Thursday, August 31, 2006

Woof, I feel like I've been parked in front of this computer forever! I just finished up creating the first official blog for the Freedom Flyer - check it out here. It's not very pretty yet, though - before I do another one I need to figure out how to add tables and such to a standard blogger post. (Or maybe just do a custom layout...lots of coding, either way!) For now, though...I need to get away from this monitor before my poor abused eyes go on strike.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Holds expired team meeting today - it was at Independence, which meant I got to walk there and back, and I'm now in my apartment, typing this up while I have lunch. This way I can work on the Freedom Flyer or the holds list from 4:00-5:00, (normal lunch time when I'm on the 12-9 shift), and I still get to skip the crazy 2:00-3:00 school traffic on Independence. Nothing like being stuck behind a smelly school bus for half an hour as it stops and blocks traffic every 200 feet to drop off screaming kids! (Kids who then go running into the road anyway...tying up traffic both ways and nearly causing accidents...*sigh*)
Anyway, changing the subject away from East Charlotte's kamikaze kiddos...one of our managers, Michael, pulled me aside the other day and brought up the idea of transforming the Freedom Flyer into a blog. (How many blogs would that put me in charge of? Five? Six?) I still kind of prefer the idea of having it in paper form for everyone, for the same reason that I print out the staff.org newsletter each month - people are more likely to read something if you put it right in front of them. However, it might be fun to have it in both formats - I have to type out everything I put in the Flyer anyway, so it wouldn't be too much extra work to upload it to a blog, too. I may mock up a template for it when I have the Flyer done tomorrow and run it by him...bringing the Freedom Flyer into the 21st century...man this little newsletter's come a long way since it started!
Stuff to do, stuff to do...I need to get Annette's birthday buckeyes in travel-ready boxes and hit the road. I have to get on my to-do list from the holds meeting, work on the Flyer, and, most importantly...get to work! (Not that I'm officially late, since I'm scheduled to be gone until 4:00, but still...) Before I go, though, here's a few more Learning 2.0 related links:
Continuing on the subject of RSS feeds, I know I'm repeating myself here from a previous blog, but I can't stress how cool Hennepin county is, or all the different things they've done with newsreaders. How awesome would it be if PLCMC reached this level one day...although most of our patrons would probably have no idea how to use it. (That's what the library's for! Learning experiences!) LIS news has a link to their feeds as well...I get their news through e-mail already, though, so I don't think I'll sign up for this one. (For those who are really into their new bloglines accounts, though, it looks pretty nifty!) And last, but not least, the U.S. government has an RSS Library site - for those interested in government doings, I can't think of a better place to get your news! Stop by and check it out - their featured sites even has a link to feeds and podcasts straight from the White House! For a US government news source, I don't think you can't get more direct than that!
Well, cross your fingers with me that the buses are all off the roads by now, all - I'm off!

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Feeling a bit better today - still not quite able to manage solid foods, but I've got my little bottle of water to carry around with me, so we're doing good. (I still owe Miss Annette some birthday buckeyes, though - hopefully I'll feel up to facing a bit of peanut butter tonight!) Just a little while ago I was bragging about how much sick time I have saved up - I think I jinxed myself, because I've had to call in on two sick days since then. (Or it could just be the standard hazards of working with the public are catching up to me...)
At any rate, let's get moving and knock out the Week 4 Learning 2.0 checklist! Now, once again, I've had my bloglines account for a while, and since I don't check it often as it is, I've never really felt a pressing need to go out and look for more feeds. Still, the whole point of Learning 2.0 is to try technology-related things we wouldn't normally try, so I used the links from the Learning 2.0 blog and set off on a feed hunt.
First stop: Feedster. Pretty easy to use, but most of the stuff I found wasn't what I was looking for. Most of the feed links I got were for personal blogs...and introvert that I am, reading about the daily lives of people I've never met and know nothing about doesn't hold much interest for me.
Next up: Topix.net. Like it says on the Learning 2.0 blog, this one's focused more news and media outlets for feed links...but I prefer to get my daily news from over at the Washington Post news site. Eh, good site if you want to get all your news through feeds, though. Moving right along...
Number three: Syndic8.com. Probably my favorite site out of the four listed, I even found a feed for Anime News Network to subscribe to. (Since when does ANN has an newsfeed? Five-star niftiness!) This one seems geared more towards feeds from websites, rather than personal blogs or news sites, which makes it a good one for those of us who like to surf, and want to use RSS feeds as a way of knowing when a page has updated.
And finally, last...and, well, least of the four, Technorati. Another site for personal blogs, but the search engine wasn't quite as user-friendly as Feedster's. Tecnorati searches in three categories: keyword in blog post, keyword in tags, and keyword in blog directory. Searching for things in a blog directory seems to give the best results, but even then they're still generally half relevant, half random. I suppose if you were just surfing around for neat things to look at, this could be a fun site, but if you're looking for a specific type of feed you're pretty much out of luck.

