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: