Staff Inflections

Well lets see. 23 things. 23 Blog Posts. A dozen or so new site signed up for (some of which I may actually continue to use. Nice.) and lots of new ideas for things I can do to make my libraries on-line presence more interesting. Not necessarily better mind you, but definitely more interesting. Would I do something like this again? Yes. Absolutely. I learned a lot and really enjoyed most of it. The only thing I would do differently has nothing to do with the program. If I had to do it over I would start just a bit sooner (more than 9 days out 8p ) so that I would have more time to really look at each Thing. I'm not sure if this Blog will ever be updated again but my gut says that it will. This may eventually become the Webermeiers main web site. I'd have to tweek a few things. Change the style a little, add some draperies but I think the ability to dynamically update the site could be very useful to me since I tend to be a fairly dynamic (as per the second listed d...

I subscribe to about 5 podcasts through iTunes . To be honest I rarely get around to listening to them. I like everything about the theory of a podcast. Pick a subject that interests you. Find a podcast or three about it. Listen a few times to make sure you can stand how they sound (a serious and common issue with podcasts IMHO) and repeat with a different subject. After a while you theoretically can create your very own talk Radio that only covers things you are interested in. Only I never get around to actually listening to them. I even have an Ipod so it's not that it's even difficult for me. I just have never gotten in the habit I guess. Anyway. I bopped around on a few of the Podcast specific search engines and there were several interesting sounding Podcasts but I actually found mine just by searching google. Maybe now that I'm (kinda sorta) getting used to the job I'll have time for Podcasts . Maybe I'll even come up with something for the Library ...

You have to sift through a lot of...uh...silt in order to find anything really worth while. That IS YouTube. Still if you have the patience and decent search-fu you can find some really amazing things. Video how too's; Hilarious clips; or just that music video you remember seeing 5 years ago by that band that you haven't seen in three...but it sure was a cool video. I on the other hand grabbed this. I play tested and did the layout for this game. It's very cool (even if I do say so myself) and if you have a RPG section in your Library I highly recommend this one...if it ever actually comes out. Yes. That was a shameless plug. :D ~0ps

I just got done playing around with Swivel Preview which is a data graphing site. This is what I made there. I've been meaning to generate a graph of our Circ Data for...oh...about since I took over the job. (Remember folks uninterpreted data is just numbers. Boooo!) Though I did have a little help from one of my clerks to get the data entered into an excel sheet (though the Swivel site is very open about how you get the data in) the whole thing took maybe a half hour...and that includes the time it took to find the sheets that had all the information I was looking for in the first place. I haven't figured out how to tell it to interpret the data differently yet (say by month or by year total) and it may not be able to do that yet but it is still pretty cool, fast and easy to access. Very Neat! ~0ps

I will keep these apps in mind. There have been a number of occasions where I needed to create a document and wanted to share it with some other people but couldn't open it on their system because they didn't have the right versions or what have you. This would seem to fix most of those problems. Google Docs is still pretty rough but I suspect in a version or two it is going to rock. ~0ps

This is a document. I'm not sure what to write about as I do not need to make a document for anything other than making a document at the moment. Quite a conundrum. Ah of course...a haiku Google Documents skitter through the internet Everything is here

I have used Media Wiki (the wiki architecture use for Wikipedia) but not PBwiki. Pretty smooth I must say. As I said last time I'm not sure how much use a wiki would be to me but at this point I think I'll try it and find out. If nothing else it would probably be a good way to collaborate with my Board between meetings. ~0ps

Hmmm....how useful is a wiki to a Library? I mean I can see that larger Libraries with a big enough patron base could use such a thing to great effect. I, on the other hand, live in a gray town of under 2000. Many of my patrons are surprisingly tech savvy but few and far between are those that really LOVE the internet. Many of them decry us using a computer catalog as too complicated. Of course this makes my left eye throb a little but I understand that if you don't understand how something works then no matter how much better it may be; it's bad. So I try and explain and some of them get it and some don't and some seem to choose not to. That's fine too. Part of my job is finding books for people. So what are the odds of getting anyone ELSE working on a wiki I put up? Pretty small in my honest opinion. Now that's not to say I couldn't be wrong or that I won't give it a try. The ease of editing and cross linking makes a wiki a very powerful tool. Y...

