Thang 12

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM

I've been entertaining myself with YouTube for a couple years. My very first search was for menthos mints in Coke (or Pepsi) and this vid was the ultimate in exploding soda bottles. Titled: Diet Coke + Mentos.

After this baptism into YouTube I began to look up old TV programmes, bands (in particular those performing in Woodstock), TV dramas I missed (before IPlayer and 4OD came into being), and favorite celebrities. I'm always amazed at what one can find on YouTube. TV stations must be adding stuff from their archives since we didn't have video machines in the fifties & sixties, but I can find Shirley Temple movie clips, The Andy Griffith Show (with Ron Howard playing the young son Opie), etc.

One of my favorite channel is Simon's Cat. A must for cat owners:

http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat?blend=1&ob=4

The YouTube EDU didn't send me. I was surprised about the low number of University channels. The Open University one seemed the most interesting and developed which I may explore in the future. Perhaps it will provide the chemistry behind the Diet Coke + Mentos extravaganza!

Pod People can have passions

Oh my GAWD!
There's a David Tennant podcast site, Tennantcast!
The bad news is that my computer doesn't have a sound card. Drats! The good news for my boss is that I don't have a sound card and that all this iGoogle, Google Reader and Blogger are internet services so I can go home to drool.

I also included in my list of Podcasts "A History of the World in 100 Objects" and (attempting to appear as a serious librarian) "MIT Libraries- Podcasts on scholarly Publishing". One of the pods is titled: "Mackenzie Smith on Endnote v. Zotero". I will have to see how this compares with Roger Mill's WISER session. Then I will return to Tennantcast. Allons-y!

Thang 10 of the nomads

Nomads: are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location (according to Wikipedia).

Are we becoming nomads in search of work and these social networking tools are proving to make our new nomadic lives easier; or is the social networking turning us into restless nomads? With all this Cloud Computing gear I can jump on my camel and surf the dunes while reading the latest antics of my friends on my Netbook, letting them know where I am using the GPS on my iPhone as I listen to the "Lawrence of Arabia Suite" by Maurice Jarre on my iPod (at the moment all these devices are virtual in my case).

I managed to network with a couple Oxford librarys: History of Faculty & Zoology library, and with Imperial College Library. Hey Presto! I have an additional 386 bookmarks instead of my previous six (no wonder I'm feeling restless). Working in the main science library in Oxford, it would be useful to see what the various departmental science libraries consider interesting and important websites; and not only those libraries in Oxford, but in other university science libraries around the world! Ah Ha! I'll be the Ghengis Khan of info sweeping through the cyber-world with my horde of Cloudi-Nomads hoovering up a googolplex of data ... or I could just keep my sanity, keep my network to a select few and avoid the RSS feeds!
http://images.travelpod.com/users/johnnynomad/latin_america.1143520560.img_7541.jpg

Delicious Thang 9

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...
It's delightful, it's De.licio.us, it's de-lovely!
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...

First, I was so happy NOT to need another password. I opted for using my Yahoo login. Perhaps that would become a problem should Delicious move to another platform like Google.

It was fairly easy to get set-up plus to add-on the bookmarklet in a round-about sort of way. The actuality was less straight-forward than the instructions since there was no initial use of the term "bookmarklet" and some other weird things seemed to happened, but mission accomplished.

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ... Oh go away!
So where was I, yes the bookmarking. The group may have noticed three contribution from me:
BBC- Virtual Revolution (about social networking over the internet)
BBC- A History of the World in 100 Objects (Daaa-Aaah-aaah-Aaah)
Gigi's Thang

For myself I also de-marked: Allotment UK, Metcheck.com UK, and the B.D. Owens Library website (a university library looking at converting its collection into e-books). I think I even managed to share a bookmark, but haven't received a response back.

The biggest positive for me (having to work from three computers) is the ability to access my bookmarks from one site instead of discovering that my Favorites on one computer is missing an item which is on another (which one) computer. No duplication needed (unless the Delicious system suffers a major breakdown losing all the bookmarks stored around the world).

The tagging is a different thing to get use to. When I first moved to England I found it difficult working out how the British Yellow Pages categorised things, but eventually I learned to distort my American way of thinking to fit the British YP paradigm. Now I would have to skew my mind into infinite dimensions to anticipate the many ways people may have tagged something I am interested in. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...

Picnik revisited & the thwarted Sweetcorn massacre

After seeing some of the interesting effects that Picnik did on other's photos I returned to the programme and the scales fell from my eyes! I had only focused on the initial editing options and never noticed the other tabs like Create. With such creative possibilities at my finger-clicks I felt a story bubbling up.

