23rd Thing

Yey!!!! I finished this programme!! :)

I can't believe it!!

Actually, I learnt quite a lot. For example, though I've heard of blogging, and even read a few of those, I had never blogged, so it was good that we had a chance of doing this, that way, not only are we up to date with what the new tools and techology we have out there in the wonderful world of www, but we also actually know and can participate in what they are talking about!

It was good. I enjoyed it. But boy, am I glad that's over!

Ebooks

This is one that I was already familiar with. I had a look at the website of Project Gutenburg and looked at what kind of titles they had available. I chose to look for Alice in Wonderland (no reason whatsoever, it just happened to pop in my head when I started typing on the catalogue search box). They did have it availabe and it was possible to read the whole book, chapter by chapter online. It is a really good idea, specially if you were not able to go down to your local library to borrow it out, or if it was one of those books that are almost impossible to purchase.

Podcast

This was quite good too. I had a quick look at it and one of the podcast sites that I found was one called "Books on the night stand" http://www.booksonthenightstand.com/. This was fascinating because they would have a topic and then everyone can respond to it. One of their recent topics was non fiction books, and I quote "Today, it's all true, as we look at several works of nonfiction that are so good, we recommend them to people who normally read fiction." One of the non-fiction books that I liked was Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, it was one of those tear-jerkers, but it was worth it. I would definately have a look at this website/podcasts that they have from now on!

YouTube

This is really handy for looking for anything that's been posted in video format. One of the fun things is looking for funny advertisements thats being shown around the world or even catching up on your favourite soap that you missed while on holiday.

The jetman video is one that I liked. This is a synopsis of that video that I pulled out from another webpage http://www.flixxy.com/jet-man: On June 24th, 2004 Yves Rossy drops out of the Pilatus airplane at an altitude of 4000m over the Yverdon airfield. Before pulling on the little lever that controls the opening of his wings, Yves lets himself glide for a couple seconds and at the altitude of 2500m, he starts the ignition of the engines and waits 30 seconds for them to be able to stabilize. Once they are steady, he can finally speed up the engines and suddenly the dream comes true. He manages a horizontal flight at 1600m from the ground for more than 4 minutes, at a speed of 100 knots in formation with the Pilatus airplane. You can watch his flight from YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-66AcTo9TU - but as usual, this site is blocked on our staff pcs :( I liked it, because it means that individual/personal jet powered travel is possible in the future. If this was added in the library website, we can put it under the heading "anything is possible!"

Web 2.0 tools

This was a fun excercise. We were encouraged to have a look at the web 2.0 awards nominees and have a gander at the different websites. It was outrageous, there were some really good ones and ones that I didn't like very much. But one of my favourites has got to be the award-winner food site i'm cooked www.imcooked.com It was awesome, you search for a recipe (or if you're feeling uninspired, have a looked at the most recently viewed and give those recipes a shot), click on it and a video of how to cook the food would play. These videos are made and posted by people like us and not only gives them their 15 minutes of fame, but also shares with us their wonderful food recipes and how to make them.

This kind of application can be applied to the library, by say, making a video on how to use the My Info page on our website, they click, watch it, and then use the knowledge learnt and give the My Info a go.

Zoho

So I played around wtih Zoho. Since I can't do a lot of things with this in a staff or learn.net computer, I'm just going to copy and paste what I did on the zoho writer. By the way, it was so much fun playing with it, wonder why I've never heard of it before?! I must have been living under a rock!! :)

Here's what I did at Zoho:

Okay, I've signed in with yet another new web tool that I have never heard of before and this zoho writer actually looks good. Most of the symbols are familiar to those I've encountered before in microsoft word, so its not a totally unfamiliar teritory for me. Some of the symbols I haven't seen before, so I might have a play with that later.

Yeah...I wonder what the oemga Ω symbol does, I'm going to click and check it out. Oh hey!! Its where all the special symbols and character are kept, cool!!!

Ok, enough fun with this, I must publish a blog about it.

Thing 17

Wow! All I can say is that I am very impressed with Auckland City Libraries bebo page. It is amazing. Why can't Manukau have that sort of thing. I mean, if that is the way that the teenagers and those even younger are connecting with each other, then it only makes sense that we (library) do this too, to not only keep up with them, but also to connect with them. Heck, they might even decide that the library is a cool place and even visit the place from time to time! Not bad eh?!

