A few of my favorite Things

When I found out youtube was going to be part of this, I knew straightaway that that was going to be my favorite Thing. My favorite surprise website that I never would have found if not for Learn & Play was the aptly named Stumple Upon. There is so much fun lurking under all those little links. Other noteworthy things I explored during the Learn & Play journey are the Pandora music website and the build-your-own Lego person image generator. I also really liked reading other CML staff members' blogs.
So...I guess this is goodbye. Thanks for the flash drive! Adieu, adieu, parting is such sweet sorrow....

Take one down, pass it around, one more Learn & Play Thing on the wall!

I don't use exclamation points lightly, so this means I'm very excited to be this close to the Learn & Play finish line. It has not always been easy to find the time to explore and blog, so I feel that I've accomplished quite a bit.
I went to MOLDI and I figured out how to download audio books. Usually the only audio books I check out are of the stand-up comedy variety, for when I'm driving to and from my hometown. However, I have heard nothing but good things about the Harry Potter books and the amazing one narrator that does all the voices. Sadly, I can't seem to find Harry Potter books on this site. Under Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy, it goes from The Harlequin to Hart's Hope, in Children's it's Harry and the Dirty Dog to Hat, and the only Teen H title listed is Huckleberry Finn. This seems like an appropriate time to point out that this Thursday at midnight would be so much more awesome if I was able to spend it sitting in a movie theater about to watch The Half-Blood Prince. Until July 2009, I suppose Potter fans will have to settle for puppets:

If this Thing was an American citizen it could drink

I went to podcastalley.com and found both Nobody Likes Onions and Wreckless Media Radio to be intriguing. I didn't want to download any of the videos from Onions onto this work computer, but I'm going to take micromarty2000's word that it is the "best podcast ever." Someone I know has a UFC podcast, but my search for it yielded so many that I'm not sure which one it is. I love UFC, I just don't know if I'm hardcore enough to sift through all these and join.

I am not a conjurer of cheap tricks!

If only Murray getting ridiculed was work-appropriate enough to post. He will just have to settle for being referenced in the blog title.

My Blog's Leather...

In my del.icio.us blog I mentioned Blayne and Stella's banter on Project Runway, so without further ado:

Hey Cindy

BEST. SHOW. EVER.

I've got soul but I'm not Sister Souljah

I realize this commercial aired a lot during the Summer Olympics, but it still pumps me up every time I watch it. As someone who's never excelled in any sport other than Bocce, it speaks volumes when a sports commercial motivates me to action.
I love what Youtube has done for short filmmakers trying to get their work seen. When I was in film school, it was all about applying to get into film festivals in order to have any hope of a large, non-campus audience. It's so much better now: filmmakers are receiving exposure, I am fighting sleep at one in the morning watching random stuff that is hilarious. I mean without Youtube, I wouldn't even know who Charlie the Unicorn was.

Pow Pow Power Tools

I clicked on some of the tools in the toolbox and became completely enamored of Stumple Upon. I stumpled upon all kinds of great links, i.e. Fail blog (which featured the Best Man Fail that was on yahoo's home page recently), and an adorable slideshow that uses phrases like "room temperature IQ" to urge shorn-faced men to grow beards (don't do it!). Stumple Upon is like Pandora for interesting websites. How dangerous that I have access to this at work....
Also noteworthy is gmail, which I clicked on because a lot of my friends have gmail accounts that they praise regularly. I was curious to see what made gmail an improvement over yahoo, which is what I have, and then I read this music to every email packrat's eyes: "over [colossal, increasing number] megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message." Never?! I haven't deleted an email from my yahoo account yet, but I will remember this if I ever have to. You never know when you'll want to read what you were talking about this time last year.

Eighteen! I just don't know what I want!

Sidebar: The Freaks and Geeks episode where Mr. Rosso plays this song in his office and Nick and Daniel sing along? Great moment.
I went to the top 3 music sites on the Web 2.0 Awards list and I like all of them! My favorite is Pandora, which a friend had told me about a couple of years ago. I love that it introduces me to music that I nearly always like and probably never would have heard of otherwise. It's a great site to visit if you're sick of all your current music and don't want to have to do too much searching. I liked last.fm also and am probably going to revisit it at home when I have more time and won't annoy coworkers with my muted music. I'm sure I could spend hours clicking on all these video links. As someone who rarely listens to the radio, these are great sites to visit when I want to find out about new music without listening to a bunch of car commercials and stammering deejays.

Google Docs

It's true, this is very similar to Microsoft Office. If library patrons used a Google Docs account for their papers and presentations, there would be no downloading compatibility packs. As someone who has the dreaded Vista on her personal PC, I can see how Google Docs would make life easier for people that use multiple computers. Incidentally, my only problem with Vista is that sometimes I can't open emailed attachments on computers without it; otherwise I like Vista okay. Maybe I will knock on this wood surface right here though to be safe.

If you wanna find me, I'll be out in the sandbox....

Hopefully, anyway. I tried linking my blog to the Favorite Blogs in two different ways, so I'm either on there twice or not at all. It's fun to see what other staff favorites are. The Staff Picks displays in library branches and video stores are always of interest to me. One of my favorite authors, Kevin Brockmeier (whom I sandboxed about), wrote a passage in his last book about staff picks displays in public places. I should look it up. It would be so appropriate here.