Last summer my husband & I decided to rent an allotment. Not one of the posh one that the Osnians hoe to perfection, but one on the margins of West Oxford, a part of the AAA: the Anarchist Allotment Association. Here we live in harmony with the weeds, the bees and the cabbage butterflies.

Though the AAA is an annexe to the Osney Allotments, we are so out of sight and soil-poor that we are pretty much ignored. Occasionally they send an inspector to encourage tidier plots and discourage the building of ramshackle sheds. Old-timers raise the alarm-flags to give us the chance of escaping through the hedgerow and over the stream since you cannot be encouraged without a face to face confrontation. Leaving notes of remonstration is hopeless, what with the wind blowing them away or being eaten by the cabbage butterfly larvaes.

Our new life was going diggingly well until a threat in the night: badgers! We had planted a patch of sweet corn that was coming to ear and the badgers could smell their sweetness wafting through the warm September air. First it was one plant knocked down, a few days later, another; they were tasting the ears to see if ready for the feasting. Drastic measures were required.

It was too late to build a fence strong & deep enough to keep the badgers out, so instead we dug-up and transplanted the corn to our patio many steep steps away from badger land. It worked and our sweetcorn continued to ripen in their new refuge bringing a happy ending to my tale.

YUM!

Thang 8

http://www.fndc.govt.nz/services/community-facilities/libraries/teddy-bears-picnic/tEDDY-BEARS-pICNIC-PICTURE.JPG

This picnic seems more engaging than the Picnik programme for editing my pictures. It didn't do much more than Paint or Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I managed to download Picasa 3.1 which seems to offer the ability to make collages of photos and I'm hoping to do overlays. I will keep you posted.

Thang 7

My Friend Flicka, any oldy moldies out there who remember this TV show?

(humongous url listed at end of message)

It inspired the title of my flickr page. Interesting is how the system selects what it thinks is the most appropriate salutation for your page. I, apparently, am a cowgirl.

So I spent hours uploading a few pictures and a couple videos from the Luminox performance in March 2006. I had four videos but discovered that for the freebie flickr account you are only permitted two videos a month. I wonder if you can keep the previous videos or will they be replaced by next months video uploads?

Then I grouped them in sets (versus folders). I had thought that by giving each photo a tag I could have them automatically grouped, but the tags only helped in pulling out particular tagged items which I then had to physically drag into the new set screen.



Last of all to become one of the elites, the Oxford 23 Things group. It was a nerve wracking night as I awaited confirmation, so it brightened my morning duties by discovering all was well. However, I was a wee bit alarmed when I found that by clicking on my flickr account name below the pictures I sent it brought up my entire photostream (I had selected the private privacy setting for all my pictures). After hearing muffled squeals of horror, Konnie bunny pointed out that I was logged in as myself so she checked and found she could only look at the pictures I sent and not go into the rest of my photostream. Which was a relief since my collection of Elmer Fudd pictures would have been distressing to her. I've ensquared my photos in the picture below.

URL for My Friend Flicka picture above: http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://horsefame.tripod.com/img/mffrear.jpg&imgrefurl=http://horsefame.tripod.com/Flicka1.html&usg=__XbGQLk1qVC28RxM0umINycgylvg=&h=300&w=238&sz=15&hl=en&start=6&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=RbwMTUTtN087UM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmy%2Bfriend%2Bflicka%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1

Emails, Blogs, RSS Feeds, oh my!

There is a tale by Aesop about a conversation between a fox and a cat (somewhere between the growls and the hissing). The fox was bragging about having over a hundred ways of escaping his enemies, but the cat had only one: climbing a tree. Suddenly they heard the baying of a pack of hounds. Up the tree went the cat while the fox began to muse over the possible actions he could take: should I run down the stream to lose my scent, nah too cold today; what about over the hill and through the narrow culvert, a bit messy and I just licked my coat clean; I could pad around this tree and place my scent on the trunk so they will notice cat up above and get distracted while I make my get-away... By the time he decided on his plan of escape the hounds were on top of him. The cat watching from his safe perch purred out: "Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon." http://aesopfables.com/

This tale keeps popping up in my mind (like the annoying Microsoft Word paperclip) as I learn a new Web 2.0 function. So many ways to communicate but which is the better one for the type of information you wish to broadcast? And what about copyright issues? Have I been naughty in displaying the images I have captured from the internet onto this blog, or am I reprieved by displaying the URL from which the image was found? [the image for this post came from http://www.squidoo.com/thefoxandthecat]

If I have a message or want to share an article, I can send an email to the particular people I have in mind. A blog could share this information to more people than I would have thought necessary, which could be good or a whopsie moment. My husband said that setting up a New Books blog with RSS feed would be useful, but it would only be useful if people subscribe to it which will require some advertising. Should we publish the same information in many varied Web 2.0 ways, or tailor the web 2.0 to the information?