Library 2.0 About a year ago I read a book titled Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It was published in 1992 and is considered by many to be one of the seminal works of predictive cyber -punk fiction...the main character also has one of the best names ever. In this book the writer describes a distopian future where the mafia openly runs a chain of pizzeria's, the metaverse (think Second Life...almost too much so in fact) is accessed via virtual reality gear and the Library of Congress and the CIA have merged into a single entity. And that is what I thought about when i was reading about Library 2.0 Here's my only issue with the various perspectives provided. They all seem to be verbose ways of saying "keep up with the times or be left behind". I agree with the sentiment but think that the Debasing article is probably more reasonable. It's going to take me a while to properly analyze and synthesize what I've read but my initial reaction seem to parallel my t...

http://www.slideshare.net/MilfordLibrary I don't really DO powerpoint. I know lots of people do and I will keep it in the back of my mind if I ever have need of something like this. I mean, I can see how it would be useful. I could even see using it for instructions as i think about it but i just can't seem to connect to it the same way i have other sites. I'll have to play around with it a little more. Flight1549 crash View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: airline crash ) This isn't mine but I did think it was cool. ~0ps

I just wanted to point out to everyone (yeah...both of you.) that there is a link to OpenDNS in my blogs Link List. OpenDNS is an open source (read FREE) web filter. You can set it up to be very strict (as in "allow only these sites") or very loose (as in only block phishing and attack sites). All of this is performed by address filtering rather than keyword filtering. Now of course this has it's drawbacks. It doesn't necessarily catch brand new sites (though you can add them yourself if you find such a site.) but it also won't stop people from getting to their E-mail. Here's how it always worked for us with Cybersitter . A patron would come in and get a computer. They would sit down and start over to their E-mail and then they would call us over because it wouldn't load (and who knows how many DIDN'T call us over and just left instead) we would look things over and almost universally end up turning off the Cybersitter so they could get the...

Last Friday I started poking around on delicious.com . When I got home I made my own Delicious account and just played around. I like it. I haven't figured out exactly how to use it for the Library just yet but I know that I will and I suspect it will be very helpful. The only problem I'm running into at this point is the shear number of log-ins I have to remember just from this project series. :P ~0ps

Huh... You know...I really can't see using this as a NON-business tool. I like how fast it is and I will admit that if I had free texting on my phone with which to update it the odds would improve but even so it just seems...I don't know...fatuous. There is a point where information for information's sake just starts to bug me. I mean. I don't care for the most part what I had for dinner last night. Why would I want to know what my friends are eating. I don't know. Just didn't grab me. Now on the other hand for the Library I can see lots of uses. "Looking for volunteers to help sort books for our book sale." "The Library will be closed xx/xx/xx through xx/xx/xx for winter break." "Did anyone leave a child at the Library? She is small and pink and insists on rubbing my head." Lots of things that really don't warrant a whole blog post or would be lost inside a larger one. So in short. The Kid in me gives it a thumbs down ...

I hadn't used Library Thing before. Man that is BAD @$$. I'm going to tell my friends and patrons and quite possibly strangers on the street about it. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/MilfordLibrary I mean even if ALL you did with it was keep track of what books you had read. So cool. ~0ps

For Christmas two years ago I received a video game package from my girlfriend. I was ecstatic! I had been wanting to try the Orange Box (most specifically Portal) for months at that point. When i had a chance i popped it into my computer, loaded it in and set it up only to find that my computer (which had originally come loaded with Windows ME) just couldn't quite handle running Half life. Drag. So i set out to get a new computer that would run it and run it well. I talked with one of my friends who has had more dealings with this kind of thing and he agreed to build me a new computer as soon as he could get all the parts he wanted for it at a reasonable price. Two years later: I'm still waiting and will likely be waiting until about this time next year. Why you may wonder. Well I'll tell you. First off Core i7 chips will be cheaper and better by then. Second: USB 3.0 should be coming out around that time. Third: Windows Seven is supposed to be out around that t...

