Wednesday, November 14, 2007

A Fond Farewell to 23 Things...

...and an ecstatic "Welcome" to web 2.0 in my life. I have learned an immeasurable amount of information, found resources I didn't know existed, and have expanded my previous knowledge as well as filled in the blanks where I had missed some aspects of all of this in my personal experience.

But I think what I've enjoyed most about this is in talking with my kids, who up to this point would roll their eyes at their technologically-challenged Mom, and now I'm tossing about terminology that *they* have to ask *me* to explain! I'm loving that.

Thanks, HCL, for giving me this opportunity and opening doors that I didn't even know were there before 23 Things.

Podcast and Project Gutenberg

I'm familiar with podcasts. The daughter of a very good friend of mine in Georgia is a member of MuggleNet, an online group of Harry Potter fans who have been involved with all of the HP books and films over the past several years. MuggleNet has a podcast, MuggleCast, in which our friend's daughter, Laura, is an active participant. In fact, her involvement with MuggleNet and MuggleCast were instrumental in her acceptance to Maryland's McDaniel College.

I searched Project Gutenberg for an obscure short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "The Leather Funnel." I used this story as a reference in a paper I wrote and presented last spring to a group of Sherlock Holmes fans; it's about a horrible death due to water being forced down the throat of someone as a punishment for crime and is drawn from actual events surrounding an arsenic poisoner in the Middle Ages. Fun stuff, eh? ;)

Sherlock Holmes and YouTube

Surprisingly, there are over a thousand YouTube entries for Sherlock Holmes. Some are scenes from the British Granada series, starring Jeremy Brett, the favorite of many for his portrayal of the eccentric detective. Some are music videos, which I found somewhat amusing. This one I particularly liked, as it is a reading of part of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Musgrave Ritual," with scenes from the Granada series. Although it is Watson's words with a woman's voice, it still works for me as it relates directly to the Great Detective himself, and not someone's interpretation of him.


Thing 19--Playing!

I found the coolest thing when I was doing Thing 19. But let me preface this by saying that my husband and I like to entertain, at our house or when we've traveled to places where we're meeting up with friends or family. Last spring we were trying to "invent" a drink for a friend of ours for when we met up with her and her husband at a Sherlock Holmes event. We didn't come up with a good one for her, but we did create what we called the "Eagle's Nest Marco Island," for when we travel to Paradise (see earlier post) every summer.

ANYWAY...on the Maryland Libraries 2.0 Web Award List I found this little gem Cocktail Builder. On the site you can plug in what you have on hand in "in my bar" and see what drink you can make, put in an ingredient or flavor in the "search" field and get a list of drinks and what ingredients you need, or you can create a drink and share the recipe with the Cocktail Builder community. I wish I'd known of this site when we were trying to create the drink for our friend!

Friday, November 9, 2007

Paradise

I knew I could do this! Post as well as upload a picture--HA!

This is at Marco Island, Florida, at sunset. This is where my family and I vacation every summer, meeting up with other family members and longtime family friends. It's a week in Paradise...

A Posting Fool

So many posts, so little time...

Trying to catch up with all that I need to post for 23 Things. There's no way I'll have time to both do the activities and then post about each one! I hope that the posting I'm doing will still count. I'll have less than 23 posts...

As fun as all of this is, I wish we'd been given more time to complete it. Doing this at home is not an option, and work time is filled up with...well...work.

Things, Things, and More Things!

Okay, so I'm kind of doing these in my own sense of order, but I've done Things 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15.

Thing 11: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jacquelynn (hyperlink didn't work)

I started adding my books and, lo and behold, it was filled with Sherlock Holmes! No surprise there ;)

Thing 12:

Powered by Rollyo
I don't know if I'll use this very much, but it's cool.

Thing 13: Checked out del.icio.us and had a little fun with it. Not something I see myself needing or wanting.

