Last post

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?
(with apologies to William Shakespeare).


No, this has been more like a tornado ...

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which picks you up and transports you with little control on a chaotic ride to places unknown.

What a crazy ride! This experience has been also a little like a roller coaster and it has been a journey full of descriptives! Here are a few I managed to experience on this exercise: frustrating, engaging, addictive, enraging, soporific, ecstatic ... but I'll stop there. I started this activity wondering where it was going to take me. The social networking sites I think personally I wouldn't bother with in the future, but I found each new activity opened a door into a new discovery and exciting possibility. It was an inventive scheme to "jump start" somewhat reluctant colleagues into the new era. In the last few weeks I found that internet connectivity issues were causing a lot of problems. Everything seemed to slow down to a crawl, or not work properly; and I must confess that there were times when I wondered if it was all worthwhile. Now I've completed it, I will probably go back to some of the websites for a more timely exploration, but I probably won't become addicted to some of this stuff.

Engari ahakoa ngā piki me ngā heke, kua whakaotihia e au. (But despite the ups and downs, I've completed it.)

The music says it all: "Last post"

Youtube

There are an amazing variety of video clips out there, and I had to ponder for a while to think of what to search to find one. Problem is, our connection is so slow that it took ages for it to load; I got two seconds worth of play for every 5 minutes waiting. This was just to view the video to see if it was what I actuallly wanted!
It seems that I have to sign up for Youtube in order to post a video clip to my blog. Have just spent ten minutes trying to sign up. Grrrrrr... Anyway, I am attempting to embed the video clip on libraries I found into this blog. It does take a while to load, though. What do library staff do over the summer/quiet season? This may provide the answer to this question.

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This type of technology could be used on a website to explain a procedure, give a tutorial, give a tour of a collection, or reveal part of the library usually unseen, in a similar way that this clip does. Web download speeds will have to be a lot faster, though. I found the whole experience very frustrating.



Hey neat! Look at what I just found:

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For all those Gerry Anderson fans out there, here's a poser: In the opening credit shots following the countdown, how many scenes from various episodes can you identify? e.g. one of them is "Attack of the alligators". Can you name the others?

Podcasts

I thought that this was meant to be easier as you got to the end!! Podcasts to me just seem to be like a type of youtube without the video. Can't be absolutely sure, as I've yet to play one. Most need to download software to play them. The ones in Podcast.net and Podcasting.com have incompatible software. Tried Yahoo podcasts, and managed finally to play one (it loaded through media player). Searched using the term "library podcast" to find this. Search engines seem to work in a familiar way, though. I've added a RSS feed of podcasts from Sheridan library. I followed the instructions to link to the RSS feeds on the site, but I'm not sure if I've done it correctly, though as it does not seem to be linking to the site properly. I tried adding the RSS feed into my Bloglines account, but I was told that there was a problem there, too, but it eventually worked. See above for screenshot. (Library podcasts folder)

Netlibrary

Gosh, it was so easy to join up with Netlibrary through the Auckland City Libraries website. The only catch was that I had no idea what the content of the library was, and I tried unsuccessfully to find ebooks of some of my favourite authors. It seems as if Netlibrary contains mostly non-fiction or classical fiction. I found a book on plate tectonics which I have bookmarked into my account, and will have a read later. I still dislike the idea of reading a book on a computer screen, though, and prefer being able to browse a book by flicking through pages. In spite of this, reading an ebook was very easy. The text and illustrations were clear enough, and you didn't have to do too much scrolling down the computer screen to read a page. I was amazed to find that we have 773 ebooks in our collection, and these can also be accessed through the catalogue.

Web 2.0 awards

Even just looking through the finalists was quite a chore: What to choose? I was just like a kid in a lolly shop. Glad to see some familiar names e.g Flickr; De.lici.ous; Facebook; Technorati. I was intrigued to notice that the Word Processing award went to Google docs rather than Zoho (after all, it was only using Google that I managed to successfully load a document onto my blog). I took a look at Upcoming (the Events sites winnner) It needed a Yahoo login, and it was basically a site where you could find information on upcoming events. It had a calendar and to enter a date and the ability to search by region. This would be a great way to advertise library events to a wider audience. Surfed through some of the events already listed on the New Zealand region, but this must be a fairly new site, (and mainly American) and not much was listed for Christmas/New Year, even though there must be lots of things happening. I attempted to create a "badge" to appear on my blog but the technology didn't seem to load. I also had a look at Cocktailbuilder (winner of Fun Stuff) Not so much use to libraries, but quite timely as it's coming up to the festive season to know what cocktail you can make with the supplies on hand e.g if you have gin did you know that all you need is root bear to create an earthquake? Here's the recipe I found:

earthquake

2 ingredients

1 - 3 oz of gin
root beer

in a tall glass with ice, mix the two based on how strong you want or need it to be. be careful not to break the richter scale.


I also looked at Google Maps (winner of the Mapping section) and located a map of Tauranga showing the motel where I had stayed during my recent holiday. (Bother; link which I had planned to show does not appear.) Quite intrigued that you can have various views: map, terrain and satellite. Satellite shows wonderful aerial shots, as if you were in a helicopter.