In conclusion, I suppose I'd have to say that my favorite way of finding newsfeeds is still to go to my favorite sites and see if they have an RSS feed of their own...and then use the feeds as a way of knowing when to check the original site for updates. What can I say, I'm a (web) surfer girl at heart, and the idea of getting all my info from a single site every day is no fun. Now if you'll excuse me...according to my new newsfeed, ANN has an update on their main site that I should go check out.:P

Monday, August 28, 2006

Well, now that the day's almost over, let's get moving on the next part of the Learning 2.0 checklist. (Man, time flies when you're feverish and unconscious!) Number eight isn't much of a challenge for me, as I already have an account with bloglines. I did start up a blog there as well, though, in honor of the whole Learning 2.0 experience - who knows, maybe it'll get me to look at the bloglines account more than once a month. (Maybe? Hmm...) RSS feeds don't really do it for me, to tell you the truth. Yeah, you get all of your news in one place, but it's not like it's really hard to click through your favorites list and visit each individual site, either. Reading stuff through bloglines is also a bit...well...dull. For example, I keep up with Neil Gaiman's on-line journal, because it's awesome to hear about the daily goings-on in the life of an insanely successful writer. (My #1 goal in life is to be a successul writer myself, for those who haven't already heard this a million times) Bloglines lets me know when he's updated, and gives me the update, but it doesn't let me see Gaiman's actual site, and it doesn't let me see any new graphics or links he's added. Yes, I admit, I'm a slave to cool site designs and pretty graphics, but really, I've always found the bloglines site to be a bit slow, so it's not like there's much of a time difference between loading the original, shiny site and loading the RSS feed. Eh, I'm not trying to make it sound as if I don't like bloglines - I do, and I do enjoy playing with my feeds when I remember to - but for me, it's just not the superamazingcool new toy it seems everyone wants to make it out to be. As for how libraries could make use of this technology, I think the coolest example is over here at Hennepin county's site. Personalized library RSS feeds - now that might make me check my bloglines account more often!
Ugh, what a Monday.
Woke up today feeling dizzy and groggy, but I figured it was just a case of the Monday blahs until I discovered I was having a hard time staying upright. Last time I tried to blow off a dizzy spell like this, I ended up with a sprained ankle, so this time I was a bit more careful. As it turns out, though, it's not my anemia acting up again - I just have a nasty fever. (So...um...yay?) Since I'm stuck at home for the day, I guess this means I have plenty of time to get caught up on my Learning 2.0 checklist, so let's get started.
Today's blog is dedicated to technology - so I'll do a little spiel on one of my favorite time-wasters: bittorrent. Bittorrent is a P2P file sharing program that has grown steadily in popularity over the years. It works like this: first off, you have to download a bittorent client. (I use ABC, but Azureus is probably the most popular right now) Once you have a client, you have to find torrents; the easiest way to do that is type the word "torrent" into Google and see what sorts of sites come up. Once you have found a torrent for the file you want, you download it, then plug it into your bittorent client and start downloading the file itself. What makes bittorrent different from other P2P file-share clients is that the moment you start downloading a file, you automatically also start uploading. While there is usually one main source that does nothing but upload, or "seed" a file, all users who download the file are also uploading parts of it as well, which is what makes bittorrent so fast. Bittorrent breaks a file down into pieces for faster uploading/downloading, and when you download a file, it draws file pieces from as many different sources as are available; the more people there are uploading a file, the faster the download.
For example, let's say a new Charlotte band wants to make their new single available to their fans over the internet, but their main site doesn't have great bandwidth. Instead of having it available for direct download, they create a torrent for it, and post the torrent on the site instead of the file itself. Their fans then download the torrent and plug it into their clients. At first, there are 200 fans uploading/downloading the file - this means that when bittorrent downloads the file for an individual, it is pulling file pieces from 200 different sources and the download only takes a few minutes. A few months later, though, only a the band and a few hardcore fans are still seeding the file. That means when a person goes to download that file, their bittorent client is only receiving file pieces from a few sources - thus the download takes longer. If the band decides to stop hosting the file altogether, and the fans stop seeding it, then bittorrent is unable to retrieve file pieces from any source, and the torrent is dead, meaning that if even if you download it and plug it into your client, there are no file pieces available for it to find, so it won't download anything.
The upside to bittorrent is that it's generally faster than other P2P clients, and there's a huge community for it, so it's easy to find whatever file you're looking for. The downside is that it relies on individuals seeding a file, so if you're halfway through a download and everyone who was seeding it suddenly stops, chances are that you're never going to get the rest of that file. However, unlike other P2P clients, bittorrent relies on a community of seeders, so if you can convince even one person to start uploading again, you can finish downloading your file.
That's it in a nutshell - for a clearer explanation, and/or to get started using bittorrent for yourself, head over to the main bittorrent site.

