#12 Roll ur own

So, Rollyo is an interesting idea, but I'm not getting it fully. The internet is huge (hence Rollyo's attempt to make it more manageable) but I don't know where the answer to my question is located, why would I want to limit where a search engine looked? I trust my search queries more than I trust my knowledge of all good potential web sites.

If I want to find out how to spell a word, I'm better off sticking it into Google (or heaven forbid, getting an actual dictionary off the shelf). I tried Ashley's spelling and synonym Rollyo with the word "courteous" misspelled several ways - it wasn't clever enough to understand what I was misspelling...

I will go in search of other participant blogs to find folks who are excited about this tool. I'll let you know if I'm converted enough to make my own!

Library Thing (#11)

It's hard to envision my home library sitting here at the reference desk... Suffice it to say that I have more books than I can recall at this sitting, but wow - what a fun tool Library Thing is! I really like the Unsuggester what a hoot. Apparently if you like Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me (as I do) then you will not like George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London or Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Now I do like reading Orwell, but I don't quite get (much to my dismay) Pynchon - I read about half of Gravity's Rainbow before I gave up and decided that I did not like the sensation of being in the kind of hallucinations that accompany a high fever... I totally get the social network when it comes to books - I like seeing how many matches there are between my book shelves and those of other folks. It's super cool to get book suggestions from other people (much like Amazon I guess) who have the same books. A++

Thing 10...

I am dying to use the Simpsonizer that I found as a recent entry on the Generator Blog. Sadly there is too much Simpsons mania right now and the web site is swamped. I'm a huge fan and can't wait to see what I look like as a Simpson's character.

I've played with name generators - my pirate name

My pirate name is:

Red Charity Kidd

Passion is a big part of your life, which makes sense for a pirate. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!

my goth name, even my stripper name (sorry is that not keeping things clean?) Amusing for a slow afternoon. The calendar generators and other assorted methods of personalizing mugs, magazine covers and the like are a really neat idea for gifts, jokes, etc... The sky is the limit if you have a good imagination and some coding ability!

I have a daemon!

The movie the Golden Compass is due out in December and a friend of mine just sent me a link to a daemon matching "tool" on the movie's web site. Did I get assigned the right daemon? 12 days to go before it settles into its final form...

MERLIN...sortof

Well, I started to explore MERLIN, but now I'm waiting for my user account to be approved so I can't go as deeply as I will later.

I did go to Meez and create an avatar - good, mostly clean, fun...

I'm excited to subscribe to the MERLIN feed - any tools that help me stay abreast of technology make me happy.

My other mission with RSS feeds is to enable (and understand) how the technology works with our new "Reader's Corner" newsletters and Dear Reader content. I'll keep you updated on that!

A recurring theme in my posts has been a low pitched whine about time and how long these technologies can take to thoroughly explore. While searching Google for MERLIN, I came across a blog from a BCPL librarian named Ellen. She refers readers of her blog to a post on David Lee King's blog, http://www.davidleeking.com/2006/09/19/making-time-for-web-20/ entitled "Making Time for Web 2.0." It reminds us that the reason we're doing 23 things and getting hip to web 2.0 is that this is where our patrons are (and have been for some time) so it's critical that we keep up if we want to be relevant. Admonishment taken - I'll try to be more upbeat. :)

RSSing our way to Lifelone Learning

Apparently I had set up a Bloglines account for a computer class that I was going to teach, so this exercise was already half finished. RSS feeds are a terrific service, but one still has to make time to read all the goodies that are collected. The list of things I am interested in and should be reading and keeping up with is far longer than the amount of time I will realistically devote to reading through the articles that Bloglines pulls for me but it sure makes headline skimming easy... Visit my blogline at http://www.bloglines.com/public/cplymire

One question that I have regarding Bloglines, why would I want to use their Bloging option?

Technology Smeknology

So for thing #7, I have to say that I am a bit confounded by technology today. I am trying to turn a Word document into a .jpg for use with our new Dear Reader Reader's Corner pages. Who would have thunk it would be so many steps... Dear Reader displays print newsletters as jpgs when it emails them to patrons...and converting from Word to jpg creates files that are way too big, hence the attempt to go from Word to pdf to jpg.

I've downloaded a freeware pdf converter called Software995 -- it's a good, free tool that I have used before. So Word to pdf is accomplished with a minimum of fuss. (However, there was a short detour as I tried to use the Google documents tool which will only upload documents as html -- completely destroying all Word formatting. Oh well. it would have been a nice CPU space saving alternative to Software995!) Now I am stuck with how to get my image into a jpg.

For a relatively low price I can download a universal document converter which will turn my pdf into a jpg... but it's the age of freeware, so perhaps there is a cheaper/better alternative? What do you know? Software995 has a freeware option that works with Pdf995 called Omniformat. For the trouble of a pop-up ad every time I use the software (this wouldn't happen if I upgraded to the fee based version of their software, but acknowledging that I am using a sponsored version of their software is a small price to pay!) Omniformat creates a folder on my hard drive and once I tell it to start scanning, it will convert any file that I save to that folder into a jpg (or any other format that I specify). Pretty neat. The graphic quality still leaves a bit to be desired, but perhaps that is a struggle for another day.

It seems there is some lesson here about technology--at what point does technology cease to make life simpler and start to make a task more complicated? Days like today make me feel like I have crossed that line into the more complicated...

Thing #6 is for the birds...and people with disposable time...

...Not the whole of thing #6, just the trading card maker. I've tried really, really hard to make a librarian trading card on the mash up - big huge labs (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php) , but to no avail. Actually, once I did end up with a card, but I'd used the wrong image, so that was a bust too. I enter the location of my image, my text and hit create and Nada... over and over and over again... Isn't this one of the definitions of insanity? Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results? I give - a moratorium is hereby declared on using software to do something that I don't really need in a medium that I don't really care about.

The site that Jennifer pointed us to in her Week #3 email http://flickrvision.com is a really cool example of a mash up, and like the rest of flickr - neat if you have unlimited time and love photographs and have a secretly voyeuristic tendency to want to know what other people are doing and seeing.