...but now with my Super-Generator I shall RULE THE WORLD ! or at the very least post some goofy freaking pics. Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php Interesting sites. I must admit i also like FD's Flickr Toys about the best of them.

Amazing Assistant Originally uploaded by MilfordLibrary Here we have my most able assistant. She is diligent and detail oriented. If she wasn't in pre-med she would make a great director some day. As to Flickr. It's pretty cool. Very easy to use and it can be interesting to see what others have posted. As a whole i haven't personally had much use for it. I'm not a photo kind of person. I've never gotten in the habit of using photographs as external memory. On the other hand If i can just remember that we HAVE a digital camera I think I may start adding some photos from Library events to this. ~0ps

Yes that's right I'm skipping #8 and moving right on to #9. I am an unstoppable force! BWHAHAHAHAH! Plus I don't have access to a camera at the moment. Ahem. Anyway. The flickr color pickr is pretty cool. The ability to pull together many images with a specific Hex code could actually be very useful for a lot of different design projects. Unfortunately the Flickr Spellr was having technical issues when I tried to use it but I could see using that to make signs or web graphics that are very different from what could be made (easily) in Word. The ease of useing all this is of course the thing that makes it all so cool. ~0ps

The feed specific search engines are interesting. Normally I just look for the RSS button if I like a site and add it that way though. All in all I must admit it really is very simple. As for useful feeds. Well. It's the internet. With a little luck I'll find more useful feeds as I continue looking around. At least now I have it in mind to keep an eye out. ~0ps

RSS is great. Of course I normally just use it to keep up with which Webcomics have been updated and I've never used Bloglines before. I just have plug in for Firefox. Which worked pretty well but isn't playing nice with Firefox V 3.0 so I'm going to give Bloglines a deeper run though when I'm not QUITE so rushed. Just so everyone knows you also have the option of clicking the little RSS feed button in the address bar and then selecting Bloglines for the destination. Very quick and very easy. (I'm using Firefox...oh I mentioned that.) Now I just need to figure out how to rearrange my feeds into a slightly more useful format. Still pretty cool from what I've seen. ~0ps

Bane of productivity. Source of unintentional drama. Slowly being replaced with "texting" near as I can tell. I've never liked IMing. Frankly if I'm at my computer it's because I'm doing something and I really don't have time to "chat". I like e-mail, it waits for you and lets you get to it when you have time. Still, I have chatted with friends on occasion and it can be fun and does allow for conversation rather than correspondence. All that said: Now that it has been brought up I could see a real benefit for the library. We have just gotten Apollo late last year and the ability to have people ask us quickly and directly when they have problems would be good. Except , we only have four people that actually work here and I'm the only one here for any real length of time. Do I really have time to mind IM and E-mail and Phone and Smoke signals? Hmmm...maybe we could get rid of the phone. ~0ps

I'm going to be honest here. I'm coming to the dance pretty late so I'm going to have to ramp the tempo to get through my card. If my posts seem a little truncated its because I am trying to get all 23 things done in 9 days rather than nine weeks. Let's see how that goes shall we. As to the habits alluded to in the title I've seen something like this before. I have trouble with all of them from time to time but none of them all the time. Which is of course double talk but it's true all the same. I'm reminded of Bilbo's birthday speech from the Fellowship of the Ring . "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." If I was pushed I would say that "View problems as challenges" is a traditional problem for me as is "Accept responsibility for your own learning" though both of these problems seem to have been somewhat lessened by fixing our furna...

Though it is my first Blogger post.