Sunday, August 27, 2006



Played around with a few tools on Flickr today like a good little Learning 2.0 student. The trading card maker is the most fun, although the idea behind Mappr is very cool too...but I had some trouble with it, which cost it some coolness points. It's very slow, and the pictures didn't seem to want to load properly on my computer screen - either they don't load at all, or I only get blurry little thumbnails. Still a very nifty idea, though, and I did get to see some cool pictures from my hometown of Granville, Ohio. (Yay for the crazy pink Buxton!)
Sooo...if I can get my act together and blog about something technology-related tomorrow I'll be caught up on week 3 - just in time to be behind again with week 4. (Sigh) I have to get the September Freedom Flyer out by Wednesday, though, so Learning 2.0 might have to go on hold for a while. Hmm...I could talk about Learning 2.0 in the Freedom Flyer...now there's a good front page story idea! (The front page is always the hardest!) I wonder if messing around with Publisher to put out a newsletter counts as playing with technology...not that I really need to dig for a technology subject. (I'm always messing around on the computer!) Ooh...speaking of which...Week 4 involved RSS feeds - I already have a very active account over on bloglines, so this week might end being a gimmie for me! (That'd be nice...)

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Oh my.
Apparently adding a PLCMCL2 tag to your photos on Flickr automatically makes them appear in the little slideshow on the front page of the PLCMC Learning 2.0 blog. So now Matt and Shundra, (pictured in the last blog), are famous - well, in our library system, anyway. Matt thinks it's funny...Shundra, however, may kill me when she comes in on Monday. (Maybe she won't notice if I don't tell her?) It's nice to see FRL rated up there with ImaginOn and Main in something, though, and it's also nice to think that PLCMC employees are looking at my photos every time they log on to the Learning 2.0 blog. (Me? Vain? Nah...maybe just a little!) I'm having a good time on Flickr now, personally. Some of my PLCMC colleagues are apparently hardcore photographers - if you want to see some amazing albums check out their work here and here. I have no eye for artistic pictures myself - I just snap shots of anything nifty. Speaking of which, I still need to upload the Hawaii album to my Flickr account so I can send the link out to the family, and I should work more on my Learning 2.0 checklist...but it's the weekend, so all that's going to have to wait for Monday!

Friday, August 25, 2006

Graphic novel collectionShundra posingFreedom Regional balcony shot 1Matt.

My Friday off would be a great day to get things done if I could wake up at a decent hour. Anyway, here's my post with some pictures I took around the library yesterday. (Matt and Shundra were good sports about posing for me - Matt even gave himself a special Learning 2.0 hairstyle!) As for my feelings on the experience...well, anyone who checks out my Flickr account can tell that I'm no stranger to playing with a digital camera and posting the pictures online. Mostly it was just another chance for me to mess around and take goofy pictures of people - which is never really a bad thing!