Double wow for Hennepin County Library, they've got a facebook account and you can also access their library catalogue from there. That's innovative. That is so cool.

Library 2.0

Hmmm... so I've been reading the different points of views about library 2.0 and web 2.0 and where it could possibly take us.

I was reading the article about the 3 icebergs that are potentially hindering the library's progress towards library 2.0 and web 2.0. One of these icebergs that author discusses is the "just in case collection". According to him, this is "a comprehensive collection of materials that anticipates the user’s every need (without providing wastefully where no need exists) has always been problematic". Though I can see where he is coming from, as he works in a university and therefore has to cater for a wide range of subject, I just don't see public libraries decreasing their collection size because the book and articles may be available electronically. My observation is that public library users, though they may be aware that there could be an electronic version of the material they are looking for, still prefer to have the material physically at hand. Somehow I don't think we would be getting rid of, or decreasing our collection size in the future.

Technorati

Moving on to the next lesson. I had a play around with technorati. Typed in learn 2.0 under the blogs-posts and the first hit was all about keeping a lighting file, the title didn't intrigue me enough to actually click on the link. So, I tried searching for learn 2.0 under blogs-blogs and a whole lot of other things not related to manukau's learn 2.0, so I typed in manukau in blogs-blosg and hey presto! Came up with a lot of hits, including manukau's training page!! Success!!

I also had a look at Boing Boing, one of the popular blogs, found some of the articles there very amusing!!! I might look at it again some other time :)

Social bookmarking

So I had a look at the Del.icio.us thing that they were talking about. The concept sounded good on paper. I even clicked on the Social Bookmarking In Plain English. After watching that video, I'm intrigued enough to give it a try at home, because ofcourse, we cannot do this at work, cause we can't add the tag button to our browser.

Also had a look at the PLCMCL2 thing for the discovery excercise and found out that the most popular bookmarked site for today is "Build Better Pages With Firebug" . I love the opening line: Ask web developers to name their desert island Firefox extensions (ignoring for now the improbability of having a laptop while stranded), and they're bound to put Firebug at or near the top of their lists.

This tagging tool would be very useful specially if you are doing a lot of research. Or for anyone who bookmarks a lot of sites with similar topics, that way, when you need to look for that page again, you can just click on which tag you are after.

Wiki

This week's discover excercise asked us to look at the different wikis available and to blog about it. The first wiki I went to was the SJCPL Subject guides, which was created by St. Joseph County Public Library system. I had a look at the Homework section, cause I thought that this might be useful for the library. The first thing I looked at, which was the Biographies didn't work (access denied by the library), so instead, I had a look at Any-day-in-history and put in my birthday and found out all the names of famous people born on that day (didn't look at the people who died that day, that's too macabre). I think a wiki site like this one would work well with the library, as this kind of thing would be useful for homework.

Now, on to the next step, onto the “explore-and-play-with-wikis” exercise. So I went to Manukau Libraries Wiki and added my fav to fav books. This is what I wrote:

Young Padawan: There are too many good books out there to name my favourite, but the most recent book that made an impact on me was Homeboyz by Alan Lawrence Sitomer. It was a powerful read and I highly recommend it.

Technology

The Learning 2.0 lesson plan, or the-thing-that-must-be-obeyed has told me that I have to write a post about anything technology related that interests me this week.

Well, the thing I'm currently interested in is my new mp3 player. Now, I know that this technology is soooo last year (hang on, I can't even remember if they were out before that? hmmm.... oh well) but the point is, I only got one about a couple of weeks ago. I don't know why, I mean, it would be handy, but I just never got around to it, or I had other things I could've used if I wanted to listen to music. But a couple of weeks ago, I bought a small 1GB Philips GoGear mp3 player at Harvey Normans for only $29. Sweet!! Now I'm busy setting up my playlists and loading it on.

Montagr

I had a look at some of the Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that other people have created. Some of them were funny, some of them were creative, but the one that I liked the best was the Montagr. This tool lets you create a picture, made up of smaller pictures. I'm sure you've seen some of them in shops before. It would be a big picture, framed, say of a mountain. Then when you look closer, you realise that each 'pixel' is actually made up of other pictures of the same subject. So each of the little pixels is made up of other different pictures of a mountain. Cool huh?