Thing 14: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/09/countertaserism.html

Okay, I found this blog on "Countertaserism" interesting and a little disturbing. Through the citizen's activist group to which I belong there is an NBC show about online predators being arrested by law enforcement, and I have to admit that the times when perverts are tasered by law enforcement for resisting arrest it's somewhat satisfying. Considering that a few seconds of being tasered is nothing compared to a lifetime of emotional pain for the child they've abused, I have no sympathy for them and would be disappointed if there is a way to keep from being tasered when warranted.

Also played with quotes (STILL having trouble with hyperlinks for some reason)
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/when_you_have_eliminated_the_impossible-whatever/220553.html

Thing 15: This paragraph from Rick Anderson's "Away From Icebergs" really resonated with me:
There was a time, not very long ago, when libraries exercised something close to monopoly power in the information marketplace. During the print era, if you wanted access to pricey indexes or a collection of scholarly journals, you had no choice but to make a trip to the library. It wasn’t a good system, but it worked. Sort of. That is to say, it worked moderately well for those privileged with access to a good library. In the post-print era, libraries no longer have the monopoly power that they had in the days before the Internet. We have to be a bit more humble in the current environment, and find new ways to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us—whether physically or virtually. At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play.

Gone are the days of the serious and intimidating librarian who held the power over knowledge and kept the library a dark and somber place. As one who has always had a hunger for knowledge it is so liberating to be able to access it on my own, and for libraries to be a part of that instead of dying a slow and painful death of obsolescence is such a thrill for me. I see a bright future for my children and grandchildren with libraries as a part of technology and not a stumbling block to it.

I did it! Online Image!

Zoho!

Okay, Zoho is COOL! I can make a really nice-looking Purchase Order on it, which we've been lacking ever since it was decided that we didn't need actual POs; just something that vendors who required them would be able to work with. I plan to redesign an HCL PO using our logo and making it look all nice and fancy. Way cool!

Hmmm...

Trying to upload images from my computer onto Blogger, but it keeps getting hung up somehow. I do know how to do this; I've done it countless times before in other blogs and forums, but for a reason I can't determine it's not working for me now. I'll try again in a few minutes.

23,000 Things

Didja miss me? I've been off doing useful things for the past two months instead of keeping up with 23 Things. It's not that I didn't want to do this; it's that four hours a day at a job filled with twice that amount of work doesn't allow, on most days, a chance to get a cup of tea, much less learn new and exciting stuff about Web 2.0. And doing this at home is not an option. As we're at the end of the alloted time frame for doing this John encouraged me to use today to try to finish...and so here I am.

Since it's been so long since I came in here I totally forgot my password to get in to edit or add to my blog. So there was the waiting for password help from Google...sheesh. Anyway, I'm zipping through 23 Things and taking notes.

Fun stuff!! RSS seems like the most useful to me, although social bookmarking takes a close second. I periodically check news of all sorts on many different web sites and now I can have it all on a handy-dandy RSS page! Woohoo!! Social bookmarking via del.icio.us will clean up all my bookmarks and make it easier for me to not only find all the great sites I need and use, but will allow me to share a lot of information with a lot of my mystery/Sherlock Holmes buddies.

And speaking of Sherlock Holmes...when I was doing the 23 Things about wikis I had to feel a bit smug. It's something I've already been using for the past several months. A friend asked me to join with him and several others on a Sherlock Holmes wiki called "Sherlockia," which happens to be a screen name of mine for e-mail and instant messaging, etc. In fact, my friend asked if he could use that name as it most suited his idea for the wiki.

The Sherlockia wiki is for Sherlock Holmes fans to post interesting or humorous pieces, either of a scholarly nature or just for information. What most non-Sherlockians don't realize is that Sherlock Holmes stories, for those of us obsessed, are our "Canon." Most of our interest lies in the character of Sherlock Holmes, the "thinking machine," but many of us are also interested in Victorian life, the state of the world at that time, the roles of men and women in society...well, here I am going on about it. For those who like a more humorous approach, there are other interesting characters in the stories and endless "errors" in the writings, such as a train schedule given that really didn't exist in Real Life. In our "playing the game," as it's called, we like to dig into and work out these little discrepancies and worry them like a dog with an old bone. It's silly and all, but it keeps a lot of geeks off the streets :)

Although I'm enjoying this blogging stuff here, I don't really care for it overall. To me it's like a huge diary that all the world can read, and I simply don't have that much to say. Nor am I interested in someone else's opinion all that much, so reading and/or subscribing to blogs holds little interest for me. Since I'm involved in listgroups, chats and message boards I get enough of other people's opinions on a daily basis.