Oh Wiki, what a pity, I don't understand.

My favorite Things are those which make me think of songs I know and like, specifically songs from Team Karl Day 2007's Name That Tune. One of the best times ever. Fact: Candy Princehorn can identify any song within the first three notes if it was released in the 80s.
Until I looked at CML's Learn & Play blog, I didn't quite see how libraries that used wikis were that much more of an improvement. It seemed at first like accessing a library's regular website would be just as useful. After looking at ours though, I can see how it is fun to contribute one's own information to a site. And while I am suspicious as to whether material published on wikis is actually true, my coworker Rey raised a good point in that if a topic is popular and lots of people read about it, an avid reader would likely correct any misinformation promptly.

Thing the Fourteenth

I read three of the perspectives and Dr. Wendy Schultz's Library 4.0 "knowledge spa" idea intrigued me the most. In the likelihood that the world becomes busier and more overrun with distractions, it is appealing to picture libraries as luxuriously comfortable retreats. I wonder if in five to ten years Amazon Kindles will have reached the tipping point and we'll all be reading books through handheld screens. I kind of hope not.

Del.icio.us

The name of this site makes me think of Blayne from Project Runway. I don't miss his "licious" tagline, which never caught on for me, but I do miss his making fun of Stella's leather obsession. Maybe when I get to the youtube step I'll post a clip of their banter. I really don't want Kenley to win.
Moving on, I can see how del.icio.us would be useful in research. If I go to grad school to get my MLS, I'll probably use this.

Twitterdee, twitterdumb

I made a twitter account. I do prefer micro-blogging to this kind of blogging, but only because it is shorter. I would use twitter in my personal life if I was stranded without a phone but somehow with Internet access and wanted to send a text message that everyone could read. My name is LWeasley if you want to be a follower, though I can promise it will be a boring journey because I only tweeted for the credit.

LibraryThing, you make my heart sing...

...the praises of similar websites better than yours. I created a LibraryThing account and it was a nice site to explore, but I prefer goodreads and shelfari to this one.

You're not number one, you're number ten. You ARE number ten.

I went to one of the image generator links and stumbled upon a blog that gave me the option of creating a Lego person. My Lego person is a superhero whose superpowers include delivering Pez dispensers to the moon.

Nine Times?

In the unlikeihood that I ever become someone that subscribes to RSS feeds outside of CML's Learn & Play, I did visit all three of the search tools provided. I found Topix.net the easiest to navigate. It looked like all I had to do was click on a headline that interested me from the homepage, then click the bookmark option to add its RSS feed to my already ridiculously long and confusing list of RSS feeds. Right? Okay, I also went to a website I visit almost daily (clevelandindians.com) and did find where I can join their RSS feed. I'm not going to, though. RSS feeds are decidedly not simple for me.

Really Simple? Not so much.

I agree that this is the most difficult thing of the 23 things. I still don't really get it. I set up a bloglines account and unintentionally subscribed to a bunch of links I don't want and would never visit otherwise. After messing around with the website, I remain unable to figure out how to delete the links I don't want. Personally, it's faster and more convenient for me to just visit my favorite websites separately, as they're all in my pull-down search menu anyway.

Seven, which I still 12 years later don't think is a good name for a son (sorry, George)

It's not often that I ponder the advances of technology, but I do take regular walks in my neighborhood, and this is much easier now that I finally have an Ipod. I used to walk my dog while listening to a discman that was so big I had to wear a purse to hold it. Every other step risked skipping part of the song, and it was only a matter of time before I got bored and wanted to switch CDs. Not having to stop every ten minutes to spit-wipe a disc makes walking much more enjoyable and leaves me time to think about other things, like I guess advances in technology. My dog and I like the Ipod so much better.

Six LeMeure

I looked at some of the librarian trading cards people have created. While it's fun to picture grade school children stealing librarian trading cards out of each others' backpacks instead of Yu-Gi-Oh, I did not follow through and make one of my own. Nor did I make a jigsaw puzzle or motivational poster, but I guess it's nice to know that if I ever want to, I can.

Flickr Exercise Attempted, Completed

This is a picture of me and my nephew on his birthday. I'm his godmother too, so I call him my godphew. He's about a year and a half now, and he's going to be a big brother in five months or so.

It's big, it's heavy, it's work!

And it's apparently a requirement of Learn & Play. I've never succeeded in keeping a journal, diary, etc. for more than a week, I guess because I don't like to write out my thoughts, but I will give this a try. I did watch the 7 1/2 habits, etc. slideshow, and I've determined that the habit I find most difficult is the one that involves viewing problems as challenges. I like challenging myself, but I have a hard time perceiving an unexpected problem as anything other than an unexpected problem. I think I am best at accepting responsibility for my own learning, particularly since graduating from college three years ago. I sometimes miss the classroom setting and peer discussion and critique, so shortly after graduating I made a point to always be reading a book. I try to mix a non-fiction or juvenile chapter book in every so often so I'm not exclusively reading adult fiction, and I am also in two book clubs, so I feel that my reading is helping me learn all the time.