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Busy day, busy day.
I've spent a large part of the day helping my coworkers get up and running with their own blogs, as well as adding my own comment over on Freedom Regional's blog. I'm still bummed that this is all mandatory now, but at least I'm getting in a lot of practive with Habit number 7 of the "Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners." (I still feel like number 7 1/2 has been tossed out on the curb for this program, though.) I'm learning a bit more by helping other people too - I just figured out today how to change/modify my blog templates. I'm not sure I'm up for coding a personal customization just yet...I may have to browse around and see if there are any other sites for Blogger templates, though! (If I find any nifty ones I'll post links to them - and if anyone here knows of anything like this, leave a comment and let me know!)
I'm going to try and get started on my Flickr checklist tonight too. I already have a paid Flickr account - I just need to start using it and upload more pictures to it. (You know you mess around on the internet too much when you get excited about a site, pay to be a pro user, then immediately forget about it in favor of the next new shiny distraction!) I got some fun shots of our branch today, so hopefully I'll toss some of those up here either today or tomorrow.
Ooh, and students come back tomorrow - and I won't be here! Part of me is a tiny bit sad to miss out on the initial excitement...and a slightly larger part of me is very, very grateful that I'll be missing out on the initial craziness!

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Well, bah.
So now this whole Learning 2.0 thing is mandatory, which kills the fun for me. Instead of using my cute library kitty picture I have to post a picture of myself. Bah. Instead of playing around for the sheer joy of it, I'm obliged to keep up with the list because I'll be in trouble if I don't. Bah. Instead of being something to do when I want to for fun, this has become something I have to do for work. Bah, bah, bah. (Apparently I go into sheep mode when I'm disappointed) Ah well, I suppose it was too good to be true - work's work, that's why they have to pay you to show up.
On the bright side, it makes me feel a lot less guilty about not updating regularly like I originally planned on doing. Anyway, I need to get myself caught up on this check list!

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

We had our Silly Circus here at FRL today, and it was fun, though it got a little crazy. (For future reference: snowcones + library carpet = bad idea.) This snowcone dye is pretty stubborn too - I've washed my hands several times and it still hasn't come off. (Miss Annette cleaned it off her hands using Comet...but I'm not that anxious to get it off!) Good times all around - and our new manager really proved himself today.:)
One of my coworkers has recently started grad school for her MLIS, which is what I will be doing around this time next year. The reading I can handle - it's the starting classes again and writing papers with actual deadlines that I'm a bit nervous about. The fact that I'm planning on getting a degree in library science lead to a discussion on the future of libraries in general, and librarians in particular. For my part, I see both libraries and librarians becoming increasingly high tech, and I think that will lead to a higher demand for qualified librarians. When I was in elementary school, I practically lived at the local library, which was a decent-sized, two-story building...about the same size as FRL, actually. Know how many librarians worked there? About 6. (Compare that with FRL's staff of over 20!) There just wasn't as much demand for them - the only times they interacted with the public were when they were doing programs, checking out materials, or helping someone find a book - I'd say around 75% of their time was spent shelving and keeping the building in order. We still do all of that, but we also spend a lot of our time showing people how to use the computers, envisionware machines, search PACs, and so on. As I have been typing this post from the lab, in fact, I have had to pause to restart a computer where someone didn't close out of their session, show a patron how to copy and paste a webpage into MS Word to make it print the full page, show a patron how to paste pictures into word, and help a patron add extra rows in a table for their resume. Libraries have always been about learning. In the past, books were the main source of learning - now it's predominantly computers. Librarians of the future are going to be the ones showing people how to use all of this new technology, and libraries are going to be the place people come to to play with it and learn about it.

Which is what this whole Learning 2.0 program is about, right?:)

*P.S. Right as I was about to close out this window, the patron I had shown how to copy and paste webpages into Word stopped by my station, smiled at me and said, "You just taught me something tonight." That sums up a large part of what my job is, I think.;)*

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Today was a stay in bed sort of day...and that is exactly what I did. Bah.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Weekends don't count.:P

So...let's get back to the Learning 2.0 checklist, which is the whole reason I started blogging here in the first place.