I did enjoy watching the little videos from Commoncraft. I could relate to the visuals on those better than pages of text to read. I plan to recommend Commoncraft to many of the people on my Mystery Babes listgroup as I change our e-mail group to something else, perhaps a wiki. Many of the women on the group are less than cyber-savvy and many of them don't realize the options out there to learn all this fascinating information. I hope to walk them gently through the scary forest of Web 2.0, with a flashlight to show them that those monsters behind the trees are really just shadows...and that they can be a part of technology even if all they've known up to now is how to send an e-mail.

Isn't all of this just mind-bogglingly wonderful?! I can't imagine what more wonderful things will be a part of our lives five years from now.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Techno-Babe

Two posts in one day! Ssssmokin'...

I just went through Thing 3 about Flickr which was immensely fascinating to me. I'm familiar with ImageShack, SnapFish and PhotoBucket, but had never explored Flickr before. It's the best image hosting site I've ever seen! Just looking at all it offers got me thinking about something I can do for a listgroup I own called Mystery Babes. It's a private listgroup of about 65 women, all either mystery novel readers or mystery/thriller/suspense authors. Most of what we do is post on our Yahoo Groups private web site, but many of us meet f2f (face to face) at mystery conventions and book signings. Usually one of us will take a picture of those of us present and post it on the Yahoo web site, but as some of the members are less than computer-literate and are seriously techno-challenged, finding where the pics are on the Mystery Babes site is more than they can handle. I'm excited about exploring all the Flickr has to offer and possibly finding a way to share our vast collection of photos with all the Babes.

Oh, and mash-ups are awesome! I'm going to pursue learning more about those on my at-home time. This is quite exciting!

Finally!

After nearly a month of attempts to return to 23 Things which were blindsided by staff ordering crises, followups on previous orders, reports due and all the other kazillion challenges of my daily life here at HCL, with John's help and guidance I'm able to finally return to 23 Things!! Woohoo!!

I'm a bit frazzled right now, hearing my phone ringing across the way and not being able to answer it, but I believe I'm supposed to be posting about Lifelong Learning.

Personally, I found it much easier for me to turn off the sound on the video for Lifelong Learning and read the text on the left of the screen. The woman's singsong narrative was like fingernails on a blackboard to me. I felt like she was speaking to a child. For myself, I found the list of "Habits" to be somewhat in the "DUH!" category, but it's good to see them all laid out in a logical manner.

I think Habit #3 is the one that will help me the most as I learn to view problems as challenges. I tend to get overwhelmed by problems; I need to see them as challenges that I have the tools to overcome. For the most part, in my personal life I believe I am already a Lifelong Learner. Through my after-work involvement in message boards, chats, and online volunteer work for a citizen activist group I have learned a lot about blogging, posting, monitoring and moderating listgroups and chats, as well as MySpace and Imageshack.

My inspiration to be a lifelong learner comes from my parents. My mother was an avid reader who made sure our home was always filled with a variety of books and magazines and taught me to read when I was four years old. My father, who celebrates his 78th birthday this week, has been involved with computers since the early age of computer technology. To this day he is very computer-savvy. He receives donated computers from companies in South Florida who are upgrading their systems, repairs them, and subsequently donates the computers to Habitat for Humanity or public schools in lower income areas so that kids have access to computers. He feels that keeping kids up to date on technology will give them a better future than they might otherwise have had. My father's example of being a lifelong learner has greatly influenced me. One is never "too old" to learn.

Monday, August 20, 2007

And so it begins...

First day of blogging here...just finding my way around in anticipation of starting the 23 Things program. I'm looking forward to learning this stuff--I know enough so as not to have a blank face when conversations turn to blogging and wikis, but not enough to really participate. I'm actually excited about finding out how all of this works.