod, but in my computer's Windows Media software, I removed it from a playlist. Plugging in myPod to recharge the battery and sync it, somehow it happened (can you tell I have little faith in this technology?). Made a new playlist and sent the next title to it. The new title got there so I will have to find time to start listening to it. Next I have to figure out how to renew what I have "checked out." The 3 titles I checked out were optimistically checked out at the same time. I had no idea it would've taken me as long as it did to work out the technical machinations, listen to it, and consider the next title. Baby steps will help me become more confident, that's for sure!

Waffling

I hate it when I waffle. First I don't think I like listening to audiobooks, now I do. But at a big cost. Time is what it costs. The mp3 player (myPod) I have from Sansa works well enough for me, but I kept losing my place in the audiobook I was listening to. If I don't hit the UP button (pause is what this does), the audiobook starts over from The Very Beginning. There is no fast forward (well, not fast enough for me), nor is there a bookmark feature (You Stopped Here).

What I have to do is navigate into the audiobook and advance the run time to approximately where I stopped. The audiobook I have is about 11 hours long and at least 3 times I've had to re-find my place at about 4.5 hours. And this doesn't count the times I stopped incorrectly before I reached 4.5 hours!! Yesterday I showed the player to a friend who has iPod and yep, you guessed it! Back to zero. Now I got smart enough to know my finger hurts after holding down a button for 20+ minutes, so I discovered a pencil with an eraser placed on the button jumps this ahead with more comfort than my finger pressing down. Ever the automator, I will have to try getting a *really* wide rubber band and using some sort of clip on the button so I can set a timer to re-find my place. This is the clip I envision using: (don't tell me if they look familiar :-)

The wide rubber band will protect the case from getting scratched too. I'll let you know how it works later on.