For me, the easiset of the 7 and 1/2 lifelong learning habits is definitely number 7 and 1/2 - play! (I'm good at playing around with stuff!) The second easiest would probably be viewing problems as challenges, especially when it comes to technology problems. Mind you, I may not always be up to meeting the challenge on my own, but I'm always willing to give it a shot! (Ask me about the time my first PS2 stopped working and I downloaded instructions off the internet to try to fix it on my own...)

As for the hardest, that would probably be beginning with the end in mind, mostly because I rarely have a set goal in mind when I start out doing something. There's always a vague concept of what I want to accomplish, but that doesn't solidify into a clear cut goal until I've already started. My goals, and the order I want to accompish them in, change too much from day to day.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Whew, there's not much August 11th left - I'll have to type fast if I'm going to get in today's post!
Work was a little stressful today - the internet was down until around 4, although Firefox started working again around 2. (Proving yet again that Firefox is superior to IE) Most of our borrowers left as soon as they heard that we didn't have internet access, so things were pretty slow at the circulation desk. It picked up a little for me in the last hour though - I ended up calling out for a lot of requests for quick pick-ups and the like. Things got a little heated at one point over a request for a browsing paperback, but we managed to get our borrower what she wanted, and she left in a pretty good mood. (Sorry I ended up causing a bit of trouble for you all over at Morrison! No hard feelings - everyone was just doing their job the way they'd been told to, right?)
I've been poking around the Learning 2.0 checklist a bit - some of these things I've already done. My librarything page is already linked in my profile - maybe for my Learning 2.0 session I'll upgrade it to a paid account and try to catalogue all of my books...that'll be a job and a half! I have an account at bloglines already too - I mostly just use it to keep up with news from Slashdot and Fark, though. (I use it to read cartoons too and check the weather too!)
And that's all for tonight. It's a lovely Friday night, after all - can't spend it all sitting in front of a computer!

Thursday, August 10, 2006

So much for the idea of updating eveyday, ne?

Well, I haven't given up on it completely. My main problem was that I didn't have anything going on in my life that I cared enough about to share with the world. (Hello world, today I went to work, then came home, ate some pizza and messed around with my computer a bit...and that was it. Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting installment.) My life makes for dull reading. So, instead of writing about myself, I'll toss up opinions and links to some of the things I'm interested in and see if that inspires me to head here daily. Be ye warned: my biggest interests right now are environmental/humanitarian issues and anime, so if that sounds even less entertaining than the story of how I spent the afternoon napping, run away.

Thus, without further ado:

Environmental/humanitarian
-Interesting stuff on the front page of Care2 today. I don't check out this site as often as I should - though that's mostly because so much of it nowadays is depressing and/or infuriating. Still, for anyone looking to keep up with the major environmental news of the day, you won't find a better spot!

-Yet another petition to try and get our leaders to acknowledge the dangers of global warming and actually do something about it over at the petition site.
I signed it, of course, but sometimes I feel like things are going to have to reach cataclysmic levels before anyone in power takes any sort of action.

-Interesting link from Red Cross today - this might also be something my fellow librarians would want to make note of. The link is here, for anyone interested in checking it out. This is a site for someone who has been involved in a disaster and has been unable to contact friends and family; the individual can register themselves as "safe and well", letting their family and friends know that they are okay. This would be especially helpful to people travelling overseas right now.

Switching gears over to anime:
The big news today, for me anyway, is that they're working on making a movie based on the manga of Battle Angel Alita. According to wikipedia, the movie is (for now) going to be called Battle Angel, and will be based off of the first three volumes of the manga. Unfortunately for fangirls like me, it's not set to start production until 2009, but I suppose it's nice to have things to look forward to. For more info check out the wikipedia link.

Well, that's a pretty decent entry - let's see if I can keep it up!

Monday, August 07, 2006

And we're off! I've never had an account just for blogging before - I use Livejournal mostly for passing around quizzes and posting weekend plans, and MySpace is my spot to post pictures and pass around bulletins. Maybe this will be good for me - I'll do my best to post something in here every day. (I need the writing practice!) We'll see how long that resolution lasts...