So I searched for 'snow' in montagr and saw this picture of a mother and toddler staring outside the window, gazing at the snow. And each pixel is made up of other shots of snow and mountain. It looked really awesome. I might make one up someday, if I end up taking enough pictures of a certain subject. I reckon it'll be fun. Plus, when you print it out, it will look very impressive!

Snowboarding

So, I’m going to get a little sidetracked here and talk about my recent introduction to the dazzling world of snowboarding. Now, I should tell you, in case you haven’t figured it out already, that I am a total GEEK. That means that the normal college (a.k.a. high school) athletics day were days to be feared, swimming sports days were the days where you try to think up of any excuse to get out of it, but can’t find a good one, so you just struggle along with it and try to look like a complete idiot. PE was just pseudonym for year round “at least once a week, twice if you were very lucky” torture!! So yeah, I sooooo loved sports, you can tell.

Well…actually, I lie. There was only one other sport that I liked when I went to college. Because it was compulsory, (when I went there anyway, I heard some disturbing news that they don’t make students take at least one winter sport in the year….so unfair…the only thing that was keeping me going was the juicy thought that sometime in the future, some poor hapless soul would also be trudging though their sport activity in misery, cursing the gods and fate for sending them to this school!) I had to choose one sport. I ended up picking field hockey. Now, I never knew a single thing about hockey, heck, I hadn’t even watched a single match. But, I went to the designated time and place for the first practice and from then on, I was hooked. I even got most improved player at the end (read = such a loser at the start of the season, but improved enough so can actually hit the ball/puck when it is sent her way and score goals).

Now, you might ask, where the hell am I going on with all this?? Well, that was just to set you up for my story about snowboarding. So now you know how sports and I relate to each other, so taking up a new sport is not really something I thought I would EVA do.

Unfortunately, my bf is totally into snowboarding, so, I thought, unless I want to get stuck in the café or worse, in the motel/backpackers/wherever we’re staying while he goes out having all the fun snowboarding, I better give this thing a shot.

First things first though, I needed to get proper gear. The most important one for me was the clothing. I had only been to see the snow once, a gazillion years ago, basically when we first arrived here and let’s just say it wasn’t a fun experience. So me and snow, don’t match. Having grown up the first 8 years of my life in a tropical climate, I don’t really like the cold that much either (god…I just realized I complain too much!!!). I cleverly thought that this time, I’d come prepared and actually get some proper snow clothes. I’ve had a look at some other snow clothes from places such as boarder town and snowgum (I think that’s what it was called) and man oh man. If you hadn’t bought them before, let me warn you now, the prices are astronomical. There was this one jacket that I liked, it cost $339 and the pants started from $199. S%*t!! I mean, at best, you wear it for a couple of weeks in the winter season and that’s it for the whole year. How can those companies justify that kind of price???? Luckily, I went to the red shed because I had seen snow clothes there before. And I hit the jackpot, they were the Cory Hutchins range and they were pretty well made. They had taped seams (very important, so the water/snow won’t get in through the seams) and water repellent and all that jazz. It’s up there with the rest of the snow clothes from the other expensive shops and it only cost me $160 altogether. At first, I was having second thoughts about buying it (*ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod, I just spent a whole lot of money on these….I better like snowboarding or else I’m dead meat!*) BUT after I went to the snow, it was ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod, I luuurve these clothes!!! They kept me toasty and dry. That was a mission, cause most of the time we were down at the snow, I was on the ground!

Let me just say, I did think about it, I mean snowboarding vs. skiing. Because I am that good at sports, I really had to think whether or not I want both my arms and legs going in 2 different directions (if I skied, I imagined myself doing the splits or something, or wiping out with the poles and skis strewn around the ground all in different directions) or if I used the board, then at least both my legs are permanently planted on the board, hence no one doing the splits. So, I chose the path of least pain and went with snowboarding.