Reading for 6 more weeks

This may be a good book to read as the sleet and rain pelt your windows. It is a diary of weather that had affected events and people in the past. So for today, February 2nd (Candlemas or Groundhog Day) there is a blurb about how Groundhog Day came to be: "If Candlemas Day be sunny and bright, winter will have another flight; if Candlemas day be cloudy with rain, winter is gone and won't come again... British emigrants to America adapted these to create Grougndhog Day... The theory (which may have come from medieval Europeans who studied hedgehogs at this time of year) is: if an intelligent rodent emerges from his burrow and sees his shadow today, he returns underground forthwith, as winter is set to continue."

This was also the day of Queen Victoria's funeral in 1901; apparently a "bitterly cold and gloomy" day which echoes a quote by Frank Skinner at the beginning of the book: "You can spend your whole life trying to be popular but, at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather."

Amazon.com has a section below this book:

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

Grit Salt | Order Online opens new browser window

www.GritSalt.co.uk - fr.£91 per tonne. Bags & Loose Delivered UK Wide Collect Today

Groundhog day

FLASH NEWS!
Punxsutawney Phil has predicted six weeks more of winter (or else he partied too much the night before and just wanted to get back to his warm den).

Editing or deleting posts

Some of you may have worked this out already because you have techno-eyes and can see the obvious on a computer screen. For me I seem to work it out in a painstakingly slow way like Helen Keller in the movie "Miracle Worker".

I was trying to edit a post I had already published and realised when you called up the New Post page there was an underlined sentence at the bottom of the page: Return to list of posts, which once clicked brings up a list of all your posts with the options to edit or delete. Eureka! Later I realised that one of the tabs at the top of the New Post page, labelled "Edit Posts" takes you to this same list of posts.

If you wondered how to access the original blog-site

So the Google Reader provides us a list of the blogs we have subscribed to and in the main page we can see the latest blog entries; but what if you want to go to a particular blog's homepage.

When you click on a particular blog in your navigation panel on the left side of Google reader, a new window with the latest blogs pops-up. At the top of this window is the title of the blog followed by >>. Click on the >> and call out with an authoriative voice "Open sesame" and the blog's homepage opens up.

Thang 6

First of all I noticed on the Google reader that all my following links are RSS feeds. But of course ya Do Do!

After this brief moment of awakening I went through a flurry of subscriptions so my Desert Island Blogs are:

• 23 Things (not much choice there but an easier way to find it now)
• Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 (a blog to supplement a book with the same title by Peter Godwin)
• Information Literacy Weblog (blogs on IL from around the world)
• Physics and Maths info@ Imperial College London Library (a library my husband uses and raves about so good to see what their up to)
• Channel 4 News
• Pew Center on Global Climate Change (so far I've listed my classical music of blogs)
• Hegehogs without Borders (now for the pop music fun. These intrepid hedgehogs, Jessica & Tim, began their world travels in 2005 starting with Argentina. I wonder of Gosia's(Techno-Babe of the RSL) travel plans were inspired by these footloose twosomes.)

Thang 5

Yo dude: task com-ple-ted!
I have been wondering how I move from my iGoogle homepage, to my blogs and now to the Google reader. What I had done was to bookmark the 23 Thing page and the dashboard page of my blogs, but now I discovered "My Account" on the iGoogle homepage which makes life a whole lot easier.

What one can do with a blog

After a wee bit of fun with my blog I began to wonder: "Self, what else is there to do with me blog?" and the answer was in front of my eyes while perusing the 23 Things Blog. Members of my team have been asked to attend OUCS courses and then teach the rest in the team what they had learned. My first idea was to set-aside Wednesday afternoons for the team to meet and learn, but there were moans coming from the ranks of "too many things to do so little time" and why not make use of the Web 2.0 technology. Which one to use? Of course! Do what the 23 Things team is doing. Place the training on a blog. So thus was created the Lankester Rodeo Blog: for training of the Lankester room staff on the bucking broncos of databases and e-tools. I learned one additional aspect of blogs and that is setting the permissions so only my team can access it and are co-authors (instead of just followers). Okay, make that two things I learned.

Hopefully, in drafting our blog training sessions we will learn more about the e-tools we studied at OUCS as well as passing on the knowledge to our co-workers.