I rented out the snowboard and day pass on the mountain and I gave it a shot. Gryphon (for the purpose of this blog, that’s my bf’s pseudonym) was very patient teaching me how to slip the board on properly (I did it from sitting on the ground first, strapping on the left leg, then the right) then getting up as if you were doing sit ups (I was so sore by the end, imagine doing lots of push for half the day!). I did manage to slide bit by bit down the beginner’s slope before landing horribly on my butt. So it was slide down the slope, land on butt, (oh man, when did these muscles exist?) get up, slide down again, glide (wooohoo!!), crash….ad nauseum. But those few seconds of actually, actually gliding on the snow, wow! It was the most wonderful, amazing, OMG experience I would probably ever have on the snow (cause let’s face it, if you ever get me on skis, everyone better watch out and get out of the way!). It’s going to sound cheesy I know, but it felt like flying, cause I felt so free.

I did that for about half a day. After that, I was so wrung out, I felt like an overcooked vegetable. Which was good, I suppose, cause that way, I felt like I had used my half day extensively and I was able to get a refund on my full day’s pass and ended up only paying for half the day.

Now, you may ask, what has this horribly long tale got to do with the web 2.0 stuff we’re supposed to be doing?? Well, I got a picture of when we were down on the mountain…so that’s the one that is going to go on my flickr. If I can just get it to work out!!

Ok, so I created my flickr acount (yet another account) and loaded up my picture. I then used Blogger's photo upload tool to load the image here for all of you to see:

Left Overs

No, I'm not talking about food...I'm talking about bits and pieces that I thought I've done, but apparently not.

OK…so, on to the last bit of week 3’s lesson. I haven’t done it yet and don’t really know what it’s about. No wait…I did do it quickly early last week. But heck…that was a week ago and I got really sick that week. In fact, I had to take Friday and Saturday off, and I already had Wednesday and Thursday off already as they were my normal days off. So basically, all that week, I was high on meds and vitamin C. Let me have a look at my drawer and see if I wrote any of the passwords down. Yep…got it. So, let’s have a look at what I did. I’m just going to log on, and see…ok, yep yep. Apparently, I had actually done it already, but I hadn’t blogged about it. It was pretty easy to set up. I did 2 book searchrolls by mistake…so I had to name one of them Books and the other My Books. Oh well. But then…I read that I had to link my searchroll to my blog. But where were the instructions…well lookee here. It’s under the instructions called “optional”, now, I don’t know about you, but to me, optional means, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Over here, it means that you have to do it. Why? Why I ask you??! .

so, let me read the instructions and have a go at it. OMG, the instructions are so confusing. I guess it’s because they have to have a generic instruction for everyone and everyone’s bloggs (hey is the plural of blog “bloggs” or is it “blogs”?). Anyway, some of the words were different and at one point, I got lost with the adding the page element, luckily someone pointed it out to me, so I was able to head off again in the right direction. And yes, once there, I was able to follow the instructions and added the code. Viola! The rollyo searchroll turned up in my blog!! (see, look, its at the right hand side of the post that you're reading now!) Yippeeee!! I’m so happy!! He he he!! Ok, smug time over. I better log off and go back to work!

Eye Candy

So, one of my friends gave me a pic of Keanu that she had done for one of the image generator thingy. But unfortunately, she’d saved it to another library’s hard drive and it did not load to her blog properly. By the time she found out about the mistake, she couldn’t find it on the desktop anymore, so she had to find a less interesting subject (I mean, you just can’t top the pic of Keanu…where else do you do from here but down?...as Newweb2 (a.k.a. webmum) and her friend catatonia (a.k.a. catatonic-chataholic) were saying when they were doing this exercise...playing around with the picture… “you just can’t improve on perfection itself!” (I’m going to have to agree on that one!). So here’s the pic of Keanu, given to me by webmum! Thanks!

Apparently, I’ve also missed writing about the search engines you can use to search for your favourite feeds. So I went back to week 2 and lo and behold! I did miss it! (oooppss!) So, I spent the next five minutes speed reading through the thing, decided couldn’t be really bothered and just started clicking away on the links. Now, syndic8 was blocked my Manukau (surprise surprise), so I licked..I mean clicked on the next one, which happened to be technorati. Meh…didn’t look that flash to me, but I did find one topic I liked, so fiddled around with it and found a site which I added to my rss feeds. This was the site by slashfilm.com. The bloggs there were very entertaining!! Well, at least I completed week 2’s exercise! :) Sweet.

LibraryThing

Well, I woke up extra early this morning to see if the computer would play nice with me and actually let me do some Web 2.0 stuff without dying on me.

Hey...it must love cold early mornings cause it worked! It is cold, it is pouring down with rain and in a few minutes, I have to go out and go to work.

The good new is, I got to play around and set up my LibraryThing.

And you know what? It is actually very fun to use! I wonder why I haven't used this before. Its pretty amazing and so easy to use. Hell...it even gives you a virtual tour of the place if you don't know what its about. All you have to do is sign up (which everyone doing this web 2.0 exercise should be familiar with, seeing as we've been signing up left, right and centre since we started this!) and viola! you've got an account. After that, you just search for you fave book title or author, click and it is added to your library. It is even easier than searching for a book through Millennium!! (he he he!).

Well people, here's my link to my librarything:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Young-Padawan

Wk 3

Right, so here we are with week 3. Glad to say I'm not dead yet, but I sure hope that this will be easier than last week. Last week's lesson on RSS feeds - not so happy with it. It was loooonnngggg.....plus if you are not familiar with any of it, also very confusing.

The slow computer connection did not help at all. The the most frustating bit was that the work computers blocked most of the sites, even if you were on the Learn.net. So I have no idea how they expect us to do this at work, if the work computers aren't even cooperating.

Here I go again, trying to do this at home. Hope it's good.

So this week, we are going to be playing around with image generators. Its supposed to be fun, but at the moment, I'm so pressed for time, I don't have time to play around.

The one I'm looking at is the Star Wars Crawl (gee....I wonder why?!!).

Except that when I clicked on it, I found out that the site was shut down. Back to square one.

Instead I clicked on the Magnigraph link where I can " create your own vector images in black, white, red or blue". So I did. Got a picture of my fellow jedis and stuck in, it worked after about 3 tries! Hey, at least it worked!

So there you are. You can see my very red magnigraph. Well...its late and its cold. I've been at this for more than an hour now. The computer is so slow. I'll try to pick this up again tomorrow.

Part Deux

So now I'm home, wishing I was doing something, anything other than this. .

OK....so I've done the discovery exercise of adding the 10 feeds onto my blogline account.

I've even subscribed to some co-workers feeds....some are really entertaining to read!

Now I'm tackling the last part of this exercise, which is..hmm...something about a public blogline URL. Let me see. OK, here goes!

Let's see...if I've done everything right, here is the URL for my public blog thingy:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Young-Padawan


Victory is mine! It works! Ha ha! The hard part is over, so now I can cruise over to lesson 3!

SSR (silent sustained reading)....err...I mean RSS (really simple syndication - not)

So here we are with lesson two.

Apparently this RSS thing is supposed to be the hardest one of the whole lot.

I've been hearing horror stories of people tearing their hair out with frustration about it, the link wouldn't work, or the webmarshall would block the sites and dozens of other little things that's making this RSS thing really hard.

I had to ask for help with this. Good thing she knew what she was on about, she was able to steer me in the right direction and I sort of got the hang of it. It was a bit hard with the computer playing up on you, it either wouldn't accept the sites I was trying to subscibe to (sorry access denied) or the whole page would suddenly come up in code (matrix anyone?).

Basically after an hour of fiddling with the computer's temper tantrums and in between customer service, I got as far as making a blogline account and signing up to the 10 mandatory feeds we were supposed to have (did I mentioned that the computer connection this morning was agonizingly slow? I swear, empires have risen and fallen in the time it took for the page to load up). And that was the only free time I had with the computer today, so I've decided to take this puppy home and see what I can come up with for the second part of this RSS feeds.

The beginning of the end

I don’t quite know what to make of this. The whole blogging business. I knew it existed…I’ve even read a few random ones, but I wasn’t really keen on getting into the whole thing myself.

Well…that stops now. I’ve broken one of my items from the “NOT TO DO LIST” because work asked me to.

I work in a library (read = geek).

Apparently, we (all library staff) have to catch up with the modern times and start learning web 2.0 stuff.

So now, I’ve got all these jargon and technical terminology…some of which I’ve never even heard of coming out of my ears..like….RSS & Newsreaders, folksonomies and technorati…. what???? are those even real words?

Well…however this goes, it sure will be an interesting journey...